The solution below takes advantage of CakePHP 1.2’s bindModel() method to manually create an INNER JOIN in place of the pre-defined HABTM association. This allows us to execute the find() with a HAVING COUNT(*) in the group option. In the example below, this causes any Albums with 0 Images to be omitted from the results as they don’t meet the HAVING criteria. What’s more, the limit of 4 correlates exactly so 8-just-incase kludge needed.

This was driving me crazy so here’s the solution for anyone else that might be stuck in the same situation. (This method is in the Albums model.)

  function getAlbums($num=4) {
    $contain = array( // use Containable Behavior for efficiency      'AlbumsImage',
      'FilterImage',// although part of the magic and required, this seems to confuse CakePHP a little - I'll try and resolve it and update the post
      'Image',
      'Image'=>array('ImageSize',
                     'fields'=>array('Image.id','Image.title','Image.host','Image.path')),
      'User'=>array('fields'=>'User.id,User.username'));

    $this->bindModel(array('hasOne'=>array('AlbumsImage',
                                           'FilterImage'=>array( // FilterImage so as to distinguish between regular Image
                                                 'className'=>'Image',
                                                 'foreignKey'=>false,
                                                 'type'=>'INNER',
                                                 'conditions'=>array(
                                                     'FilterImage.status = 0',
                                                     'FilterImage.id = AlbumsImage.image_id')
                                                 )
                                           )
                           ));

    $albums = $this->find('all', array('contain' => $contain,
                                    'conditions' => array('Album.status'=>'0'),
                                        'fields' => array('Album.id','Album.user_id','Album.title'),
                                         'order' => 'Album.created DESC',
                                         'limit' => $num,
                                         'group' => array('Album.id','Album.title HAVING COUNT(*) >= 1'))); // here's the clincher

    return $albums;
  }

Although MediaCentral is quite text-based for navigation, its presentation is definitely a lot sharper and more refined than any of the others. CenterStage is intersting and has a lot of potential, but better be careful not to ‘over utilize’ available space. It’s definitely the most mature of the projects. My main gripe is that if I’m browsing a bunch of movie covers (which BackStage – the CenterStage backend component sucsessfully downloaded for me), why do I need a text title underneath them? I don’t; it simply wastes space. Also the cover browsing section seems awfully small, but as I didn’t poke too deeply, one might be able to turn off the preview area to the right (that would be handy). iTheatre is at RC1 currently and has quite a few pieces of missing functionality, but could be nice although is heavily text-based like MediaCentral. CoverFlow is purely for browsing your music but it is such a simple, obvious UI that it merits mentioning. Hopefully its ideas can be intergrated into a more encompassing media browser.

MediaCentral
(lg, xl)

CenterStage
(lg, xl)

iTheatre
(lg, xl)

CoverFlow
(lg, xl)

You’ll need to go and get plink.exe from PuTTY, but that’s about it.

To open the tunnel, run the following:

NOTE: The first time you run this, do not include the “-batch” parameter or the “sleep 30″ command on the end because you have to manually accept the SSH server’s key so it gets added to your Windows registry for future use, and then type “exit” to disconnect.

For example, the command looks like this for me:

"sleep 30" is required (including quotes) as this keeps the channel open for 30 seconds, which should be long enough for you to open your RDP connection with 127.0.0.2:3390 as the server address.

Use the following command to open your RDP connection from a batch file, or the Start->Run dialog (the parameters in bold are for screen Width and Height, and obviously optional):

Here’s a screenshot of what the plink.exe command looks like. On the last line, it’s indicating that it has just run the sleep 30 command and then it sits waiting for the open port forwarding to be used:

To simplify all of this, I cleaned-up a VBS script I found that prompts for all of the parameters in turn so you don’t have to keep them saved in an insecure batch file or anything. Grab a copy of rdp_connect.vbs and put it in the same directory as plink.exe and after connecting, it’ll automatically run the RDP client and attempt to connect for you. To create a shortcut to this script, you’ll want to prefix it with the wscript command as simply double-clicking a .vbs file does nothing but open a text editor (not entirely helpful really).