Guess we’ll see what happens with this one. Hopefully it turns out to be more than a $75 paperweight. It doesn’t weigh much even with batteries so it probably won’t be a good one.

As a byproduct, who knows maybe I’ll even start posting videos here.

On the twitter side of things, i highly recommend Tweetie. Enough where I sent the $11 to help support the project. I’ve been a Tweetie convert on my iPhone for the past month or so and really am enjoying it on OSX. I’m still using twhirl on my PC though. It’s odd that I find so much innovation in OSX software in terms of UI and simplicity. Hopefully Windows developers are taking note.

Speaking of the web only doing so much, if you’re a PHP developer and cringe at the though of working with javascript, I highly recommend sitting down with jQuery. We’re in the process of replacing Mootools with it and I love it. As soon as I finally get around to updating our code structure to support dynamically loading the correct plugins, life will be a breeze with it. I’ll try to get some actual decent demos up sometime soon.

Other than that, life is back to working long work days, I’m pretty sure these will never end. It builds character right? Or is it that it puts hair on my chest? The world may never know…

The error we were receiving while doing so however was “The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object.”  Doing a bit of reading up on php.net, it turns out that php serializes an object, then when the session is started, it unserializes the object.  You won’t actually find out there’s a problem until you call a method that is supposed to reside within the object.

The work around for this problem is loading the class into memory before starting your session.  In our situation, we’re running the Zend Framework which start’s the session on it’s own and it seems unsensible to modify the Zend libraries but we still had a problem with an incomplete object.  Thus on my path to finding a way to work around this problem, I created class.cow.php.

class cow {

	var $name;
	var $milk;

	function __construct() {
		$this->name = 'bessie';
		$this->milk = false;
	}
	function moo() {
		echo "mooo!!!!
";
	}

	function gotMilk() {
		if($this->milk == true) {
			return true;
		} else {
			return false;
		}
	}
}

Cow has all of the basics for our needs.  You can tell your cow (all cows are named Bessie btw) to moo, or check if it’s ready to be milked.  For my test, I created 2 files, the first was index1.php which will be used to create our session object, the second is index2.php which we used to load our cow object from memory.

index1.php

name."
";

	$calf->moo();

	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}
	echo "waiting...
";
	$calf->milk = true;
	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}

	$_SESSION['calf']=$calf;
?>

index2.php

name."
";
	$calf->moo();

	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}
	echo "waiting...
";
	$calf->milk = true;
	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}

?>

Both files are mostly identical except for the line $calf = $_SESSION['calf']; in index2.php.

Here is where we get the error: Notice: main() [function.main]: The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition “cow” of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded _before_ unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in index2.php on line 6.

The solution was to load the class, then unserialize and re-serialize our object. The code change to $calf = unserialize(serialize($_SESSION['calf'])); resolves the issue and all works as normal. This was pretty interesting food for thought for me, hopefully you found it to be the same.

Unfortunately, lots of the world isn’t like me. Most people don’t think in queries, and which words are most likely to be indexed. Enter, Powerset, a company that is working on developing a search engine targeted towards parsing the human language. While I can applaud them for trying, I have to admit I was skeptical if they can knock google down. It’s time to do a comparison.

Now before I show off some comparisons, I’d like to point out that to be fair, at the moment Powerset searches Wikipedia so we’ll be comparing it to Google’s site:domain.com feature.

To start with, we’re going to use one of the searches they recommend “Who is Jon Stewart”

The first thing we see is that Powerset is giving us data it has obtained from Freebase. Beyond that we see a list of results in Wikipedia that reference Jon.

So now, let’s do some comparison shopping… and here’s Google’s results

Based on our up front comparison, I’d say Powerset is holding up as a solid contender to Google. Most of our results all link to one of a few things, the Wikipedia entry for Jon Stewart, the Daily Show, the short lived Jon Stewart Show, and entries on Jon Stewart in other languages.

Of course, this was a recommended search, I’d expect to see results like this. Let’s go a but deeper now. At the moment, Serenity is playing on my tv, so it seems fitting. Let’s see what TV shows Joss Whedon has worked on. This time, we’ll use the string, “What TV shows has Joss Whedon worked on?”

I’m pretty pleased with the results found with this search. How will Google compare?

Obviously Firefly is the most successful show that Joss has worked on, but we notice the 3rd one down, Dollhouse. It’s Joss Whedon’s new series which I was actually unaware of. Funny thing, PowerSet missed this so we need to give the point to Google.

Lastly, let’s do one more test, this time, let’s find out who developed the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car, developed by Larry Page and the Tesla foundation. Due to it’s electric engine, not only is it free of pollutants, it sports an impressive 4 second 0-60 time.

Good news, the Factz portion of Powerset noticed that Larry Page is an investor in Tesla Motors. The results below the Factz show Lotus’ work on the vehicle as well as well as more info on Larry Page.

We pretty much get the same info with Google, however we’re given a bit more info showing us Lotus played a much more important role than what PowerSet has led us to believe. All in all, we’re really not getting much benefit from PowerSet over Google. I like what PowerSet is trying to achieve, however I’m much more interested in seeing where other newcomers to the search engine world such as the human powered Mahalo. Granted, PowerSet is still in development so we’ll just have to watch and see what comes from the San Francisco firm.  For a bit more insight, I recommend checking out the Jason Calacanis’ blog post which led to me to my research.

In order to determine if a user is logged in, the previous programmer would do the following. Query the database for all users with a type of 2 (call center agent). After that for each user in the database of type 2 (call center agents, currently ~120 agents exist), he would query the actions table for the users last action, whether it’s action type 1 (login) or 2 (logout). If the first returned row is of action type 1, the user is logged in. Lastly, the code queries the actions table to see what the last campaign a user logged into. (action type 20). After throwing in some basic code to track the queries and time of this (and thanking John Davis along the way for teaching the importance of big O notation) I learned that an average check of who’s logged in totaled around 150-200 queries along with taking 45 seconds to a minute. So this was one of my goals in Nashville last week, to write one massive query I could use to get the results I’m looking for. To assist me in the insanity, I called master of all that is shoes, Brian Schumacher. We worked together back at Irresistible Ink as data developers and since he’s gone on to be a DBA in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Well he quit last week but that’s his story not mine.

So after about 45 minutes of being on the phone and utilizing the greatness that is pastebin, we worked out a viable solution. I present to you, possibly the most complicated query I’ve written to date.

SELECT
loggedIn.lastname, loggedIn.firstname, campaigns.cpnname, DATEDIFF(ss,[actions_4].[actionwhen],getdate()) AS LoggedIn, DATEDIFF(ss,[actions_3].[actionwhen],getdate()) AS CampaignLogin
FROM
(
SELECT
employees.unqempid, employees.lastname, employees.firstname, ActionIDLoggedIn.actionID
FROM
(
SELECT
unqempid, MAX(actionid) AS actionID
FROM
actions
WHERE
(actiontypeid = '1')
GROUP BY unqempid
) AS ActionIDLoggedIn
INNER JOIN
(
SELECT
unqempid, MAX(actionid) AS actionID
FROM
actions AS actions_2
WHERE
(actiontypeid = '2')
GROUP BY
unqempid
) AS ActionIDLoggedOut
ON
ActionIDLoggedIn.unqempid = ActionIDLoggedOut.unqempid AND
ActionIDLoggedIn.actionID > ActionIDLoggedOut.actionID
INNER JOIN
employees ON employees.unqempid = ActionIDLoggedIn.unqempid
WHERE (employees.type = 2)
) AS loggedIn
INNER JOIN
(
SELECT
unqempid, MAX(actionid) AS actionID
FROM
actions AS actions_1
WHERE
(actiontypeid = '20')
GROUP BY
unqempid
) AS maxCampaign
ON maxCampaign.unqempid = loggedIn.unqempid
INNER JOIN
actions AS actions_3 ON maxCampaign.actionID = actions_3.actionid
INNER JOIN
campaigns ON actions_3.actioninfo = campaigns.cpnid
INNER JOIN
actions AS actions_4 ON loggedIn.actionID = actions_4.actionid
ORDER BY
loggedIn.lastname, loggedIn.firstname


The end result, we’ve shortened this down to 1 query that takes 2-3 seconds. Hopefully this post can only serve as help to some programmer stumbling along a similar problem as mine.

After some failed attempts at remotely starting remote desktop, I started looking into ways to get into VNC.  They weren’t running the older vulnerable version of so that was out of the question.  After doing a bit of google searching I came across a utility called vncpwdump which allows you to dump the existing password from the registry.  Unfortunately the program was only giving me a portion of the password.  Instead I decided I was approaching this the wrong way.   I went ahead and changed my VNC password to a temporary password and then exported the registry key.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RealVNC\WinVNC4]
“Password”=hex:aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa
“SecurityTypes”=”VncAuth”
“ReverseSecurityTypes”=”None”
“QueryConnect”=dword:00000000
“dummy”=”"

Then using Connect Network Registry option in the registry editor, I imported my registry file to the remote system.  Voila!  

With Windows Vista a new technology referred to as autotuning was introduced.  This feature enables the system to adjust the size of tcp packets beyond 64kb.  To do this, a SYN packet to negotiate a larger packet size is sent to the client.  This is all fine and dandy except that some routers think this is something else and strip the acknowledgment packet so the server starts running with the new packet size, and the client sits dumbfounded.

To make a long story short, I disabled autotuning with the following command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

After which, I was able to remote desktop to my hearts content.  The reason this only occured with our 2003 server was that our 2000 servers don’t support autotuning.  Go figure.

After this, I went ahead and installed the MySQL migration tools on the MSSQL due to the application crashing on the CentOS box.  I had to modify the grant tables to allow root to remotely connect to the system.  After this, I ran into a small pitfall of the Migration tool.  The default value of some of the fields in my table refer to MSSQL functions, which aren’t compatible with MySQL so I had a compatibility error.   For example:

`beginningdate` DATETIME NULL DEFAULT convert(datetime,(convert(varchar,datepart(year,getdate())) + ‘-’ + convert(varchar,datepart(month,getdate())) + ‘-’ + convert(varchar,datepart(day,getdate())))),

Since getdate() and datepart() aren’t acceptable functions, I removed the default value for now.  After that all of the data migrated fine except for a few truncated records.  When I move this to production though I’ll be sure to solve that problem.