Brian Cline

Category: Programming

  • SQL University & #SQLHelp On Twitter

    In the last three months, I can say that I have learned more about SQL Server than ever before because of the SQL University put together by Jorge Segarra and many other very vocal members of the SQL Server community. SQL University started with very simple introductory blog posts, and has now moved onto much […]

  • Component returned failure code: 0x805e000a

    Error: uncaught exception: [Exception… “Component returned failure code: 0x805e000a [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]” nsresult: “0x805e000a ()” AdBlock interferes with the XmlHTTPRequest object and is known to sometimes break the way jQuery functions especially if the url triggers some sort of url filter. You have a few options to resolve the solution: suggest that users turn off AdBlock if […]

  • PHP MS SQL Truncated VarChar(255)

    I don’t often have fields much longer than 256 char, but a web application I am working on makes use of varchar 512. I’m not really able to change the field to text as the PHP Docs suggest. MS SQL doesn’t allow the equal operator, and grouping on text fields, and it’s also very slow […]

  • Resolving Session Not Saving

    Tonight, I’ve encountered a very strange situation where the session data was empty after each page reload. Have you ever had an issue with the session data not being set after a page refresh and the session has been for sure been started using session_start() ? I modified the php.ini file located on the server […]

  • How do I upgrade magento?

    Before you upgrade magento you should be sure to make a complete back up of your files and your database. (It also isn’t wise to test the upgrade on a production store!) To upgrade the easiest way is to make use of downloader, using a user with permissions, sign in, and then use the following […]

  • Magento – Adding Feaured Products to Front Page

    The owner of Nature Bumz wanted to be able to add featured products to the home page of their magento store each day without having to modify to edit the content. Inchoo has created a great extension, called Featured Products, that features a great backend allowing the admins to choose featured products from a simple […]

  • Table Based Layouts Unnecessary (Part 1)

    More and more often as I develop websites for companies located around Niagara Region (Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, St Catharines, Welland) I am seeing table based layouts for websites. Table based layouts depend on an html table to do all of the layout and often have many tables inside of tables creating an extreme amount […]

  • Magento – Setting Paypal to Redirect Back

    Quick steps on how to redirect back to your magento store upon a successful purchase. Unfortunately, you can only redirect to one page. Sign into Paypal account Click directly on Profile -> Website Payment Preferences Change Auto Return to on. Fill Return URL to http://www.mymagentositregoeshere.com/checkout/onepage/success/ Save and then go test it! After a successful paypal […]

  • WordPress – Auto Tweeting

    A couple of visitors have asked me how I am automatically tweeting my post title to twitter: I’m of course using a plugin that required very little configuration and making sure that I always use Posts -> Add New because the quick post functionality doesn’t work. The plugin I’ve been using that has worked so […]

  • Canadian Software Developers on Twitter

    I am very honoured to say that I have been mentioned by John Bristowe as one of the developers in Canada You Should Follow on Twitter. John has already been accused of including only Microsoft centric developers, but I’m certain there must be many other programmers like me that don’t normally use Windows, or Microsoft’s […]

  • BRCline Consulting – 1st Magento Site

    BRCline Consulting has been busy working on its first ecommerce site to create Niagara Fall’s Natue Bumz Cloth Diaper Shop. The owner, Crystal Cline, needed to accept paypal, credit cards, and be able to create her own blog along with adding inventory, and all of the traditional sort of business functions. I chose magento to […]

  • Magento – How to Enable Logging

    Magento is an excellent project that so far hasn’t been too difficult to program for. Initially learning how to use magento has been fairly tough: there are a lot of settings and fields that should be set before the site becomes visible to visitors and of course indexed. I won’t touch on magento seo right […]

  • MODX Base HREF

    There’s a lot of sites incorrectly showing how to use site_url in both MODx Evolution and MODx Revolution. Primarily, I use site_url with the html base tag. If you don’t already know the base tag goes inside head and specifies the default address. In MODX Revolution, our code in a template would look like: <head> […]

  • Book Review: jQuery in Action

    Book Review: jQuery in Action

    jQuery in Action, First Edition is written by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and is probably the simplest and easiest to understand programming book available. Target reader is somebody that already is using javascript in projects and is looking to push the limits of their web applications by using jQuery and many of it’s great […]

  • MODx Code Mirror

    Code Mirror is a great addition to MODx Revolution that serves as a very useful EditArea replacement.

  • Drupal CCKEditor

    Installing CCKEditor for Drupal is pretty easy, but does require the two downloads. CCKEditor Module and the actual editor. If you haven’t copied the actual editor you will see an error something like the following: CKEditor was not found at sites/default/modules/ckeditor/ckeditor

  • Easily Take Screenshot of Page in Firefox

    Every web developer or computer programmer spends time taking pictures of websites for their portfolio. Taking screenshots of pages that have a scrollbar has always been really difficult for a developer and often requiring sometime stitching images together in Photoshop. I found a plugin for firefox called Screengrab! that actually can take screenshots of the […]

  • jQuery + PHP to parse XML

    jQuery is very well suited for cross browser JavaScript development, but I bet you didn’t know jQuery is also fairly well suited to parsing XML. I often use jQuery to send XMLHttpRequests and then parse the XML returned by a PHP script on the server and then manipulate the return in some way. I won’t […]

  • jQuery Scroll To Top

    jQuery is so powerful and very flexible and usually makes so many complex takes so simple. Anything with a scrollbar and can be selected can be programatically scrolled to to the top. $(div).scrollTop(); Scrolling to top of browser window is as simple as: $(window).scrollTop(0);

  • Book Review: Thinking in C++, Section Edition, Volume One

    “Thinking in C++, Section Edition, Volume One” (ISBN:978-0139798092) was written by Bruce Eckel. The book is quite large coming in around 800 pages and focus on making the transition from C to C++, and focusing on practical programming. I believe the book could be much shorter if Bruce had a lot less repetitive, and long […]