Brian Hartsock's Blog

I recently started a new project here at Webmail.us which will be a .NET based web application. One of the core pieces of .NET web apps is, not surprisingly, ADO.NET. It is Microsoft’s upgrade from ADO, but it is more of a rewrite. Almost everything has been refactored, with many new abstractions and paradigms for how to access data. When I first read about ADO.NET, I was very skeptical. I didn’t understand the need for these complex, hard to understand abstractions like DataTable’s and DataRelation’s and DataSet’s. »

For the past few weeks, I log into my blog and am disgusted at the theme I was using. It was pretty awful, but I couldn’t find anything I liked better. My requirements for a theme are simple: Widget ready At least 1 sidebar, maybe 2 Simple Being a web developer, I hoped for a little more though. I wanted an Ajax theme. It took a while, but I finally found K2, the second version of the default Kubrick theme. »

PHP, like most modern languages, has a garbage collection mechanism. It is supposed to destroy objects and variables as soon as there are no references to it anymore. To learn more about how it actually works, read this article. To summarize, PHP’s garbage handling is dumb, so any object that contains a circular reference will never be cleaned up. Normally, this doesn’t matter because a typical PHP request only takes a short amount of time and creates only a few objects. »

A few months ago, it occurred to me that I am no longer a college student, I am an adult. That being said, I realized I should start acting like one. While transforming into an adult, I began to understand there is really only one major change, high-definition TVs. I researched TVs for weeks, until I finally chose a Samsung 1080p 40” LCD which I will blog about in the coming weeks. »

Today I ran into an interesting problem with PHP. It boils down to PHP’s handling of protected and private members of classes. Basically, when serializing or typecasting, NULL characters precede the variable names. For instance: class TestClass { private $var1; protected $var2; public $var3; } $instance = new TestClass(); //print_r() to a string and escape special characters $str1 = addslashes(print_r((array) $instance, true)); echo $str1; Outputs: Array ( [\\0TestClass\\0var1] => [\\0*\\0var2] => [var3] => ) As you can see, this is probably not what you expected. »

I recently bought an HDTV, and wanted more HD channels than cable had to offer. This meant ditching cable TV and internet for satellite and DSL. From the title, most of you are wondering what kind of comparisons I can make between these companies. Well, I wanted to share my experiences signing up with each of these companies. DishNetwork I decided on DishNetwork since they seemed to have some pretty good offers at the time. »

Awesome. If you work out and don’t care about advanced features, you need one of these bad boys. It has a clip. It’s tiny. It’s simple. For my needs, its the perfect workout partner. »

A while back, I posted a review of some existing Active Record implementations. One of those happened to be the Zend frameworks DB portion. I believe that was about the time of version 0.7, and I recently looked on their website and discovered 1.0 had been released. I initially had low expectations, expecting 1.0 to just clean up 0.7 code, with minimal feature additions. After I downloaded it, I found out how wrong I was. »

Probably not many people have noticed, but it has a been a while since my last blog. Those few of you might be wondering why this is. Well, every time I log into my Wordpress admin site, I get to preoccupied with getting plugins and themes. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a widget-ready theme I like, which means I might start working on my own in the very near future. »

TeamSnap is a new web 2.0 application for managing/organizing sport teams. Since I am on a softball team here at Webmail.us, I figured I should give it a try. As it turns out, it’s pretty nice. It has all the features I want and very little that I don’t. Since it seems to be a Rails based application, it has some similarities with applications like Group Hub. Very clean, intuitive, and simple. »