Made of Everything You're Not

After my little foray into unlocking my old Blackberry Curve I started to think that there were probably other special codes to play around with. I’ve done a little bit of research and it turns out, yup, there are quite a few special codes to do some random things.

Decibel meter

Normally, the signal strength meter is a series of bars like the below image. Hold “Alt” and press “N”, “M”, “L”, “L”. To undo just redo

Normal Signal Strength Indicator

Decibal Meter

View Source Code

This one every web developer should know. In the Browser, hold “Alt” and press “R”, “B”, “V”, “S”

View Source Code

Help Me! menu

If you ever call up for support chances are you’ve been told to enter this one. It shows a bunch of info in one place but most of it will be greek to most people.  Hold “Alt” and (left) “shift”, then press “H”.

Help Me! Menu

Display IMEI Code

As far as I know this is really only useful for unlocking a device. Type “*”, “#”, “0″, “6″, “#” on the Home screen.

Display IMEI Code

Event Log

The Event Log is probably only going to be useful if you’re a developer or similar. It displays all the last Java goodies that have happened since starting the device. Hold “Alt” and press “L”, “G”, “L”, “G”.

Event Log

Show SIM Information

This code will display the details about a SIM card. You have to enter this code from the SIM Options page and press “M”, “E”, “P”, “D”

Show SIM Information

View Refld and ServiceUserId

From inside a message hold “Alt” and press “V”, “I”, “E”, “W”

View Refld and ServiceUserId

View Data Usage & Voice Usage

This one is really only good if you have a new, unused, Blackberry. It maxes out at the below but if you buy a “new” Blackberry enter this code and verify it. From Status Options page press “B”, “U”, “Y”, “R”

View Data Usage & Voice Usage

Hard Reset

Doing a Hard Reset is like taking the battery out and inserting it again. Handy if you’re not in the mood to fuddle with the case. Hold ALT + Right Shift + Del

Validate Contact List

I’m honestly not really sure what these last two do but I’m listing them anyway for completeness. Hold “Alt” and press “V”, “A”, “L”, “D” in address book list

Rebuild Contact List

Hold “Alt” and press “V”, “A”, “L”, “D” in address book list.

These are all the “secret codes” I could find but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any more. Also, these codes were only verified on the Blackberry Bold 9000 so they may not work with all devices. If anyone has any new ones please leave a comment and I’ll update a list.

My business partner recently had her phone literally break apart in her hands. Since communication between us is pretty crucial I decided to give her a backup Blackberry Curve I had as a replacement for my Blackberry Bold. Problem was that the Curve was bought through AT&T and she uses T-mobile. The phone would have to be unlocked.

How To Unlock AT&T Blackberry

Initially, I was a little nervous about the process of  unlocking the Blackberry. I’d never personally tried anything like this and my direct experience with the process was that a 3rd party company would have to be brought into the mix. I didn’t relish the idea of paying someone to handle what seemed to be a simple exercise when I’m capable of pushing buttons on a freaking phone.

Turns out it’s actually extremely easy to handle this yourself though it does require a phone call to AT&T support. Simply call them up and they’ll ask you for your IMEI code; it’s under the battery on the serial number label. They’ll send you an email, like the below, that’ll walk you through the process.

Your device unlock request was received and processed, see below for details:

IMEI: YOUR_IMEI_NUMBER

Unlock Code: YOUR_UNLOCK_CODE

Caution: If this process is unsuccessful ten times in a row, the phone will be permanently locked to the at&t network. Do not attempt to enter the code more than one (1) time total.  Instructions below will assist you in unlocking your device, if these steps are unsuccessful please contact us at 1-800-331-0500 or (916) 843-4685 from overseas.

Blackberry 8310

Follow these steps to unlock device:

1. Turn off the radio! VERY IMPORTANT

2. Go to “Options”

3. Scroll to and select “Advanced Options”

4. Click on “SIM Card”

5. Type “MEPD” (You will not see on display what is being typed. To obtain a “P” double tap “OP” key)

6. Type “MEP2” (To obtain a “P” double tap “OP” key. Press “ALT “key to obtain a “2″)

7. Enter the unlock code

8. Press enter

9. Reboot device. Device is now unlocked.

Note: To verify the IMEI, dial *#06# on device’s keypad, 15 digit # IMEI will display on the screen.  If this sequence does not work, pull the back/battery off the phone and the IMEI will be listed on the back of the phone.

All told the total time invested was only about 5 minutes. Seriously, 5 minutes. So why would I want to pay someone for this again?

I’ve been using Jquery a lot lately and have absolutely fallen in love with it; so much so that I’ve pretty much walked away from Prototype and Scriptaculous entirely. Not to take anything away from Prototype but Jquery is just a lot more… well, it’s just more fun to work with. That being said, I wanted to give a shout out to one of the cooler toys Prototype has: TableKit.

TableKit

TableKit is a table enhancement JavaScript library written using Prototype provided by Millstream Software. In a nutshell TableKit allows you to easily create sortable, resizable and editable tables. Implementation is extremely simple and, according to Robert Speer, designers don’t have an issue working with it (I haven’t had the pleasure of having a designer work with it yet):

Many times using scripts I find on the Internet turns into kind of a hassle. They are usually unfinished side projects, or are kind of bloated and slow.

TableKit is not one of those scripts, it’s fast & easy to implement. Development time was low, and the designers didn’t complain too much about working with it.

Robert’s right; TableKit is extremely easy to work with. TableKit works by using css class overloading to tell the system how to handle a table. For example:

<table class="sortable resizable editable">

indicates that the table should, obviously, be sortable, resizable and editable. There are all sorts of other options available, which you can read about in the documentation. If you have to use Prototype for a project and you need some jazz TableKit is a good fit.

About a month ago I started receiving emails from my server about the installed version of PERL being too old and needing to be upgraded. Since my server uses WHM and cPanel, and thinking that upgrading PERL would have some pretty nasty consequences if something went wrong, I held off until I could familiarize myself with the ins and outs of what this was all about. Now that I’ve done the upgrade I’m not sure it was really so worth the wait and worry.

The first thing you want to do is backup all your installed CPAN modules. These are basically the library of functionality your system relies on to work. Pretty important stuff in there. It’s a pretty simple command though:

perl -MCPAN -e 'autobundle'

The above will create a “bundle” of all the CPAN modules you have installed to be used after the upgrade. Make a note of the bundle location though; you’ll need it later.

The instructions to do the actual installation were included in the email and is geared specifically towards cPanel servers:

cd /root
wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar -zxf perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install -optimize-memory

This parts pretty simple, but time consuming. The whole process is automated and should take about an hour or three. When you come back you’re going to want to install the autobundle you created earlier. To do that you’ll need this command:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::NAME_OF_BUNDLE_YOU_CREATED_EARLER'

This is where things started getting difficult. This process is going to require all sorts of input from you. It’ll, thankfully, give you default options but the install will sit there until you enter something. All told, this process took me about 4 hours; just sitting there watching the process.

Definitely a pain but not upgrading PERL would have been worse. If you have to do it be sure to set aside an afternoon though.

When I purchased my newest laptop back in July, from Best Buy, it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it came out a few months later. Fast forward to December and I’ve since received the new operating system and have installed it on the laptop. Since a lot of people are going to be going through the same thing I put together some notes about the experience.

Windows 7

Because the promotion was for a version of Windows 7 that was the same flavor as the installed Windows Vista, I was given a 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium copy. Personally, I would have preferred Business or Ultimate but ok, fine Home Premium it is. At least this meant that I wouldn’t have to do a clean install so I could keep all files and programs where they were (still backing up the data of course).

The upgrade package came with 2 discs; the Windows 7 disc and a driver upgrade disc. The instructions said to insert the upgrade disc first and I’ll be prompted to enter disc 2 when required. Doing so started an upgrade program that inspected my system and warned me about deauthorizing my iTunes account which immediately made me feel good about the experience.

All told the install took around 3.5 hours and was like watching water boiling. I did it super late at night but I was still up and every time I would check on it I swear the progress rarely looked like it was making any progress. Still, it is Windows, so I was used to this; just wait and be patient, it’ll finish. And eventually it did.

Upon first booting up there were a couple issues. One was my fault. The others… not so much. Probably the worst offense was that I had no Internet connectivity. I checked both my wired NIC and the wifi and both were working  fine; I could connect to my router through both and I could find my Xbox and PS3 on the network. I just couldn’t get online. I eventually found that this was caused by a conflict between Esets firewall (which I had disabled in Vista) and the native Windows firewall. Uninstalling Eset and reinstalling it solved the issue.

I also had an issue with my local Apache webserver working. After checking the logs it turned out to be a soft link I had created under Vista to link the conf directory (makes editing the files from my working directory that much easier). Creating a new link solved the issue nicely.

The last issue is with the touchpad; and I haven’t really fixed it yet. At first, Windows thought the touchpad was a PS/2 mouse. This wouldn’t be an issue except I like the scrolling functions on the touchpad and the PS/2 drivers don’t support it. This seemed like a cut and dry driver issue except I installed all the latest drivers for my laptop that Gateway offered and it still doesn’t work all that well. Yes, it’s there but not in any real functional way. It’s jerky and hesitant when it works (around 30% of the time). Not enough to get me to downgrade but still a pain.

I’ve never really had an issue with Vista but I was still excited about Windows 7. Even though there were a couple hiccups during the install, and that my touchpad isn’t operating 100%, I’m still really happy with the experience.

It’s crazy to me how important email is; it’s almost 2010 and I’m still, still, relying on email for communication more than anything else. Considering just how broken email is this, along with how I know it’s broken, this isn’t a little surprising. Managing the shear amount of email I get used to be pretty easy but now… it’s a little more painful but still manageable.

IMAP on Blackberry: The Poor Mans BES

When I had the day job I had access to a nice little network with Exchange 2003 and the latest Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). It never really occurred to me how spoiled this would make me but, now that it’s gone, it’s pretty obvious how much I relied on it for my email management.

Why? Syncing. Loved the whole syncing aspect; open an email on your Blackberry and the email was marked as open in Exchange. Send an email from your Blackberry and it appeared in your sent folder in Outlook. Even better if you sent an email in Outlook, through Exchange, it was put in your sent folder on your Blackberry. Simple. This was great for things like filing and responding to emails. Put simply, using the Exchange/BES combo allowed you to keep all your communication in sync.

Then I get unplugged from the BES and have to setup a new solution. First, I went to POP3 (as I was most familiar with the protocol) but this was a cluster fuck of a bad idea. Yes, email was put on the Blackberry but it’s a one way method and nothing was kept in sync. I’d do something on the device and when I would go to Gmail nothing would be there; this couldn’t do.

I also tried the native Gmail Blackberry app but this too wasn’t ideal; I hated how it wasn’t truly a “native” app in that other apps would still open the default Blackberry message program to do anything email related. For example, if I clicked on an email on a web page while on the Blackberry it wouldn’t open the Gmail app but the native messaging one instead. I was surprised how much this happened and how much it bothered me but it did.

Then I learned that Gmail has IMAP support and have been using it ever since. So far, IMAP is the closest approximation of the BES experience I’ve found. It’s not without it’s issues or anything, and technically it’s not supported by Google, but it’s the best solution I’ve found.

Probably the biggest issue I have with the IMAP integration is that mail manipulated on the Gmail site doesn’t get synced to my Blackberry. This isn’t too bad since I usually only use the Gmail site for sending but if I want to keep things in sync I have to treat the Blackberry as the master.

To keep the calendar and contacts in sync requires the use of another Blackberry app called Google Sync. Google Sync it’s keeps your contacts and calendar synced up between Google Calendar and Gmail contacts and your Blackberry.

While it’s not a perfect solution I’ve been mostly happy with IMAP and Gmail on the Blackberry. It’s way, way, better than paying money for an outsourced BES / Exchange account.

It’s interesting how life can throw you a little too much coincidence. For example, I was having a nice conversation (with a pretty smart dude) where it was mentioned how much more painful development on large projects used to be back in the confused days of early PHP. Then life decided to highlight this little message with a project using Dolphin 6.1 from Boonex.

Your Soul is the Fish

The work came from a client that had a straight-forward install of Dolphin. She wanted to customize it a bit to make it a little more user friendly; nothing too difficult. Before the project came to me the client had gone the usual route of hiring someone on the cheap who ended up not being up to the task and was, subsequently, left high and dry. This left me with a project that had some of the work started, but not finished, which added to the pain a little but Dolphin sure has it’s own ways of ruining a mood.

In case anyone else has the misfortune of having to work on a Dolphin CMS project I thought I’d highlight just what you’re in for.

The Good

To be fair, for as bad of a nightmare Dolphin CMS is as a project (compared to coding standards in today’s landscape), it does have one or two(ish) redeeming qualities.

For one thing Dolphin CMS has a pretty logical directory structure. Looking for the language file? Why it’s in the “lang” directory of course. Looking for a class? Just check out the “inc/classes” directory. Admittedly, this is a small thing if you’re using a modern IDE but I still appreciate it (so many programs I’ve ran into lately don’t even include this level of logic).

Dolphin CMS also has what can only be called an advanced admin panel. This thing allows you to customize all sorts of areas including the content of pages as well as the layout of the pages. I had a lot of fun playing with that thing. This is double edged though because it serves no practical purpose if you want something unique and cool. For newbies though I think this is a nice feature to learn about the possibilities for a website.

The Bad

Right off, Dolphin CMS is PHP 4 compatible. This is just silly; it’s fucking 2009 already and Dolphin CMS using PHP 4 as a baseline is probably more to blame for the rest of this list than anything else. If you’re going to use old technology why not use old coding standards? In that situation I imagine complacency and laziness would come naturally.

Then there’s the use of short tags in Dolphin CMS. I admit to having a problem myself with maintaining this standard (it’s still natural for me in a template file) but it’s irritating if you have short tags disabled in your ini file.

Another offense: inline HTML and PHP together ALL OVER THE PLACE. You can’t hardly open any file, seriously, any file, without wanting to tear your eyes out of your skull from the cluster fuck in front of you. Add to that the confusion in that the system has a template system (see below) Dolphin CMS just doesn’t use it for the parts you’d actually want to change. Gave me a headache when I would think about it.

As mentioned above there is a template system (of sorts) but it doesn’t actually templatize anything. I guess it’s more of a layout system but considering the majority of templates only had header, footer and content references it’s a poorly utilized one. To make it even worse though Dolphin CMS uses a hard-coded, numerically indexed, naming convention. Want to know what template file you’re file is using? Just open up that file and look for a variable called “$_page['name_index']” and use the value as a reference. Seriously, why would you use a number instead of something meaningful like the name of the file (or similar)?

Back Pedaling

I just got done working with Dolphin CMS so, yes, I’m a little raw. Wah; I know. Still, the fact remains that Dolphin CMS is one of the biggest pains in the ass to work with that I’ve run into in quite some time. It’s not too complicated to work on, it’s structure should be familiar to anyone who’s worked with PHP ten years ago, which is it’s biggest issue. You have to dumb yourself down to work with. And for the love of god don’t try and abstract anything.

The most heinous thing though is that Boonex actually charges for this filth. Real money too. Crap can be excused if it’s free but there’s nothing worse than paying for a box full of horse shit.

One of the most natural things to do while being an obsessive programmer is focusing on the minutia. Not only do our projects have to perform and function to our standards but they also have to be structured “just so” with just the right comment style and just the right indentation to space ratio (4 of course!). Point being that, for me, it’s ridiculously easy to spend time and energy focusing on, what amounts to in the end, as trivial. I was reminded of this while playing around with the latest release of PHPLoc (1.40).

Photo: Grahambones

PHPLoc is a project by Sebastian Berman that measures the size of a PHP project. In a nutshell PHPLoc is a project analyzer that shows details like amount of classes, files, directories and total Lines Of Code (PHPLoc get it?) to name a few features. It’s ran from the command line and I had no issue getting it to work on Windows (huge plus for quality IMHO).

According to the Git repository:

phploc is a tool for quickly measuring the size of a PHP project.

The goal of phploc is not not to replace more sophisticated tools such as phpcs, pdepend, or phpmd, but rather to provide an alternative to them when you just need to get a quick understanding of a project’s size.

PHPLoc works as a PEAR module (requires PEAR installer version 1.8.1 at least) and as such is really easy to install. There’s some great instructions on the Git site that I had zero issues with (outside of having to update PEAR) so I won’t go into detail here.

Here’s an example of the output when ran against a Zend Framework 1.9 distribution:

C:\php>phploc --count-tests C:\ProjectFiles\ZF
phploc 1.4.0 by Sebastian Bergmann.
 
Directories:                                        393
Files:                                             1856
 
Lines of Code (LOC):                             372292
  Cyclomatic Complexity / Lines of Code:           0.11
Comment Lines of Code (CLOC):                    173793
Non-Comment Lines of Code (NCLOC):               198499
 
Namespaces:                                           0
Interfaces:                                          94
Classes:                                           1758
  Abstract:                                         155 (8.82%)
  Concrete:                                        1603 (91.18%)
  Lines of Code / Number of Classes:                167
Methods:                                          12377
  Scope:
    Non-Static:                                   11517 (93.05%)
    Static:                                         860 (6.95%)
  Visibility:
    Public:                                        9886 (79.87%)
    Non-Public:                                    2491 (20.13%)
  Lines of Code / Number of Methods:                 23
  Cyclomatic Complexity / Number of Methods:       2.78
 
Anonymous Functions:                                  0
Functions:                                            0
 
Constants:                                         3361
  Global constants:                                   1
  Class constants:                                 3360
 
Tests:
  Classes:                                            2
  Methods:                                            0

As you can see, PHPLoc gives some really nice insight into a project. I have to admit I’m more interested in the OCD satisfaction than the practical reasons but it’s still cool. Definitely check it out if you’re looking to get some interesting though completely trivial information about your project.

A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that my writing seems to say I’m against money; as if I don’t appreciate profit or something. To be clear; I’m not against money. I love money. If left alone with money… well you get the idea

I just think the accumulation of it needs to be done responsibly and with the consumer in mind. Rarely does this happen and, to date, I haven’t really wanted to try and monetize this blog. Then I lost my job and while I’m not poor or anything I do make all my money directly off of me and my work. Keep in mind, I don’t have a day job and I’m not going to get one.

Amazon Tour

At the moment, I don’t believe that advertising is a good fit for me or this blog. Personally, I always lose a little respect for an author when I’ve never heard of them and their site is littered with ads all over the place. Nope. There’s no way I’m doing that right now. There are other ways to make a little, very, very, little scratch on a blog though. Every little bit helps. Right? Right?

One such option I’m exploring is the Amazon Associate Program.  According to the Get Started Tour (which is actually worthwhile to take a read through):

Amazon Associates is one of the first online affiliate marketing programs and was launched in 1996. The Amazon Associates program has a more than 12 year track record of developing solutions to help website owners, Web developers, and Amazon sellers make money by advertising millions of new and used products from Amazon.com and Endless.com. When website owners and bloggers who are Associates create links and customers click through those links and buy products from Amazon.com or Endless.com, they earn referral fees. It’s free to join and easy to use.

There are quite a few options to start earning a commission on referrals but the only one that’s personally appealing to me, insofar as a blog goes, are the text links. The text links work for me because they can be placed in posts when referencing relevant material. Basically, if I’m linking to Amazon anyway why not earn a commission? Obviously, it’d be a mistake to abuse this by placing links inappropriately but staying honest is easy

I especially don’t approve of those widgets that are all over certain sites. I’m willing to bet you can think of a site that does that right now. The problem is that, frankly, they’re ghastly and really take away from the experience. Nothing screams amateur desperation with suspect motives than a site with those little warts on it. Seriously, stay away from those boogers.

Amazon states that it’s possible to make up to 15% on referrals if a transaction takes place. As always, it’s a good idea to take a read through their Operating Agreement to get an idea of what you’re really in for. If you do you’ll see that it’s not quite so black and white. Not to take away from the program or anything it’s just that like everything it’s all in the fine print.

I am encouraged by the recent “success” Stack Overflow has had with the program (with success meaning people clicked on the links):

But in the meantime, since we had our fancy-shmancy Amazon Affiliates account set up, we might as well put it to good use. Even way back in the original Stack Overflow beta, people were proposing that we convert any Amazon book links to Stack Overflow amazon affiliate book links. I was hesitant to do this at the time, but given our failure, I was licking my wounds. I was willing to give it a try. Particularly since the community seemed totally OK with the concept.

So, onward to plan B: we now auto-insert Stack Overflow affiliate info into any amazon book links posted on Stack Overflow. Oh yeah, and here’s the kicker. These silly little rewritten text links work 200%-300% better than our custom amazon book ads!

Go figure.

Obviously, I don’t have anywhere near the penetration and exposure that Stack Overflow does; not what I’m saying. But I do think their success indicates 2 things; a higher acceptance of Amazon links compared to the run of the mill advertising and a more engaging intrusion to the experience among their, primarily, developer audience (which is my target audience).

I’m always happiest when I can make a buck and not compromise my integrity.

I recently took  on a project that was a failure for the original developers. It was the usual story of outsourcing a project and just getting hosed on cost and timeline (my bread and butter). I was asked to take a look and see if I could finish off the project ASAP. Looking under the hood I found that the site was using a framework I hadn’t heard of called Akelos.

Akelos

Akelos touts itself as a port of Ruby on Rails (RoR) to PHP but, frankly, I think that’s mostly marketing. Hell, even in the footer disclaimer on the Akelos site they minimize the R0R relationship. Not that that’s a bad thing per se (I wouldn’t want to be associated with RoR at the moment either).

Expecting a clusterfuck of code I was actually a little surprised to find the use of a framework. Granted, the previous developers weren’t using the framework very well, or in any optimal way, but it was still nice to see. Of course that meant I had to learn Another Fucking Framework but what the hell; I like to learn.

According to the site:

The Akelos PHP Framework is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. Based on good practices, it allows you to:

• Write views using Ajax easily
• Control requests and responses through a controller
• Manage internationalized applications
• Communicate models and the database using simple conventions.

Your Akelos based applications can run on most shared hosting service providers since Akelos only requires that PHP be available at the server. This means that the Akelos PHP Framework is the ideal candidate for distributing standalone web applications as it does not require any non-standard PHP configuration to run.

It seems to work similarly to most MVC frameworks, like the Zend Framework, in file structure and hierarchy which definitely eased some of the pain. Unfortunately, I can’t really speak to the Ajax ease of use because, well, like I said above the previous developers were not so much on the… ummm, good side of the coin.

There is a video which is definitely worth checking out; it’ll walk you through the basics of how to use Akelos to generate your project. While there’s a bunch of options for generating your project it does come off a little schizophrenic in that it uses both command line and a web interface depending on what you’re trying to do.

One thing I was impressed with was the localization functionality. Basically, it works like most do, using translate files (read; arrays), which by itself isn’t that impressive, but I really appreciate the way the system uses the browser locale value if one isn’t selected. Nice.

One thing that really didn’t impress me was the absolute NEED for a database connection; NO MATTER WHAT. That’s just confining and comes across to me as lazy and wasteful. Seriously, why would this be a good idea? Does no one care about performance anymore?

It’s unfortunate that Zend Framework and Symfony are the juggernauts they are; I know I wouldn’t want to go against them. It’s got to be tough building a competitive framework with those two being as rad as they are.

All and all Akelos isn’t a bad framework and it does have potential. The Ajax readiness is intriguing and the file structure and hierarchy is intuitive (if you’ve used any other MVC framework )so it was easy to figure things out. There’s also the plugin architecture; I do enjoy me a good plugin architecture.

But I don’t think the relationship to Ruby on Rails is as good a thing as the developers of Akelos think it is. To be honest, I found the similarities between the two jarring due to how uneven the implementation was. Plus, similarities to RoR might have been a good marketing hook 2 years ago, these days it’s just another bullet point. Add to that my personal bias that PHP should function like… you know… PHP.

Point being, I like RoR and if I want to code like RoR I’ll use RoR, not PHP, thankyouverymuch. Add to that my dislike for code generation (and Akelos has a lot of code generation) and I just don’t care anymore.

So for me, Akelos is a fail. Not because Akelos sucks and not because Akelos isn’t good (though it does suck a little and it’s not all that good). More because of design decisions that can’t be helped that disagree with how I like to work.

Zf = 1
Akelos = 0