A few months ago, my Nokia N900 (with the Maemo OS) broke down, so I was forced to buying a new one. I had thought for a long time that my next phone would be an iPhone (I admit, I’m kind of an Apple fan, although not all the way). I had seen Android in action about two years ago, and I was not at all impressed (it was very slow), but still I decided to take a look at it again. Here are the criteria on which I based my decision.

Reaction speed of the interface

I checked out some movies on YouTube of Android examples, just to see if it was as snappy as the iPhone. And I was pleasantly surprised! iOs is probably just a little bit faster, but you hardly notice it. Android (and the hardware) has come a long way since I saw it two years ago.

Integration and synching

iOs synchs very well with all Apple software and services. Android on the other hand integrates very well with Google services. As I already use GMail and Google Calendar, Android seemed to be a more logical choice for me.

GPS

Android supports voice-assisted navigation for free. On the iPhone, you must purchase separate apps (I think). I love the integration of GPS and Google Maps, it’s much better than my TomTom.

Tethering

This one was very important to me. I don’t think iOs supports tethering (unless it’s jailbroken), and Android supports this out of the box.

Apps

The iTunes store and all of the iOs apps look more professional and ‘polished’ than the Android ones. The apps were the main reason I kept wanting the iPhone for so long.

Screen size

Not really Android/iOs related, but the iPhone screen is just a bit too small for me. A lot of people don’t like ‘bulky’ phones like the Galaxy SII, but I don’t mind and I really like its big bright screen. It doesn’t bother me sitting in my pocket. But then again, just personal taste…

Music

There’s no doubt about it : iTunes in combination with the iPhone will always be better than any other system… But I must say the Andoid music player is not bad at all, I can live with it.

In the end, I decided to go for Android (Samsung Galaxy SII), based on previous criteria. These criteria are very personal of course, but they might help others make a decision. I must admit I had never actually used iOs or Android before the purchase, so some of these criteria may be incorrect. Feel free to comment…

• The type of your foreign key is not the same as the referencing key, e.g. BIGINT -> INT
• One of the two tables does not have the InnoDB engine. You cannot add foreign keys to MyISAM tables, or referencing MyISAM tables.

If you need more info about the actual error that occured, you can execute following sql statement :

SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS

This will show you which foreign key gave the error (or about other errors for that matter) and some more info about possible causes.

ErrorException: Notice: serialize() [function.serialize]: “id” returned as member variable from __sleep() but does not exist in…

Now, apparently php has some problems serializing an object which subclasses an object with private properties. As Doctrine always creates subclasses of your entity classes (which are called Proxy classes), this means you should never use private properties (e.g. $id or any other property) on your entity (or associated entities) ! Use protected instead.

# validators.en.yml

This value should not be blank: This is a required field

That’s all

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

This way, the characters will be displayed correctly in the rendered pdf.

First, add the Zend library to your vendor folder (e.g. vendor/Zend/library/Zend). As Zend does not use namespaces, you need to register the ‘Zend’ prefix instead. This can be done in the autoload.php file located in your app folder. Apparently Zend has some problems this way with ‘require_once’ statements, hence the modification of the include path (last line) :

// autoload.php

use Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\UniversalClassLoader;

// ... existing code

$loader->registerPrefixes(array(
    'Twig_Extensions_' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig-extensions/lib',
    'Twig_'            => __DIR__.'/../vendor/twig/lib',
    'Swift_'           => __DIR__.'/../vendor/swiftmailer/lib/classes',
    'Zend_'           => __DIR__.'/../vendor/Zend/library',
));

$loader->register();
$loader->registerPrefixFallback(array(
    __DIR__.'/../vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/Locale/Resources/stubs',
));
set_include_path(__DIR__.'/../vendor/Zend/library'.PATH_SEPARATOR.get_include_path());

Now you are ready to use the Zend components. One mistake I made, I used the classes without a leading backslash, which does not work because the classes are in de default namespace. So, instead of using e.g.

$gdataCal = new Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); // class not found error will be thrown

you need to add a backslash as such :

$gdataCal = new \Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); // class is located in default namespace

$ sudo -i
[sudo] password for xxx :
(enter your password)

$ crontab -e

The sudo -i command will change your current user to root, so crontab -e will automatically use the cron file of the root user.

// Acme/BlogBundle/Author.php
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

class Author
{
    /**
     * @Assert\NotBlank()
     */
    public $name;
}

I tried this on my installation, but this doesn’t work. I had to change ‘@Assert\’ into ‘@assert:’ to make it work :

// Acme/BlogBundle/Author.php

class Author
{
    /**
     * @assert:NotBlank()
     */
    public $name;
}

I had the same problem with the @orm prefix, so there might be some other cases where this problem exists. My guess is that my PHP version (5.3.2) does not support native annotations, but the examples in the book are based on a version that supports them (just a wild guess).

Translations

The message translations of these validators are located in the vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Bundle/FrameworkBundle/Resources/translations folder using the name (e.g. for dutch) validators.nl.xliff. In this file you can find all the possible error messages. To overwrite those messages with your custom translation, place a file with the same name (possibly with different extention, e.g. validators.nl.yml in the translations folder of your bundle and add the translations that need to be different than the default.

*** update ***
The reason the translations are searched for in the validators.*.xliff file, is because of the default error templates used by Symfony2 (this template is a bit different from the original because I already removed the ‘ul’ and ‘li’ tags…) :

{% block form_errors %}
{% spaceless %}
    {% if errors|length > 0 %}
        {% for error in errors %}
            {{ error.messageTemplate|trans(error.messageParameters, 'validators') }}
        {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
{% endspaceless %}
{% endblock form_errors %}

See http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/form/twig_form_customization.html for more info.

While looking for some more info, I came across an online book that seems very interesting : http://diveintohtml5.org. Definitly on my todo list now