Time flies when you're having fun

[http://uk.moo.com]There is some mystery time warp device which absorbs time when you're having fun. There is also a nasty tunnel monster which lives on Britain's railways and gobbles up all your freetime whilst you're travelling to and from work. At…

How to view and extract Plesk backups

[http://res.cloudinary.com/hannahwf/image/upload/v1392491830/uudeview_start_bsfo2x.png] Have you ever had a minor developmental nightmare and needed quick access to a Plesk [http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/plesk/] backup? Lost some data or needed a reference point and just wanted to get at a…

Snippet: Magento - Using OR and LEFT JOIN in addAttributeToFilter

I'm still pretty new to Magento, and am learning more about it every day. I've been trying to learn all I can about internals such as managing collections & recently stumbled on trying to filter a collection by two attributes. I wanted to build a list…

Snippet: Symfony & Propel - Queries with SQL functions

This is a super short snippet that I ALWAYS forget how to do! Often I want to build more complex where clauses with Propel Criteria [http://www.propelorm.org/wiki/Development/Criteria] which use SQL functions such as UCASE, LCASE, LEN and the date functions DAY, MONTH and YEAR. This…

Snippet: Creating & Debugging Complex SQL queries in Symfony

When working with large and complex datasets in Symfony, there comes a point where the ORM layer (Propel or Doctrine) causes more problems than it solves. Sometimes it's necessary to debug large SQL queries built using the ORM layer, and at other times it's appropriate to…