The first day of talks is now over, and all in all I found it quite informative. so what did I learn?
Right now I’m sitting at a table with the likes of Cal Evans, Ben Ramsey, Sara Goleman, and Derick Rethans – all big players in the PHP world. And here I am, lowly ol’ me who does a bit of PHP at work. Wow. I feel a little starstruck (in a geeky kinda way), I have to admit!
OK, to be honest, I’m not saying anything, but, hey! I’m here. It’s a start. 
Today I’m flying to Atlanta for the php|works conference. I am really looking forward to this as there seem to be quite a number of good talks – so many, in fact, that I had a hard time deciding which tracks to attend.
As part of this conference package I also had the opportunity to do the Professional PHP online course run by php|architect. I enjoyed that, and learned a fair bit, so I’m hopeful for the conference. 
I’m sure you’ve seen the simple email address format validation function; they’re usually a simple regular expressing that just check the address portion (the user@example.org bit). That’s really only a bit of the validation that should be done. The RFC822 specs detail that the format of email addresses can be much larger, for example, it could be something like “Andrew Collington & Co.” <a.collington@example.org>, and, of course, the simple regex on that would fail. But even a check on the address format isn’t often enough… The user could enter a correctly formatted email address but simply have mis-spelled the address… they may accidentally type in user@yahooo.com, or user@hitmail.co.uk rather than hotmail.co.uk, and things like that. In which case you may want to check the MX and/or A record to see if its a valid domain. And whilst you’re doing that, why not check to see if it’s a commonly used email host that maybe they’ve typed in wrong?
So here is a class that will allow you to do all that in one easy method call:
Continue reading ‘Robust email address validator – with address suggestions!’
Today I was working on some sql for Oracle and connecting to the database with the PHP4 OCI extension. I’ve done this many times before, but today ran in to a little oddity that I thought was worth mentioning (mainly so I don’t forget and fall in to the trap again!)…
So there you are nicely tagging your project in Subversion, but for some reason you need to get a list of all the tags being used… That situation came up for me today. I thought it was going to be some really complex way of getting the tags, involving the use of hook scripts and the like. But it turns out that with some command line goodness it’s actually much more simple. Here’s how to do it:
svnlook tree --full-paths /home/path/to/svn/project | \ egrep -a '/?tags/.+' | \ sed -re 's!.*/?tags/([^/]*).*!\1!' | \ sort -u
Building a set of select lists that are dependant of each other can be a daunting task, but for a simple two-level list – in that what you select from one drop-down will changing what’s displayed in one or more other drop-downs – is actually quite easy thanks to Zend Frameworks and Prototype, both of which support Json.
Continue reading ‘Easy chained select lists using Zend Framework and Prototype’
Create a random thumbnail of a video file
Looking at sites like YouTube, you may think it’s quite hard to create a lot of different thumbnails from video files, and have them from random times within that file. But, no, it’s not! As this article shows, by using the very fabulous FFmpeg library, it’s actually a very short amount of code that’s required to create all those lovely random thumbnails.
Continue reading ‘Create a random thumbnail of a video file’
Following on from the previous post, I thought it’d be nice to have the handle move on a mouse wheel. Looking around for mouse wheel integration, it seems that it’s only a short amount of code to update Prototype to use the mouse wheel. Why it’s not in the core code I don’t know, as it seems rather handy. The mouse wheel code is listed at the Prototype Event Extension article over at Ajaxian.
Yesterday I was looking at the Scriptaculous library, in particular the slider bar. I had used it once before with some success, using a graphic for the track and gripper. But that’s was boring! What I wanted was to see the bar fill up with colour when it was slid. Something like this:
I hadn’t seen anything like this around (not saying it hasn’t been done, just that I hadn’t seen it!), so after a bit of playing I found out it was actually very easy to create. And this is how I did it…
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