Items Utility: Piloting Data Entry Updates
Piloting packets for this year are starting to come in and the data from these packets needs to be entered into the items utility. Because the questions in the packet have changed from previous years,...
View ArticleCreating Graphs in PHP
I was tasked with creating a demonstration of a dynamically generated graph for one of the grant proposals being worked on at present. This isn’t something we’ve really done before in PHP, but I had a...
View ArticlePlaying nice with CPU usage
I needed to do a mass resampling of around 280,000 images. There are a number of ways to do this, but I settled on doing it via PHP because the images are stored on our web server, the total size of...
View ArticleThe Mechanical Turk Knows All
With a large set of test packets in need of transcription, little time to do so, and even less desire to spend the money on temporary workers, I needed to think of some other way to perform the task....
View ArticleCakePHP, Apache, and Ampersands
I’m still learning CakePHP. My most recent experimentation is with forms and URL redirecting. In the process I noticed that if the URL includes an ampersand, even in URL-encoded form, CakePHP will read...
View ArticleCakePHP and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
As of cakePHP 1.2.1.8004 you can’t use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as the default for a column. With MySQL when the default is set to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP the current date+time is inserted for a new row that...
View Articlesuhosin to WordPress: go on a diet
We were seeing a lot of suhosin alerts in the system messages log of the type: ALERT – script tried to increase memory_limit to 268435456 bytes which is above the allowed value (attacker...
View Articlesuhosin to [internal web app]: you talk too much
Following up on my earlier post, I’ve had to make some further configuration adjustments to avoid suhosin-related restrictions in one of our custom web applications. This particular application has a...
View ArticleIntegrating calculated fields and model data in CakePHP
(This is mostly a summary of Dealing with calculated fields in CakePHP’s find().) One of the great things about CakePHP is that if it doesn’t have some core functionality you want/need there are easy...
View ArticleOptimizing database queries in CakePHP
We’ve been using CakePHP for a while now. I’ve found it to be very helpful for quick prototyping and development of core site functionality. This is nice because it allows more time for tweaking a...
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