Tag: Programming

Family Slider Program

A few weeks ago, my youngest turned 13. Our first teenager. I was discussing with a group how many teenagers we’d one day have in the house at one time (6, Lord help us). It reminded me of a tool I had built several years ago. The tool allowed me to see the ages of each of my kids on a timeline and then slide the whole group along to see what their relative ages are. I dusted it off and added some extra features to make possible for anyone to load their own children. You can load in your kids and see what combinations you’re going to be dealing with as they grow up. You can also click the “Load Demo Data” button to roughly see our situation.

Baxley Family Slider

Convert Moodle Timestamp fields to Date

I get really frustrated with Moodle for using int fields to store dates. They store it in the Unix (Epoch) format. Here’s how to make it more readable.

To convert it to a readable date, use
FROM_UNIXTIME(int)
You can also get more formatting control with something like:
FROM_UNIXTIME(int, '%Y %D %M %h:%i:%s %x')

 

Long character fields from database weird in PHP

When you are returning longer text from a query in PHP, like from a varchar(MAX) or such you can get weird characters at the end.  The problem is that the ODBC connection, which I used to query the MS SQL database, has a default field bytes limit of 4096 chracters.  This is controlled by the odbc.defaultlrl setting in the php.ini file.  The solution that I found was to override this setting in the page where you need the long text with a line like this.

ini_set(‘odbc.defaultlrl’,65536);

Supposedly you can use the functionodbc_longreadlen setting, but I was not able to get it to work.  You can find more info here and here.  The default value for this is 4096, so 65536 may be overkill, but you can find what fits.  When I tried 0, which is supposed to set it to passthrough all the text it didn’t work at all.

For the curious lrl = long read length

 

Handling checkboxes in JQuery

Some quick notes on handling checkboxes (and probably radio buttons, but I haven’t tested that) in JQuery.

To find a count of all checked items with the class Testbox.

$(".Testbox:checked").size();

To get a count of all of the unchecked items use this code:
$(".Testbox:not(:checked)").size();

To test an individual item with the ID Testbox1 use this:

$('#Testbox1').is(':checked');