So we’ll have to make one and it’s very simple.

First you need to have the Symfony2 Console component setup in your Silex project.

The following console file is based on the example in this blog post and the Swiftmailer bundle console.

Make that file executable, or remove the first line and call it through the php cli.

You will also have to do a little change to your current Silex bootstrap file:

That should be it. This means you can now have a cron running to send emails and to the user they don’t have the wait while the SMTP server responds.

Here is a quick code sample which shows how to test emails that are sent using Silex and Swiftmailer.

I would recommend using this example app to get Silex and Swiftmailer setup if you haven’t got a working setup.

The aim in the code is to stop sending of real email in the test environment and log the messages so we can test them.

Here is a quick gist of the Test class, testing for number of emails sent and the first emails subject.

I have copied out the Symfony2 MessageLogger.php class from the SwiftmailerBundle, which I’ve included in the gist for your convenience.

As we find it a good resource we try and answer questions on things we know about, in turn for answers you get points and sometimes badges.  The badges/points side of things is a little childish but very addictive and a more productive use of time than Youtube.

Recently Stack Overflow released an API and I thought that joining Stack Overflow and Twitter together sounded like a fun reason to play with both websites’ APIs.

So Stack of Twits was born and unleashed to the world last night. Simply it sends you a message on Twitter when a question matches your set of keywords.

I built the site using our framework of choice symfony very quickly. It only took me a few hours over the course of a week or so to get it together. While building it I have made a PHP wrapper for the Stack Overflow API and the plan is to open source this work. Any interest in it pre release please comment below.

I took a mini-break to New York last week, and had the chance to pop into the Apple store on 5th Avenue (I love how awesome that sounds). Obviously then I had to try out the iPad first-hand. It was clearly the most popular item in-store as the gorgeous MacBook Pros and large iMac demonstration areas were practically empty, with large crowds around the iPad areas.

It’s a nice device, if a little large for my liking, but very responsive, particularly with regards to the keyboard. Positioning the iPad horizontally on the provided slanted stand allowed for typing on the on-screen keyboard at the same speed as you would a normal computer keyboard, and was extremely nice. I was personally quite sceptical back in January when the product was announced, but I did find myself experiencing iPad-envy after playing with the device; travelling back to our hotel on the subway, I noticed about 4 people using them for various activities including reading books and browsing the web. Suffice to say I restrained myself and didn’t purchase one sadly!

It’ll be interesting to see the UK release; by then hopefully all the little niggles will have been ironed out and we’ll have a solid product. Watch this space :-)

Oh, and I also came across a stack of paper versions of The Onion hidden in a subway corridor. Very bizarre!

function shorten($url, $login, $apikey)
{
  $api_url = "http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&
                    longUrl=".urlencode($url)."&login=".$login."&
                    apiKey=".$apikey;
  $ret = file_get_contents($api_url);
  $data = json_decode($ret);
  if($data instanceof stdClass && property_exists($data, "errorCode") && $data->errorCode==0)
  {
    foreach($data->results as $result)
    {
      if(isset($result->shortUrl))
      {
        return $result->shortUrl;
      }
    }
  }
  return $url;
}

In the application where I am using this function I have defined the login name and api key as constants, so you can do away with 2 function calls.

Also handily it returns the original url if bit.ly fails.

One of our major clients has a Master-Replication setup which we use for failover and backups. However it managed to get itself out of sync. A small example is that it the user table is missing a single user. The database is so large it is impossible to be sure that this is the only thing missing.

Thankfully there are tools to help in this situation provided by Maatkit, sadly the documentation is a bit vague and lacks direct examples.

Here are my simple steps to get a slave in sync with its master. I would make sure that try this is a demo environment first as during my experiments with these tools it managed to remove data from the master…which is bad!

Make sure that replication is working before you start this.

1) In the database (mydb) on the master I want to create the following table, this stores the checksum data:

CREATE TABLE checksum (
     db         char(64)     NOT NULL,
     tbl        char(64)     NOT NULL,
     chunk      int          NOT NULL,
     boundaries char(100)    NOT NULL,
     this_crc   char(40)     NOT NULL,
     this_cnt   int          NOT NULL,
     master_crc char(40)         NULL,
     master_cnt int              NULL,
     ts         timestamp    NOT NULL,
     PRIMARY KEY (db, tbl, chunk)
);

2) On the master run the following command, which stores the checksum data in the table we just created:

mk-table-checksum -d mydb --replicate mydb.checksum 127.0.0.1


3) On the slave run the following command, what this does…I am a touch vague about but it works…read the docs see if you can explain it:

mk-table-sync -d mydb --replicate mydb.checksum --sync-to-master --no-foreign-key-checks --execute 127.0.0.1

I hope that this is of some use to someone!