If you lose or forget your Android keystore file alias that is used to build APK files for distribution (like I did when trying to package Autoridge Lite for the Android Market), here is a quick and easy way to see them:
- Open a Terminal Window, Run This Command:
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| keytool -list -keystore /location/of/your/com.example.keystore |
Make sure “keytool” is either in your PATH, or “cd” into the “tools” directory where your Android SDK files are.
- Enter your keystore password when prompted (you didn’t forget that too, did you? Did you?)
- See results!
You should see something like the picture below if you did everything right. The alias is circled in yellow. If you have multiple aliases in your keystore, they will all be listed, one per line.
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Like any web developer who has been sitting on the sidelines watching this mobile explosion happen in front of my eyes, I was eager to find a way to jump in. Up until about a month ago, I was still evaluating various different mobile development platforms – Titanium, PhoneGap, and Rhomobile, trying to decide which one I wanted to use to make my first mobile app. My only selection criteria was that the platform would have to be able to produce both iPhone and Android apps with the same code, because I wanted to be able to develop and release both an Android and iPhone apps without having to learn two completely different programming languages and development environments, and without having to do everything twice. Read More »
Closures are a new language-level feature that has been added to php 5.3, along with namespaces, late static binding, and a slew of other new features, patches, and updates. If you’re like me, you might be wondering what the practical uses for these new features are before you can rightly justify diving in and using them in new or existing projects. I experimented a lot with closures and possible uses over the past few weeks, and came up with some compelling reasons to start using them.
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Most developers are coming from a background with relational database-specific experience, and then trying out some new NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Here are some “gotchas” I ran into while using MongoDB with my MySQL hat still on. Read More »
I’ve spent the past few weeks here at work researching and playing with NoSQL databases (and especially MongoDB) for a new feature we’re developing that doesn’t easily fit into a relational model. And so far, I really like what I see. The profoundness of the shift away from the relational model and the implications that has just blow my mind. You no longer have to fragment your data to persist it. You just store it. That’s it. No more hours toiling over the design your table schema and how to break apart the data you put together just to fit it into a relational model. You can now store your data exactly how you use it in your application, with no other special needs or impedance mismatches. Going back to an RDBMS system now just seems illogical – it’s like breaking apart a camera tripod just to fit it in the same standard size case you’ve been using for years instead of just collapsing it and finding a different case that fits it better. All that effort you go though tearing down your tripod and putting it back together every time you use it is wasted and unnecessary. It’s a symptom of the larger problem that your case doesn’t fit your tripod. Read More »
March 24, 2010 | Posted In
Database,
MySQL by Vance Lucas |
Comments Off Multi-byte characters can cause quite a few headaches for the unsuspecting webmaster. Sometimes all you need to do to figure out how to fix the problem is detect which database records have UTF-8 data in them and which ones do not. If you’ve been scanning records manually, stop now. Here’s a quick query to cure your ales:
Return all the rows with multi-byte characters in table posts on field title:
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| SELECT *
FROM posts
WHERE LENGTH(title) <> CHAR_LENGTH(title) |
This does pretty much what it looks like: returns all the rows in the posts table where the title’s character length does not match the title’s length. This works because the LENGTH function returns the number of bytes in the string, while the CHAR_LENGTH function returns the number of characters in the string. If the string contains multi-byte characters (individual characters that are made up of more than one byte) like international UTF-8 characters, the two functions will return different numbers and will not be equal, thus including that row in your results.
PHP provides two built-in functions to retrieve properties of a given class – get_object_vars and get_class_vars. Both these functions behave the same exact way, one taking an object as a variable and the other taking a string class name. The tricky thing about the two functions is that they behave differently depending on the call scope, returning all of the class variables available within the called scope. So if you call either function within the current class you need properties from, all properties are returned – public, protected, and private – because the current scope has access to them all. This makes seemingly simple things like returning all the public properties within the current class a bit of a pain if you want to keep the code inside the class itself.
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Packt Publishing announced the winners for their annual Open Source CMS Award in November, and since then I have been a bit disturbed that the 2009 winner was WordPress. My first reaction was this:
“… So a blogging platform won the content management system award? How sad is that?”
My knee-jerk “how sad is that?” reaction comes not because I don’t think WordPress is worthy, but because of what it implies about the state of other open source CMS projects. The reaction comes from the fact that a blogging platform is kicking your CMS’s ass in its own category.
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December 16, 2009 | Posted In
Database,
MySQL by Vance Lucas |
Comments Off Sometimes there are unique situations where you need to order query results by a particular field in descending order, but also need NULL values first. The default (and logical) behavior of MySQL in this case is to return NULL values last, because in descending order they have the lowest value (none). But what if you really need to reverse this and force NULL values to the top of the result set?
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I was fortunate enough to be selected as the regional speaker for the Dallas CodeWorks 2009 stop by the Dallas PHP User Group through a community voting and selection process. My talk was entitled Object Oriented Apologetics, and was essentially about letting people know what good object-oriented code is, when to use it, how to use it, and more specifically why to use it over traditional procedural PHP code. Read More »
