Pragmatism in the real world

A review of "Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5"

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it. Overview of the book Chapters two and three of the book are an excellent discussion of how… continue reading.

Flickr Uploadr

The new Flickr Uploadr was written using Xul. Richard Crowley has put up a post at the Flickr blog with links to various articles that he's written about devloping with XUlrunner. Fascinating stuff and a must read for anyone who writes Xulrunner apps. Even better, the full source to Uploadr is available!

Simple Zend_Form File Upload Example

UPDATE: This is out of date. Nowadays, you want to use Zend_Form_Element_File. Zend Framework 1.5's Zend_Form component is missing support for the file input element as it is waiting on a file upload component to build upon. We're busy people, so we'll fake it… This is a super simple example showing how to do file uploads with Zend_Form in Zend Framework 1.5. I'm building on the Simple Zend_Form Example, so make sure you have read… continue reading.

On Mail.app

As I mentioned a while ago, I'm now using a MacBook Pro. All is going well, and I like Mail.app's search and data detectors very much. There are some niggles though that I miss from Thunderbird. My top 3 are: * GPG integration (Thunderbird's Enigmail) * Mail.app's insistence on attached PDFs and images inline * Filing mails to arbitrary folders using the keyboard (Thunderbird's nostalgy) It turns out that there are solutions to all three… continue reading.

Updated Tutorial for Zend Framework 1.5

Zend Framework 1.5 has now been released to mark the occasion I have significantly updated my Zend Framework Tutorial! The tutorial was first released on 16th August 2006 and was written against version 0.1 of Zend Framework and had one major revision to bring in support for the ViewRenderer component. The new tutorial produces exactly the same application as before, but now uses the new 1.5 goodies of Zend_Form and Zend_Layout, so you can see… continue reading.

PHPWM March Meeting: Symfony

On Tuesday, PHPWM had a meeting at PSL Connect's offices where Darren Beale talked about Symfony. I took a few pictures and have stuck them up on Flickr. I should have taken my other lens though as the 50mm isn't wide enough for taking pictures in room! It was a very good talk that covered the basics of Symfony and what it can do. At the start, Darren asked us which frameworks we use and… continue reading.

Site Stats

One thing I get asked a lot about at work is site stats. Usually, the client wants to know how many visitors they get on any other day along with other data such as where the visitors came from and which search terms they may have used. So far, I've used Google Analytics and PHPMyVisites JS based logging along with Analog on the logs themselves. I've also experimented with Mint on one site. Generally, I've… continue reading.

IE8 will work like IE8 by default!

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously. From Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8. This is good news all round. It's nice to see that Microsoft have listened to the comments surrounding their original intention to make IE8 render like IE7 by default. Well done!

PHP London 08

The PHP UK Conference in London is over for another year and this year's event was another evolutionary improvement on last year's. It was held in Inmarsat's conference facilities in the City of London. There were two conference rooms in use: a 300 seat main auditorium and a smaller 75 seat second room. There were also a large social area for food, drinks and networking. I thought it worked really well, kudos to Paul Morgan… continue reading.

Cure for BSS announced!

Cal Evans has announced a cure for Blank Stare Syndrome! You know the problem: you're in a conversation and someone mentions something about a new technology that you haven't heard of. Your eyes glaze and you have that Blank Stare… Sixty Second Tech is the solution. Once a week, it will deliver a short podcast (presumably about 60 seconds long!) that explains one technological concept per episode that you (or your less-techy friends!) need to… continue reading.