UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I’m in the midst of my second big CakePHP-based project for a client, still loving CakePHP and the MVC concept overall, but I am definitely having some headaches with CakePHP this time around.

First off, I ran into some issues early on in the project that were attributable to CakePHP’s caching mechanism. Not sure why though, because caching was off by default (in fact, I was only even vaguely aware of its existence) on the first project I did; this one is building on that one; and I didn’t change any settings for caching in the core.php configuration file.

Caching is nice in a production environment, but it is a pain in the butt, to say the least, in a development environment. At least now I have it turned off. One less thing to worry about.

Today I’ve been struggling with some other frustrations that have nothing, really, to do with what I’m working on. What I’m working on would be frustrating enough, trying to wrap my brain around the intricacies of hasAndBelongsToMany relationships. But I can’t even get to that because of a pair of other issues.

First up, something I think I’ve finally got figured out. I’m writing my admin tool right now, so all of the pages I’m working on are using admin routing. Again, it should just be working; this is building upon stuff I already wrote for the first big project, which is working great and has been live for over a month now. And, for the most part, the admin routing has been working, but every once in a while I’ll click on a page that tries to load in the default template, and when it does, I get this:

Notice (8): Undefined variable: javascript [APP/views/themed/neutral/layouts/default.ctp, line 23]

OK, first off, I have the JavaScript helper defined in my controller. Second, why is it trying to load the default page layout instead of the admin layout? Well, that second question is probably irrelevant, because I viewed source on the page and found what the real error is, and what is apparently triggering CakePHP to load the default layout: there was a missing controller. And that was just because I had copied one of my other controllers as a starting point for this new one, and had not yet edited any of the code within it. In other words, I just shouldn’t click that link yet.

Fine, I can handle that. But when I was clicking on some pages that should be working, they just wouldn’t load, triggering the browser’s “server unavailable” error page, which I recognized as being the result of a segmentation fault error in Apache. So what within my PHP code, or in CakePHP, is crashing Apache? That was my real problem, and the reason for this blog post.

I googled “segmentation fault PHP” and got my answer in the form of the following:

Apache Segmentation Fault from CakePHP 1.2 Caused by Zend Optimizer

Thank you very much! This problem is happening for me in my local development environment, running MAMP. So I dug into MAMP’s php.ini file, and sure enough, Zend Optimizer was configured. I commented out all of the pertinent lines, bounced Apache, and we’re in business!

Well, sort of. The page still isn’t working, of course. It’s just now that its not working is not causing Zend Optimizer to crash Apache. Fortunately, I can see CakePHP’s error messages now, and it looks like I’ve got some problems in my model that are generating MySQL errors. Fair enough. At least I know what’s wrong now and can do something about it!

This is not a rant against CakePHP. Its error messaging is generally very useful, and its stack trace functionality rocks. Most of the time. Unfortunately it was a dangerous confluence of unrelated issues in my application today that caused the system to break down. But ultimately it was the result of issues with Zend Optimizer. I’m extremely thankful to “One Insightful M*******cker” for saving my sanity, and I just wanted to return the favor with a link back.

Here’s the scenario: I’m working on an image gallery for a client site, sort of a slideshow concept. The client wants the user to be able to click on the left half of the current image (“slide”) to move to the previous image, and on the right half of the current image to move to the next.

OK, no problem.

In the days of yore, I might have handled this with an imagemap. But my solution now, drenched in jQuery goodness, involves a pair of empty <div> tags, with set dimensions, absolute positioning and z-index in the CSS. These transparent <div>s are overlaid on the image, and the jQuery code triggers a refresh of the HTML code in the slideshow <div> itself, underneath, that contains the <img> tag for the current “slide.”

If you’re not a web developer that last paragraph is probably little more than a steaming pile of (to follow John Hodgman‘s lead) “bullroar,” but the point is that this allowed me to stick to semantic HTML (more or less — there is a chunk of JavaScript code directly in the page, but I may optimize that out of there soon), and keep most of the presentation in the CSS and the functionality in a separate JavaScript file, the way it should be.

Only it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer.

“It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer” is nothing new to me, and in fact I wasn’t totally surprised by that. My first hunch was that IE didn’t like the empty <div>s, even though they have dimensions specified in the CSS, so I gritted my teeth and stuck   inside each one. Didn’t help.

Next I decided to make sure my dimensions were being interpreted properly, since it seemed clear that they weren’t: when I say it didn’t work in Internet Explorer, that’s only a half-truth. It didn’t work properly in Internet Explorer, but there were clickable areas on the slide — they were just really small and not in the right places.

So I set the background of the “previous” area to red and the background of the “next” area to blue. Reloaded in IE. Yep, the dimensions looked perfect — my photo was now covered precisely by equal-sized red and blue rectangles. And, curiously, the links worked properly now. I thought maybe it was just because I had added some CSS code for these <div>s in my IE-specific stylesheet (yeah, I do that… get over it). So I changed them both to transparent within the IE-specific stylesheet, and the problem reappeared.

And then, it hit me. No… could it be?

Yes, it could: IE was just ignoring the presence of those z-indexed <div>s simply because their backgrounds were transparent. This is probably a “known issue” with IE, but I had never had to deal with it before, and regardless, it sure as hell didn’t make any sense.

My solution? I went for a play straight out of the book of web design circa 1997: a one-pixel transparent GIF. Except I used a PNG, but same thing. I made a completely transparent image, and in the IE CSS file, I used that as the background for these <div>s.

Problem solved. But as is so often the case with IE issues, the solution is so bitterly unsatisfying, so fundamentally wrong, that there is no joy in its discovery. Just the impetus to blog about it.

Now, this is odd.

A few months back I wrote a plug-in for WordPress called RegisTrap. It’s beyond basic, and has one simple purpose: to block registration spam on my WordPress-based website.

Registration spam, for those of you who don’t know, is when a “bot” (a computer program written to seek out and exploit poorly-written web forms to send floods of spam email messages) signs up as a “user” on your site. These “users” can’t really do anything on the site, but they clutter up your database nonetheless.

I had a feeling that RegisTrap was really only going to work reliably if I kept it to myself. And I was right: after submitting it to the official WordPress plug-in repository, it eventually stopped working, as the bots adapted to avoid its “traps.” It might have happened eventually anyway, but I’m sure that the publicity it received from being in the repository, and the hundred or so people who downloaded it (many of whom, I suspect on reflection, were probably bot developers looking to dissect its workings), accelerated its demise.

As I announced here a few days ago, I turned RegisTrap off on my site, and I also turned off registration altogether. But that hasn’t stopped the flood of new bot registrations. There are 14 of them sitting there in my database right now (well, there were before I just deleted them), all added after I turned off the ability to register altogether.

I suppose, since the bots don’t actually visit the site and fill in the form, they just submit the right data directly to the right URL, whether it’s “browsable” or not, it doesn’t even really matter if your site is set up to reject registrations. Still, it’s a bit dismaying that WordPress is processing those registrations even with registration turned off. Apparently it stops at making the registration page inaccessible via links; it doesn’t actually turn off the code that processes registrations. Boo. Perhaps that should be my next plugin: “Stop All Registrations 4 Realz.”

But maybe I won’t call it that.

I was already feeling like a futuristic 21st century spaceman (pronounced spə-CHĔ-mən) with my iPhone, but this video of “blocks that think” from TED makes it official: we are now living in the future.

I am the first to admit that I emulate my musical influences. I’m pretty confident that I always manage to fall well on the proper side of plagiarism, but it’s impossible not to emulate the styles of the musicians I admire. In fact, emulating their styles is pretty much the point.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of the artists and songs that influenced me as I created Anagrammatic Pseudonyms just like I’ve done in the past with the album notes I post here.

This time I’ve taken it a step further though: I’ve created an iTunes iMix. You can buy it now on iTunes. Here are the songs:

“Pocket Calculator” by Kraftwerk
“Axel F” by Harold Faltermeyer
“Get Up Offa That Thing” by James Brown
“Let’s Work” by Prince
“White Mountain” by Genesis
“Inertiatic ESP” by The Mars Volta
“Out of Town” by Zero 7
“With Jupiter in Mind” by Joe Satriani
“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” by Led Zeppelin
“Anchor Drops” by Umphrey’s McGee
“Your Most Valuable Possession” by Ben Folds Five
“Hold the Line” by Toto
“We Own the Sky” by M83
“Clocks and Clouds” by National Health
“Down by the Sea” by Men at Work

Note that the songs in this iMix are in the same order as the songs on Anagrammatic Pseudonyms that they influenced (although there’s not a 1-to-1 relationship: some AP songs have more than one representative here — “Candor Stetson” has four — and some have none).

This iMix has a total running time of 73 minutes, which means that it’s a great set to put on a CD if you decide to go buy it (or if you’re as crazy as I am and already have all of these songs in your iTunes library).