James R Sullivan

A site my wife needs for work recently overhauled their site using Microsoft Silverlight (didn’t say “upgraded”). My wife’s iBook G4 works perfectly for streaming video, email, calendar, and basically everything else a personal trainer would use.  Unfortunately, Microsoft decided the new version of Microsoft Silverlight should not support G4 macs.

It sounds to me like Microsoft Silverlight is telling me to buy a new mac, which I did.

I created integrations with ExactTarget for a client and found it was an up-hill battle to get information about their web services and rest interface.  The only way to get the documentation is behind lock and key, a private forum and knowledge-base called 3sixty that is slow, has no user participation, and if you are a freelancer it’s just another layer of overhead to get an account to talk to people there – probably the reason why there is virtually no user adoption.  :)

Since I see no merit in contributing code to a private forum that you have to buy in for the sake of that company, I bought a domain and put up a punBB forum to give people a public space to talk openly (like the Salesforce.com forums):
http://ExactTargetDeveloper.com 

Nerd Factor: 8

I am trying to call an Exact Target Web Services (SOAP) API via PHP and there is this problem where the __getLastRequest() is showing that my data isn’t actually being put into the request. It looks like I’m not passing any data aside from the basic XML showing the method name.

It has been a while since I ran into this issue and so I wanted to make note of it on a blog, somewhere indexed more thoroughly by Google, so the next person who ran into the problem would save a little time.

The skinny:  You need to explicitly encode the objects that are being sent to the service.

If you want to pass no data:

$sfs = new ExactTarget_SalesforceSend();
$sfs->Email = $e;
$sfs->Targets = array( $t );
$sfs->FromName = "Lead/Contact Owner Name";
$request = new ExactTarget_CreateRequest();
$request->Options = NULL;
$request->Objects = array($object);
$results = $client->Create($request);

If you do indeed want to pass data:

$sfs = new ExactTarget_SalesforceSend();
$sfs->Email = $e;
$sfs->Targets = array( $t );
$sfs->FromName = "Lead/Contact Owner Name";
$object = new SoapVar($sfs, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'SalesforceSend', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");
$request = new ExactTarget_CreateRequest();
$request->Options = NULL;
$request->Objects = array($object);
$results = $client->Create($request);

That bolded line tells php/soap that it needs to encode based on a specific element in the wsdl schema.  In other languages you can use wsdl2java and end up with classes that you can just pass along and they get serialized the right way.  PHP and other languages of that group (Perl, Ruby) need to explicitly encode the data that is being passed.  You would expect that passing an array/dictionary/object into the function expecting that element would work – but no – it just needs to be told ever so gently which data type it should use.

Of note:  I belive this may just happen when inheritance is used in publishing the web service (.Net and Java) which is represented in the wsdl file like this:

<extension base="tns:APIObject">

For Google, the error I was getting was:

Requested value 'APIObject' was not found.

If you are making a website – and who isn’t lately – you need to make a theme for the site.  I an not stylistically inclined and am also colorblind, so I have a couple tools that I use when building sites that help me with that side of things.  One of them is ColorSchemeDesigner.com – a really great tool to help you get your colors right.

Previously, most of my sites were “yellow”, “green”, and “red” to add color.  Now they are shades of all different colors that actually jive together.  I don’t recognize much of the improvement but people say it’s better.

Watching a video like of “Improv Everywhere” doing an escalator high-5 and seeing the smiling faces of the people getting off the train convinces me that arts have a place in every day life.

The last truly usable, well-performing version of Excel is obviously Excel 2003. It has all the features you need without the needlessly redesigned UI and massive bloat. Plus, it works nice and quickly in my XP virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of using Windows Update on automatic mode.  It installed some garbage called “Office Live Add-in” which will not go away.  Even when you disable the toolbar, delete it, whatever… it comes back every time you restart Excel.  Here’s how it works:

Click here to watch the flash web recording

Picked up some organic vodka. We must for the children: carbon neutral and certified organic!

This is funny, I thought to myself. The virtual image of Ubuntu I just installed shows a partially drained battery. Then I noticed that it’s the actual battery level…

I read 43folders until a year or two ago and I am a huge fan of GTD.  This video is a succinct motivational and informative explanation for those of us who feel like we could be getting more out of our organization systems and really just do more:

Specifically, there are two books here which have made it onto my reading list due to Merlin’s recommendation: On Writing by Stephen King
and The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.