There’s some information on the Facebook Developers’ Games page about building web-based games for Facebook. There’s also a talk about some of the issues involved.
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The Reality of HTML5 Game Development
Read an article the other day which talks about all the different approaches you can take to creating a web-based game: The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and making money from it.
Checking your Ubuntu version
Read about checking your Ubuntu version today and was reminded of lsb_release -a.
PHP heredoc syntax
Today I found myself looking up the PHP heredoc syntax. It was cool to learn that you can use {$var} syntax to embed variable data in a heredoc.
Using arrays in PHP
Apparently in PHP 5.4 you can index an array returned from a function as explained here. I learned this today but unfortunately I’m still running PHP 5.3. I also read an article on stackoverflow about how to make an object behave like an array.
MySQL cheat-sheet
Learned a trick or two from this MySQL Cheat Sheet.
MySQL function LAST_INSERT_ID like @@IDENTITY
There is a MySQL function to return the auto-increment ID of the last inserted ID and that is LAST_INSERT_ID. You can also read about Using AUTO_INCREMENT.
Inserting multiple rows with an insert statement in MySQL
Today I had to double-check the syntax for doing multiple row inserts in a MySQL insert statement, because my first guess at the syntax was wrong. I found this article which explained the syntax which is basically:
INSERT INTO example (example_id, name, value, other_value) VALUES (100, 'Name 1', 'Value 1', 'Other 1'), (101, 'Name 2', 'Value 2', 'Other 2'), (102, 'Name 3', 'Value 3', 'Other 3'), (103, 'Name 4', 'Value 4', 'Other 4');
MySQL: Error in SQL: Commands out of sync; you can’t run this command now
Today I was programming MySQL via PHP and I received an error “Error in SQL: Commands out of sync; you can’t run this command now”. It turned out the problem was that a previous mulit_query had mysqli_results that hadn’t been freed. This article helped me solve the problem, and now my batch mode SQL processor looks like this:
public function execute_batch( $sql ) {
$this->write_count++;
if ( ! $this->link->multi_query( $sql ) ) {
$this->throw_error( $sql );
}
if ( $this->link->more_results() ) {
do {
$result = $this->link->use_result();
if ( $result instanceof mysqli_result ) {
$result->free();
}
}
while ( $this->link->more_results() && $this->link->next_result() );
}
}
This code executes the SQL batch and then frees any mysqli_results that result from the query batch.
phpMyAdmin #1045 Cannot log in to the MySQL server
I was using phpMyAdmin and trying to login to my server with a new user that I’d created called ‘pma’ but I was getting the error “#1045 Cannot log in to the MySQL server”. The ‘pma’ user was also my phpMyAdmin control user and as its login wasn’t working advanced features of phpMyAdmin weren’t functional and I was getting an error letting me know.
I thought maybe the problem was that I’d specified the password for the ‘pma’ user incorrectly so I reset the ‘pma’ user password just to be user:
update user set password=PASSWORD("secret") where user='pma';
But the problem persisted. I had a look in the mysql.user table to see what was in there. The results included the following:
mysql> use mysql; Database changed mysql> select Host, User, Password from user; +-----------+-----------+-------------------------------------------+ | Host | User | Password | +-----------+-----------+-------------------------------------------+ | localhost | | | | % | pma | *BD053A55278DA675E32F28360C759B3FBEE32B3E | +-----------+-----------+-------------------------------------------+
Note the entry on the first line with a blank username. I have no idea how that entry got into my mysql.user table but basically it seems to be interpreted as “any user” at localhost with no password. I didn’t like the look of that so I deleted that entry. After that entry had been deleted the login for my ‘pma’ user started to work.