Bill Shupp Software engineer, photographer, musician, space geek

5Jun/110

More do it yourself home improvement fun – garbage disposal replacement

The new and improved in-sink-erator, with sound insulation

Ever since we moved into this place over three years ago, our garbage disposal has been a bit noisy, and more recently has started to smell bad.  The model we had, the In-Sink-Erator Badger 5 Plus, was not easy to clean since the black rubber flap at in the drain was not removable.  Since the disposal was pretty old, we decided to replace it.

1Jun/110

PHP’s interactive shell as your application console

When developing a web application, it's common for your feature development to be ahead of any data administration tools you might need.  While some frameworks, such as django, have built in admin tools for managing your application's data, many don't.  At my current job we use Zend Framework, and have rolled our own lightweight model layer which does not have any fancy automatic admin tools.  In addition to supporting database pools and selectors for partitioning of data, it also has transparent caching of data.  While this is good for speed, it precludes you from making any data storage changes without going through this model layer or the cache will get out of sync.  For now, rather than doing any DB queries directly, we do them through CLI jobs built for a specific task (batch updates, etc).  This works fairly well, but often things come up that aren't yet supported in the application's admin tools, such as changing a user's status bits, etc.. Things that a CLI console would be useful for.