Progress!

I called Mr. Lin today and was able to contact him!!

This is significant, because previous attempts to call did not get through.

I had a friend help me talk to him.

The final result: Mr. Lin said he will return the deposit on Dec 10, 2010!  Wow, we have a commitment from Mr. Lin!  Look forward to seeing a positive result on that day!  I’ll keep you posted!

Who is Mr. Lin?

I just tried calling Mr. Lin’s cell phone, but got no answer.

Who am I dealing with?   Is it a naive youngster?  Nope.   Quite the opposite: Mr. Lin is quite sophisticated in business!

Mr. Lin has been working for 15 years (since Taiwan year 85 or 1996).  And he actually worked for the Taiwan government in the Ministry of Economic Affairs (經濟部) from 86.06 – 88.06 and the huge bank HSBC (香港上海匯豐銀行) from 90.11 – 95.07.

Moreover, he was an Economics major (經濟系) at Feng Chia University (逢甲大學).

So, well-educated and deep business experience … and what’s the result?  I will tell you in the next post!

(aside: the Chinese version of this post is at http://www.wretch.cc/blog/BusinessTW/16546921 )

Who and Where are those early Facebook people?

Here’s an interesting tidbit about Facebook: you can see the the people that joined early.    gosh, lots of them are from Hahvahd…

ok, i’m looking at URLs for some reason.   go to facebook; surf a few pages; now look at your url — what a mess!

oh, look: that id parameter is hanging out there for anyone to ‘adjust’.

let’s see who id=4 is:  Mark Zukerberg, FB founder

his neighbor id=5 is: Chris Hughes, co-founder

id=6 also works at FB: Dustin Moskovitz.  oh, wikipedia says yet another co-founder

you get the idea.  those ids are like a company directory for early Facebook joiners and employees…

btw, here’s an article that discusses the security hole caused by this (actually, i  only scanned it so i just have a vague impression of the contents ).

Naming Recommendation for Controllers, Actions, and URLs using zend_controller

 Given the zend_controller naming changes in zend framework 1.5 for controllers and actions and the corresponding url, I’m trying to figure out a recommended naming scheme that I can use for zf 1.5 and onwards.  This forum post helped a lot: http://www.nabble.com/AW%3A-Normalizing-action-function-names-p16110540.html but it does not mention multi-word controllers and file and directory names.  Here’s what I could figure out.   Comments?

• URL:
  • domain.com/controller-name/action-name
    • note the use of dash (-) in the url.
• Controller File:
  • Controller File name / Class name:
    • Filename and class name are the same.
    • MixedCase
    • eg: file RoadMapController.php contains class RoadMapController for url domain.com/road-map
    • Zf 1.5 docs explicitly recommends caps for first character (not sure what “Title-cases” refers to in the zf docs).  Implicitly, it seems to suggest MixedCase if I want dashes in the url.
    • Need separators:
      • No Underscore ( _ ) since it will break mvc mapping so can’t use (might imply a sub-directory)
      • Dash ( – ) is not allowed in class name since it’s a minus sign.
      • Need casing to make it readable since I can’t use separators
  • View Action method name inside controller code
    • Use camelCase
    • Eg: componentsForHighLevelAction for domain.com/road-map/components-for-high-level
    • Mixed case does not work.  View action method must be camelCase.  This was a changed in ZF 1.5. 
    • No Underscore ( _ ) since it will break mvc mapping so can’t use.
• View File and directory:
  • Controller directory name that holds the view script files:
    • All lower case with dashes between words. 
    • Matches controller part of url
  • View file name:
    • All lower case with dashes between words. 
    • Matches view part of url
    • URL Underscore ( _ ) gets mapped to filename dash ( – )
  • Eg: my_file_system/road-map/components-for-high-level.phtml
• Resources and notes:
  • This naming scheme is pretty complicated.  It sure would be nice to have a complete example explicitly documented in the zend_controller reference guide.  I’m really looking for the zend framework recommendation on setting this up such that it covers the common cases, enables readable (word separated) URLs, and will be stable for future releases.  Well, this is my attempt at documenting it.
  • Good reference for zf 1.5: http://www.nabble.com/AW%3A-Normalizing-action-function-names-p16110540.html
    • What was the thread in the mailing list before?  Is it: http://www.nabble.com/correct-controller-php-file-name-td14424663.html#a14425880
    • Or could be http://www.nabble.com/Need-help-using-dashes-in-action-names-td13348011.html#a13349348
    • This is interesting in the context of naming: underscore is new directory: http://www.nabble.com/underscore-in-URL-td15406669.html#a15411590
  • From zf 1.5 manual:
    • Zend_Controller’s dispatcher then takes the controller value and maps it to a class. By default, it Title-cases the controller name and appends the word Controller. Thus, in our example above, the controller roadmap is mapped to the class RoadmapController.
    • Similarly, the action value is mapped to a method of the controller class. By default, the value is lower-cased, and the word Action is appended. Thus, in our example above, the action components becomes componentsAction, and the final method called is RoadmapController::componentsAction().
    • From intro http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.html

see this ZF forum post for updated information: http://www.nabble.com/Naming-Recommendation-for-Controllers%2C-Actions%2C-and-URLs-using-zend_controller-td16362913.html