Pragmatism in the real world
As today is Ada Lovelace Day, I get to write about a women who has inspired me and isn't my wife! I first met Alison on the Electronic and Electrical Engineering course at University back in 1991. Of course, that dates me; Freddie Mercury was still alive and died towards the end of '91. I remember her from our Uni days as conscientious and determined to do well, though I did not know her very… continue reading.
One thing that I've noticed is that whenever I used — in a post, such as this one, WordPress converted the — to &emdash; which whilst very pretty doesn't work so well for people trying to understand command line switches to ./configure! Today, I finally got around to poking into the WP source code to work out what was happening and I tracked it down to the wptexturize function in the wp-includes/functions-formatting.php file. Once I… continue reading.
I use Twitter's search feature to create RSS feeds for useful terms, like "Zend Framework". Today I noticed a tweet from ManningBooks, my publisher for Zend Framework in Action! It turns out that they've put up a sample of the book on Scribed! Check out the book, then order it, remembering to use the coupon code scribd25…
Everyone else probably already knows this stuff, but I hit an issue today to that took a while to sort out. Fortunately, some kind folks on IRC helped me, but as it's embarrassing to ask for help on the same issue twice, I'm writing down what I've learned! The problem Get a £ character stored to MySQL, retrieved and then displayed without any weird characters in front of it using UTF-8. The solution Make sure… continue reading.
In the vein of some of Lorna's articles, this is more a note for myself than anything else. Not everything is explained in detail as it assumes you know how to use a command line… These are the steps I take to get the Apple supplied PHP working with GD, PDO_MySQL and Xdebug working on OS X 10.5. /usr/local Ensure that the following directories exist: sudo mkdir /usr/local/include sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib sudo… continue reading.
Another PHPUK conference is over and again it was a good'un! There were a lot of good talks, though not all were targeted at me and I also got to meet old friends and make new ones. The day started well with probably the most inventive safety announcement ever by Marcus, though he should use a microphone next time! Aral Balkan's keynote provided food for thought and he's a very enthusiastic speaker. This was an… continue reading.
If you're going to the PHPUK conference on Friday, please say hello if you see me! The schedule is out now, so you can plan the talks you want to see.
Although I'm not posting here much at the moment, I am answering questions about my Zend Framework book in Manning's Author Online forums. There's a fairly active discussion going on as readers find areas that they are struggling with and I do my best to contribute to most of the threads when I can. Also, if you missed it, I have a post containing the errata that we have found. If something doesn't make sense,… continue reading.
Since the New Year, I've been very busy and have had little time for coding. One reason is that I decided to take a photo every single day of this year. It's proving fascinating, but is taking up more time per evening than I realised. Of course, as I get into the swing of things, the time taken choosing which image(s) to post and then processing them will go down :) If you are interested,… continue reading.
Like Matthew Weier O'Phinney, I don't really understand these tagged memes either, however, after he said such nice things about me, I thought I'd have a go. Seven things you may not know about me: My first programming job was programming PIC microcontrollers using Forth. Forth has been one of the more confusing languages that I've used. The first search engine I used was Gopher on a SparcStation 1 in 1991… My most expensive telephone… continue reading.
