Tinsology

If you use Opera you’re probably aware that it supports shortcuts in the address bar that allow you to run a search on various search engines and websites. For example, if I type g tinsology in the address bar, you’ll get the Google search results for the keyword tinsology. You can do similar things with yahoo, amazon, ask and other sites that come preconfigured in Opera.

Personally, I find myself frequently using this shortcut to Google PHP documentation. For example if I’m looking up documentation for the implode function, I’ll type g PHP implode. More often than not the… Read More | 5 Comments

I suddenly recall something interesting a professor of mine pointed out a couple years ago while on a tangent during lecture. It has to do with the nature of infinity and how accepting something perfectly reasonable as true leads to less intuitive, but equally true conclusions.

The following expression is true and most people would not argue otherwise:

1/3 = .3333333333 . . .

Assume, of course, that there is an infinite number of 3s trailing the decimal point. The following expression is also true, and even fewer people would argue otherwise:

1/3 +… Read More | 2 Comments

If you’ve ever used PHP’s library functions you’ve most likely noticed that several function such as array() can take an indeterminate number of arguments. Normally when defining a function you specify each argument in the function declaration. Obviously it would be impossible to define an infinite number of arguments in such a way. PHP does, however, allow you to accomplish this through the function func_get_args(). Read More | 1 Comment

The other day I needed to populate a database with some placeholder content. Doing this manually was out of the question so I decided I’d find a text generator, specifically a Lorem Ipsum generator. For anyone unaware, Lorem Ipsum is non-sense, placeholder text used in publishing and design. It allows the developer to see their work completely populated with text, without having to actually create the text. Obviously, for this purpose, any kind of text generator would work to some extent, but traditionally Lorem Ipsum is used. Read More | 1 Comment

Even if you are new to programming, you probably have an understanding of functions and their purpose. What may be less clear, however, is what is happening underneath the hood when you pass a value to a function. In some languages, such as Java, when you pass a value (such as an integer or a char, this only applies to primitive types) the function receives a copy of that value. In this instance you are guaranteed that the original version of the value will remain unchanged after the function call. In other languages, such as C/C++ and PHP, a copy… Read More

Throughout the life of a database there may come times when it needs to be updated to incorporate changes or new features. This may involve adding new attributes to existing entities; adding new columns to tables. The problem with this is that in a populated database, modifying the database schema can be very expensive with regard to performance. This is not something you want to do frequently on a live site. One method which not only makes your database more resilient to future change, but also improves modularity is the use of metadata.

You don’t have to look very… Read More | 1 Comment

Making a custom login system is a common task for beginning PHP developers. Jumping right into it, however, may not be the best approach. There are several important aspects do building a login system that not only makes it work, but makes it safe. Read More | 35 Comments

Occasionally I’ll see someone make a point of distinguishing coding in a particular language as scripting as opposed to programming. Often times the distinction is arbitrary. I’ve seen justifications for this distinction ranging from scripting languages not being as strict as programming languages, to scripting languages not being turing complete. Web languages in particular (HTML, javascript, PHP, etc) seem to have the stigma of being scripting languages. To this day, however, I have not seen a non-trivial definition of the difference (or perhaps just one that satisfies me).

This does not mean that I don’t think there is a… Read More

In my experience, one of the most common pitfalls for beginning programmers is not understanding the relationships between objects in their environment. This is especially the case in web development where there is in almost every case a blend between multiple client side and server side scripts. Failure to understand the the way browsers and servers communicate or the relationships between (X)HTML (or javascript or CSS etc) and PHP (insert alternative language here) will certainly lead to a poor or incorrect implementation. If you are an experienced programmer you probably won’t gain much from reading this, but if you are a beginner, hopefully I can provide some insight that will save you a lot of trouble. Read More

F.I.N.A.L.S.
F%*k I never actually learned s&^t.

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