What drives a business? Numbers?

Posted by mkhairul - March 12, 2010 at 11:03:19 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

Most understands it (tacit), but do not realise that..

What drives business success is emotion: passion, greed, ambition, determination, courage.

Because ultimately..

It takes courage to take a risk – not numbers. It takes determination to build a business – not numbers.
It takes passion to keep going when lesser mortals would cave in – not numbers. It takes imagination to create a new idea which changes a market – not numbers. It takes inspiration to motivate staff through difficult time – not numbers.

Onboarding

Posted by mkhairul - March 12, 2010 at 10:03:28 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

A new book, which looks interesting is out, Designing Social Interfaces, tells us about Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences, a term used by human resource and the common practice for new hire orientation.

What does this have to do with web applications?

Most companies think that getting people to sign up is the ultimate challenge, but what about getting them oriented to your site and actually using it? That process of helping people get started is called onboarding, and it’s crucial that you give it the attention it deserves.

Persuading the users to hang around long enough to benefit from the web application.

Oftentimes, the true value of your product or service becomes apparent only after significant use—perhaps because the user needs a sizable social network to really reap the benefits, or because continued activity on the site ultimately leads to something, like better recommendations. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that your users will stick with you that long. You need to help them get there as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to make your case.

SVN (Version Control) and binary files

Posted by mkhairul - March 7, 2010 at 09:03:46 pm - Comments Off

Categories: blog

Does a version control eats a lot of space when using on binary files? What I mean a lot is, for each changes, does it commit a new copy of the binary file and thus uses twice the amount of space?

No.

Taken from Subversion FAQ (How does Subversion handle binary files?) :

For storage and transmission purposes, Subversion uses a diffing method that works equally well on binary and text files;

From what I read, it does reverse delta on the files being commit

Magento Admin Error when Logged-In

Posted by mkhairul - March 5, 2010 at 12:03:12 pm - 1 Comment

Categories: Troubleshoot

An error message is displayed when logged into Magento’s Admin.

One of the errors is as follow.

lib/Zend/Locale/Data/id.xml:227: parser error : out of memory error

By default, Magento sets the memory limit to 128MB. Check the hosting’s memory limit (depends on where you are, most probably its going to be 32MB).

Change the value for php_memory_limit in the .htaccess file (in magento’s root folder) to the same value as the hosting.

Predictable Design

Posted by mkhairul - February 28, 2010 at 02:02:13 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

A Quote from Predictable Design (UX Magazine)

For a design process to produce an extraordinary product, two conditions must be met: stakeholders and participants must unequivocally accept that they aren’t designers, and trust the real designers’ abilities.

jquery context menu problem in chrome and IE

Posted by mkhairul - February 25, 2010 at 01:02:33 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog

I was doing some image uploading with swfupload and added context menu to the pictures that were uploaded. I was told by a colleague (who helped me testing in other browsers) that the context menu is overlapped by the browser’s context menu (for those who don’t know what ‘context menu’ is, its the menu when you right click).

I’m using jquery’s contextmenu. There’s a code needed to be changed.

Search for (which is probably at line 141)

$(el).add('UL.contextMenu').bind('contextmenu', function() { return false; });

Replace it with

$(el).add($('UL.contextMenu')).bind('contextmenu', function() { return false; });

Reference
jQuery Contextmenu DOESN’T WORK IN JQUERY 1.4 CHROME & SAFARI

MySQL Service Error 1067: The program terminated unexpectedly

Posted by mkhairul - February 17, 2010 at 03:02:38 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

I was bugged by this error for 30 minutes, wondering what the hell is it? No spaces in data dir path? Or no spaces in some other paths?

What is needed is just to set the bin directory in the windows path.

If that does not work, check this steps out, MySQL Error 1067.

Refreshing PHP.ini on IIS

Posted by mkhairul - February 17, 2010 at 03:02:34 am - No Comments

Categories: Troubleshoot

One of the SOAP script that I did is not working (it works fine when using apache), so I know its not the script’s fault (most probably its the php configuration). I’m using a PHP script for sending SOAP data to a 3rd party server. The data needs to be encrypted (mcrypt) using an IV (initialisation vector) provided by the vendor.

It also requires cURL to send data through an SSL connection (curl). I checked up on the php configuration and as I have suspected, mcrypt and curl is not loaded.

To enable the extensions, go to php.ini, and uncomment it (remove the semicolon). Reload the php.ini from IIS by recycling the application pool.

Start -> Run -> inetmgr -> ApplicationPools -> DefaultAppPool (Right click, Recycle)

Run a test script containing phpinfo() and check if the extension is loaded.

Reference

• PHP.ini

nuSOAP problem – Method not allowed

Posted by mkhairul - February 3, 2010 at 10:02:39 am - No Comments

Categories: Tips, Troubleshoot

I got a call from a friend working at the previous company that I worked for. I did the integration between their flagship application with a 3rd party payment gateway involving SOAP.

As usual, people call me expecting me to troubleshoot problem on the phone. At first I was a little bit confused as to what the problem is, but then I remembered that I had already solved it and went through my notes.

The web service client is calling the web service on SSL, it requires the use of cURL. Enable php_curl extension and everything should work fine.

Listing non alphabet records – MySQL

Posted by mkhairul - January 7, 2010 at 12:01:18 pm - No Comments

Categories: Tips

I know this is rather simple, but I thought I’d just put it here because I haven’t been posting quite as often as I would like.

There’s this application, where it needs to list companies by alphabets. Click on ‘A’ it displays all companies that starts with ‘A’ or ‘a’.

So there’s this ‘Others’. Companies that starts their name with other symbols.

A simple regex will do the job.

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column NOT REGEXP '^[a-zA-Z]'

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