Entrepreneur Geek

Mahatma Gandhi said:

It is a bad carpenter who quarrels with his tools. It is a bad general who blames his men for faulty workmanship. I know I am not a bad general.

Too many managers (including me) blame failures on their team. My team could not deliver or if they had worked harder we could make it. Or that they just don’t care about work. Or that they are bothered about their careers only. Or that need to improve their skills.

Why do we blame our men? Because we do not want to take responsibility of the failure on our shoulders. My experience is that people shine when the leader respects and values them. When the leader encourages her team to go out full and even to fail, the team goes out full and creates wonders. The team may not reach the expectations of the leader overnight, but a leader knows they are on the way and need to be guided – not pushed back.

Be a good general!

I want to create an action plan for OpenCerti. We have enough leaders now, and we can get cracking on the actual work now. I have not taken out time to work on the plan so far, but I will do that this week.

Some important things:
* Voice interview by a PHP-pro as part of the process
* Online tool to unit test PHP code submitted
* Question bank generation

Some people have raised their concerns about the project. One important thing we noticed was the lukewarm response by good php developers about the project. People feel certifications are about mugging up and ticking off one option from four. Hence there is not much value of certification.

Well, OpenCerti is not going to be like that. We will have real code that will be tested, and we will also have actual php programmers evaluate others.

More soon…

Do you know of a good resource that helps creating editable datagrids with Flex? Not with another text field where the user has to edit the text. The editing should happen in-place.

If there is a resource, great! Otherwise we will write up something. We have learnt a lot of things figuring out ways to do this

When you get “Unable to connect to endpoint” errors in Flash while using a web service, here are a few things you can check up:

• If you are passing complex data, make sure you use classes on the backend. And not associative arrays.
• If there is any problem on the web service, you may get this error. Test your service by writing a test case in the backend programming language (e.g. PHP) and see if that works.
• Make sure the spelling of the function you are calling and the arguments to it are correctly written.
• Did your first web service call succeed? If not, check the connection.

I was working with PHP5 webservices and had a head spinning experience because of the WSDL cache. Everything was working fine on my local setup, but when I uploaded that to the server, it said:

[faultstring] => Function ("savePrefs") is not a valid method for this service [faultcode] => Client [faultcodens] => http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ )

Another variant of this was Procedure ("savePrefs") not found. I checked and rechecked my WSDL and Webservice files. But everything was just right. Tried changing the parameters of the function, assuming that there was some problem in the WSDL definition. That too did not work. Google’d for this, did not get much. I then did everything possible to get this to work: even recompiled PHP to the latest version on the server

But then I figured that it was not accepting any new methods I add to the web service. Which meant that something was cached. Digging further, I found it was the WSDL being cached on the server side. PHP caches the WSDL file for better performance. There is no way to turn off this cache other than a php.ini setting.

So I added this line to my .htaccess file:
php_value soap.wsdl_cache_enabled 0

And it worked!

I think I can write a book about SOAP and WSDL blues now!