September 13, 2007 php|works day 1 The first day of talks is now over, and all in all I found it quite informative. so what did I learn? Categories PHP/works07 Comments: 0
September 12, 2007 Is this what being starstruck feels like? 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... Categories General/PHP/works07 Comments: 2
September 11, 2007 php|works 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... Categories General/PHP/works07 Comments: 0
August 30, 2007 Robust email address validator – with address suggestions! 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... Categories Code snippets/PHP Comments: 3
August 22, 2007 Oracle extension oddity 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!)… Categories Databases/PHP Comments: 0
August 14, 2007 Getting a list of project tags from Subversion 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... Categories Code snippets/Subversion Comments: 2
August 13, 2007 Easy chained select lists using Zend Framework and Prototype 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. Categories javascript/PHP/Prototype/Zend Framework Comment: 1
June 22, 2007 Create a random thumbnail of a video file 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... Categories Code snippets/PHP Comments: 16
June 15, 2007 Slider – part 2 – using a mouse wheel 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... Categories Experiments/javascript/Prototype Comments: 0
June 14, 2007 Scriptaculous slider trick 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... Categories Experiments/javascript/Prototype Comments: 15
