Jojo Siao

Last saturday, March 14, 2009, I volunteered as one of the speakers for the PHP Roadshow – Adamson University Leg. There I presented my topic “Starting your programming career in PHP”.

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Research regarding working solo on projects has just made me realize even more issues. Sadly, it is an undeniable fact  that programming is a social activity and it is not fun working alone.

These issues had not made me enjoy programming at all:

1. Better coding tricks and techniques ( if you couldn’t show them to others or to your colleagues.)

2. Working as a better programmer such as implementing and observing great programming disciplines, reporting schedules, deliverables

3. Life outside programming, other social activities like bowling, playing chess, etc. (Well, if you have a team, you would love to play with them of course.)

4. Understanding complex parts of the web software. (Maybe it isn’t really complex at all but I am just making it look like it is.)

Hope somebody could give me advice on how to enjoy working solo?

This is in regards to my personal project “frendsmo” which is a facebook/friendster clone.  I am recently trying to build a Gallery page for the users where they can create, edit and delete photo albums.

I looked at railscasts.com and downloaded their video tutorial on how to use Paperclip in ruby on rails. While in the video, it was mentioned that you have to have ImageMagick and RMagick installed to use Paperclip.

So there I was, immediately,  I opened up putty (windows SSH client) to connect to our fedora web server and searched google for any step by step installation procedure.

I did the installation on ImageMagick easily and after that I did RMagick installation by doing ‘gem install rmagick’.

I encountered an issue when I had to test to see if everything (all installations) went smoothly. When I had to do

"irb -rubygems -r RMagick"

This complained that RMagick.so shared library could not be found.  Our common friend named Google told me to do

"ldconfig /usr/local/lib"

and it really fixed everything! nice!  But I wasn’t really contented without knowing what is the use of ldconfig, so I did,

"man ldconfig"

and found out that,

       "...ldconfig creates the necessary links  and  cache  to  the  most  recent
        shared  libraries  found  in  the  directories specified on the command
        line, in the file /etc/ld.so.conf, and in the trusted directories (/lib
        and  /usr/lib).  The cache is used by the run-time linker, ld.so or ld-linux.so. 
        ldconfig checks the header and filenames of the libraries it
       encounters  when  determining  which  versions  should have their links
       updated."

Now , I’m off to continue coding my ruby on rails project. Hope that helps!

Note:

1. I just recently got interested to try out this one, from jim neath’s blog, you can use swfupload with RMagick and Ruby on Rails. Here’s the link to his blog post: http://jimneath.org/2008/05/15/swfupload-paperclip-and-ruby-on-rails/
2. Jim Neath has also a blog post regarding creating Social Networking Sites in Ruby on Rails. url:
   http://jimneath.org/2008/04/25/building-a-social-network-site-in-rails/

I had this cakephp project that has an option available for the user to download the data as excel file. Now, the problem is when the user downloads the file and attempts to open it using Microsoft Excel 2007, it complains to the user that the file seems to be corrupted (or I think, it views the file being infected by a virus.) But still, you are being offered the option to:  a.) Open the file and risk yourself to open it, b.)Refrain from opening it, c.) Cancel(I think, that’s a cancel button – I don’t remember. I can’t simulate the problem on my own pc. I have MS Excel 2003.)

The cakephp layout file code that is being used is shown below:

{code type=php}

<?php
header(“Content-type: application/xls; charset=UTF-8″);
header(“Pragma:”);
header(“Cache-Control: private,max-age=3600″);
header(“Content-Disposition: filename=\”".time().”-downloadasexcel.xls\”");
echo “<html xmlns:x=\”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel\”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=\”Content-Type\” content=\”text/csv; charset=utf-8\”>
</head>
<body>
“;

echo $content_for_layout;
echo “</body></html>”;

?>

{/code}

I think there is something wrong with my HTML code as regards to making excel acknowledge the document as HTML document in excel format. Let me know if you had the same problem as mine. Thanks. :D

UPDATE:

I realized that the problem is due to the trailing blank spaces right just after the classes… you know, after the ‘?>’ of the controller class. Now I know how this becomes dangerous to a web application. I tried to view the html code in windows and it showed a special character (a tab and a space) in the code, but when I tried to view it in Ubuntu (my working environment) it didn’t show up.