All entries of my technical and business blog

Doctrine Error: Expected Plain Value

Mar 19, 2015 php

I’m so used to PHP’s liberal allowance for single and double quotes, that I forget that other languages and tool-sets don’t play that way. Case in point, my most recent error:

Ansible Installation of Postfix with No Prompts

Mar 13, 2015 linux scripting

Using an Ansible configuration, I wanted to use postfix on ubuntu to send out mail. However, I couldn’t seem to figure out exactly how to get it to stop asking for input during the apt-get install postfix process. Turns out, you can use debconf to set the values that are necessary for the install.

Getting variable values from nested twig / symfony custom template

Mar 12, 2015 php symfony

Today, I was working with a custom form themed symfony / twig project. The previous developer had developed a bootstrap based theme (yes, this is an older Symfony project at this moment - I think this is a bundled theme now). I was struggling with the block field_row item. Inside of this, there was a call to form_label passing in just the form view again. I was setting a custom label on the form_row() call in the main template, but nothing was happening.

Morning Motivational Email to Text

Dec 29, 2014 php

So I’m going to try this new thing - watch a motivational quick movie in the morning via youtube. I made a playlist of videos and have put the following code in cron for 5:30 every morning. It will send an email (which is actually email to txt on my phone) with a link to open the youtube player on my phone with a random item from my playlist. Hope you find it useful!

Android Emulation - in VirtualBox - 400% faster!

Nov 25, 2014 mobile

I’ve been working with my QA department to determine a faster, better way to test our pages in android browsers. The android emulator just seems to take a long time to load, to render pages, and is clunky to use. (True, I may not have learned about all of the options in the emulator, and I may be able to squeak a little bit of performance out of it.)

HTML5 Placeholder: Not Always the Best Choice

Nov 2, 2014 html misc-web

One of the applications my team develops is used by a group that we’ve determined to be very much beginners at computer usage and internet comprehension. We attempt to make the product as intuitive as possible - while staying away from the newest trends. I don’t believe our place is to challenge their current notion of what websites do at this time. We stay a bit behind the curve because they need to use this application to solve a task. The task is already hard enough, we shouldn’t be pushing them past their comfort zones.