I was privileged enough to get a couple of free passes into a pre-screening of Dreamworks Monsters vs. Aliens. This was the first time I’ve ever seen a movie before it was released to the public, so needless to say I felt privileged. (To the one who hooked me up with the passes, thanks again!) In any case, Dreamworks managed to put themselves back on the radar of having really good potential in the animation market, and definitely didn’t let me down this time. Dreamworks does have an impressive number of digital animation films lined up, but for the longest time it seemed as though they were releasing films that were on the coattails of Pixar, and never really released films that topped theirs. I’ll give Dreamworks credit for Shrek, however, as it was one of the more humorous digital animations that I enjoy seeing again and again. One word of advise though - stop making newer episodes. That plate of food has already gone stale.

Wow, this semester has been far worse than I had expected. I feel like I’ve been constantly on-the-go…which has really been the truth of it. For the first night in a long time, I’m actually able to sit down and do what I want - not what I have to do. Not to try to one-up everyone else’s schedule, but this is my typical weekly schedule:

I have been working on another Zend Framework project at work and stumbled upon an interesting problem while trying to unit test with PHPUnit. The Zend_Db_Table_Abstract and Zend_Db_Adapter_Interface wouldn’t mock and would throw really weird and convoluted error messages. This continued to occur despite the fact that I’ve divided my application into several layers for maximum abstraction. Read on for how I went about fixing the problem.

I had been in the market for a new music player, and Songbird wasn’t really cutting it for me. They didn’t have keyboard support built-in yet, and the application was bloated as hell (it took several hundred megs of memory - way more than a music player should). XMMS was out of the question because Gentoo removed it. So, I turned to a KDE app called Amarok. It was getting good reviews on sites I read, so I attempted to install it - and almost never made it past that point.

I’ve been moving the databases at work from one Microsoft SQL 2005 server to another SQL 2005 Server. When the databases grant security to non-domain users, they have a tendency to not be attached / accessible on the new server. What you have to do is reattach / rejoin the orphaned security authorization to the credential that you reestablish on the new SQL Server. This is done with the following pl_Sql command:

For my winter vacation, I traveled to Red River, NM with my mother, sister, and wife. It was a pleasant trip, though disappointing for my wife because she was sick a majority of it. Nevertheless, Red River, NM continues to be a place that I will always enjoy visiting for skiing and sightseeing.

Yea, I’ve officially sold out to advertisements. Sadly, desperate times call for desperate measures. Now, I can’t officially ask people to click on my ads, but what I would like is for people to let me know what they think of the placement of my ads. I’ve always been a proponent of advertisements that are present and noticeable, but not “in-the-way”. So, for my regulars (and the occasional visitor that drops by), please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!

The last year or so I have dabbled in C# .Net development, which was quite a bit different from PHP development. The .Net Framework is absolutely huge, the capabilities are endless, and the tools to help me develop faster far outnumber those of PHP. Furthermore, there are many within the community that work like true pragmatic developers (J.P. Boodhoo is one). These developers think about how best to organize your application and help to bring true automation to a project. Further, they work to eliminate conflict from workstation to workstation. In short, I’m talking about organization and management of code for rapid and agile development no matter who is on the team or how those team member’s workstations are setup. When moving back from .Net development to PHP, though, this type of mentality hasn’t quite made it.

For those Eclipse users who are PHP developers, getting the PDT Eclipse modules to install in a non-PDT distribution of Eclipse is extremely painstaking. This is compounded by the fact that x86_64 users don’t get a PDT distrib from http://www.zend.com/pdt/. As a result, we have to fend on our own…

I have some new, preview shots of Death and Harry Houdini online. You can check them out at http://www.chrisweldon.net/HarryHoudini/. More to come soon, I promise!