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 I actually launched the beta late Saturday night and I'm just now getting around to posting something. Did you know there are hundreds of contests on Twitter right now? A lot of users do not realize people are giving away prizes just for some follow love. Many contests go unnoticed and end without a single entry. Meanwhile some popular users have thousands of followers and are faced with a somewhat daunting task when it's time to pick a winner for their contests. This site allows you to view and host contests on Twitter. The site is free to use, and does not require you to logon.
If you want to host a contest on Twitter® http://www.tweetswin.com/ makes it easy to do so. You can use this site to post a contest, gather statistics, and automatically choose a winner! Don't worry though, you're still in control and can manage the winner pool and cancel contests if necessary. Know what else? The site tracks your new followers and provides daily analysis. It will also show you who quit following you after your contest ended for up to 7 days.
Need help running a contest? Not on Twitter but want to market to it's users? I can help you with that as well
If you are trying to get mail going on a Slicehost or similar self managed hosting solution ( I'm using Ubuntu ), this quickie guide may help.
 You may be aware of Eclipse's built in spell checker. It does not offer suggestions or replacement, but it will mark your mistakes. I was using a standard dictionary but of course it hit on a lot of php functions. I've created a decent dictionary that includes every PHP function and a ton of common words from various sources. I'm sharing it here so others won't have to do the same. This post contains the dictionary downloads and instructions for enabling the spell checker in Zend Eclipse.
 First time I've needed ReflectionClass. Just making a note for future reference. This will give you the pull path and filename to the file that defined the class for any given object. Requires PHP5 (OO).
// abstract class foo extends bar {}
$object = new foo();
$class = new ReflectionClass(get_class($object));
echo $class->getFilename();
 I just launched tweetstacker.com, it's a very simple threaded Twitter client. It should be considered a funcitonal prototype or beta. I was tired of visiting Twitter.com to see what's new and finding 1 or 2 pages full of one person's ramblings. Obviously I want to hear from these individuals some of the time, but the signal to noise ratio eventually gets too high and I inevitably end up un-following them. It's also annoying not being able to see the message that people are replying to. When I first visit Tweetstacker.com it shows me the 20 most recent (unique) threads to update instead of the 20 most recent messages. It also shows me each person's stream if I expand their tweet, and it shows me the message they replied to.
That's right, a threaded twitter client that also has a very thin UI. Most of the work is done in a simple api that feeds the static html client.
I normally just leave the page up on my side monitor, it automatically adds new tweets to the top and caches and sorts everything. By the end of the day I can see a list that represents everyone I follow, everyone they replied to, and everything they said earlier ni the day. It's all threaded so its very easy to follow conversations.
There are too many posts on the web advising people to turn off cURL peer verification to disable the "Error performing HTTP request: error setting certificate verify locations" or "Error performing HTTP request: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed" messages. Please stop turning SSL_VERIFYPEER off.
 I can't believe my (mostly undocumented) windows install actually took less time to setup than MagickWand on Ubuntu. This quick article will explain what you need to make it work.
Windows users should use this guide.
Do you want to setup ImageMagick and/or MagickWand on Windows? Here's what I did to get it working.
If you want to have one Ajax request handler for all your site's requests, or if you're just looking to pass a variable to the response handler, this snippet shows you how ridiculously easy it is. This snipped uses jQuery, but you can apply the same principle to any Ajax call.
 I have been struggling with what I can only describe as "click lag" whenever I try to work from home with my laptop. At work it's part of a domain, and a few drives are mapped automatically when I logon. When I connect at home, it doesn't have access to the domain any more, and it becomes, well, very unstable at best.
 A new site just launched that I had a hand in. You can visit http://www.routeblast.com to get trip directions and distance information. It lets you see detailed information about a few different route types ( 3 for now ).
You can email the info to friends, or export it to excel. It's' fast, really fast. It's free and it uses several Google Map APIs.
So you've created some fancy web 2.0 looking buttons with a nice hover effect and maybe even a click effect, they sit float:left in your content. You've even matched them up with your button element styles so everything looks pixel perfect. They look great don't they? Later in your site design you encounter a couple places where you'd like to center those buttons. Uh oh. There is no float:center. You can't center a dynamic width div using auto margins. So what do you do?
Cut straight to an example, or read more for the full info.
 I like to use a pagination class I wrote for lots of projects, it takes a sql query, and some configuration options, and puts together a flexy compatible paged data grid, and can serve CSV and XML Excel dumps of the data. It's handy as hell and makes my life simple. Someday I'd like to merge it and an ajax enabled version into one class and release it but for now I am just writing about the sql tokenizer component.
I couldn't find a sql tokenizer for php, or a parser of any kind. If there's one out there that I didn't see hopefully someone will let me know.
Updated 12/29/2008 - Found a complex query that didn't play nice, so I tweaked the code.
Updated 01/16/2009 - Found a bug, fixed it.
Updated 01/27/2009 - Changed from GPL to LGPL
Updated 02/25/2009 - Parse error, fixed it.
This is some common sense that I had somehow misplaced. How to cancel the bubbling of an event with html/js.
 I was asked to assist with the support of a website that uses CakePHP. After tweaking the vhost entry and path config the site displayed as expected, but users were not able to logon. "Authentication failed." was displayed when an invalid logon was used, but nothing happened when the correct credentials were passed.
Searching for information on Google yielded very little help, except one thread that discussed cake's security level settings. I modified those settings (CAKE_SECURITY) by updating the app config's settings for Security.level in the code. This did not make any difference. Authentication was still not working, and the session was invalid.
 Last week, Warhammer Online went gold, and I thought I'd give it a try. A friend of mine was playing it and I wanted to join him while everyone was low level and the game was new. So Friday evening I tried to obtain the game using Direct2Drive. It was a failfest.
They declined my transaction, and their faq stated that I should check my account balance, and maybe call my bank. So, I called my credit card company, they confirmed that my account was in good standing. They also let me know that no charges had been attempted in the last 24 hours. No authorization attempts were sent by direct2drive. The #@!$?
I'm still trying to figure out the root cause of all this. But I will explain a workaround until then.
Problem: Apache crash / restart when accessing any local php app/site. Environment: WAMP install ZendDebugger.dll enabled via the ini.
I'm looking into Google Map's Mobile API and it's RESTful interface. I don't know if it's supported at all, it may even be against the TOS or TOU. I do know it's not documented by Google at all. Why use it instead of the API they already supply? The simple answer is, their GDirections API doesn't support all of the features you can access over the REST interface used by the mobile API. These features include Walking directions, Highway or Non-Highway directions, and an option to avoid tolls. The other obvious benefit is the ability to write server side code and avoid JavaScript all together. Click read more to see example code.
I noticed a much slower response time from a website I'm working on once I setup open_basedir in my php.ini so I decided to run some benchmarks. It seems like a generic page with several includes ( templates, etc ) takes 4x as long (0.15531941822597 off, 0.64727306365967 on) to return with open_basedir on. Sure there's going to be overhead, but I was surprised to go from 6 or 7 requests per second down to 2 just by enabling this.
So safe_mode sucks, and open_basedir is painful. Awesome.
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