Andy's blog o' goodness – Page 11 – php, web stuff, raspberry pi… even blacksmithing!

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...

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...

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!)…

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

Experiments/javascript/Prototype Comments: 15

June 5, 2007

Create a registration key

This simple function allows you to generate a random registration key in the format, ‘1224-54B1-7D35-5EF7’.

Code snippets/PHP Comments: 0

June 5, 2007

Validate a UK postcode

You’ve probably seen this before, if not a thousand times, but here’s a simple function to check the format of a UK postcode.

Code snippets/PHP Comments: 0