Entries from June 2006

Stupid PHP move

Date June 13, 2006

Yes, this happened awhile back, and is another shining example of why people have a hard time trusting/adopting PHP as a real ‘enterprise’ language.
From http://php.net/strip_tags:
Since PHP 4.3.0, HTML comments are also stripped. This is hardcoded and can not be changed with allowable_tags.
So, in other words, behaviour that existed [...]

Google Earth beta for Linux

Date June 12, 2006

I was pleasantly surprised to just learn that there’s a beta of Google Earth v4 for Linux.  I’ve heard some good stuff about Google Earth, and saw it running on a Windows machine once, but had never installed it (even when using a Windows machine).  So, I thought I’d give it a try out today.  [...]

Mixed Apple experience

Date June 11, 2006

My wife is a rather committed Apple fan.  We’ve owned an emac for almost 3 years, and have an iPod each.  We’re not rabid ‘top of the line, gotta have it now’ people, but she does appreciate the Apple experience.  We went to the local Apple store here and did explain that we have an [...]

Transaction patterns - a new vocabulary

Date June 9, 2006

Just as ‘design patterns’ have given architects and developers a common way to describe certain types of software problems, Tony Marston is now challenging the community to begin thinking in transaction patterns. The title of his paper is somewhat overstated (as he later admits in his conclusion) but the premise is certainly on target. [...]

Another reason I don’t like Smarty - part 2

Date June 8, 2006

There’s no way to run smarty files through a tool to beautify them.  There are beautifiers for PHP and cleaning/reformatting tools for pure HTML, but as far as I can tell, nothing for Smarty.  Having to live with someone else’s Smarty files that are inconsistent makes it difficult to read through them.  If someone *has* [...]

mysql full text searching presentation

Date June 7, 2006

I’m doing a small presentation for our local Mysql User Group tonight, and the topic is full text searching.  While doing a bit of research, I came across a few useful sites:

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3512461
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000576.html
http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/tutorial-ferrara1.php

The first one is an in-depth analysis of how the full-text algorithm works - definitely worth reading up on.  The other two give demonstrations [...]

Polyphasic sleep

Date June 6, 2006

I’ve been so interested in polyphasic sleep after reading Steve Pavlina’s article on his experiences.  My wife doesn’t want me to do it because, as she says, ‘You’re weird enough already!’.  I would love to have an extra few hours per day of awake time - as it is right now I feel like I [...]

blogger meetup

Date June 6, 2006

Having a good time here at the raleigh blogger meetup. I’ve met the guy behind the Citation machine site, and he was telling us his experience about recently adding google adsense to his site. Apparently the results were quite impressive.
Another guy (Wayne) just recently put up a page looking for [...]