Category: web development

All about building a website but the administrative/business stuff: that goes in “business and economics.”

I’m a simple guy

Because I haven’t moved in yet, there is a dearth of good books at my place. In light of that, I finally picked up a Redbook. No, I don’t mean I’m interested in how to find my inner sex goddess, I mean I wanted to see what IBM’s developer tech support has to say.

This one is called Developing PHP Applications for IBM Data Servers. And that’s a tad ironic because I’m using Oracle. As Chris is fond of saying: people are born with either an I or and O stamped on their foreheads.

I was born with “cheap ass” stamped on my forehead since I’ve tried to stick to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. But flipping through the book makes me make an observation from the cheap ass camp.

[Getting me to switch after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Clever HTTP

I was looking at FirePHP today, trying to figure out what the point is, because the screenshots they keep directing me to are a joke.

Here is a better summary:

Basically it is allows PHP scripts to send debugging (or profiling) information to Firefox’s Firebug without having the write to the page itself.

How it does this is quite clever.

[More on FirePHP after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 12

POW makes Ajaxian

Dave told me his website was getting stumbled.

The reason is he made Ajaxian:

FirefoxScreenSnapz001

Congrats. I love Ajaxian even if you have to wonder with all the Web 2.0 koolaid they drink there what’s going to happen when they have a James Jones moment.

Dave, as your first user ever, you have to convince me why I need to use it. I’m sure one of these ajaxnauts can figure out something useful to do with the extension.

[Personal stuff after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Amazon Prime a**hole

I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.

This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)

But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.

Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.

Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.

(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)

[Updates after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7

Creative abuse of the OSCON submission system

OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂

The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.

That was a challenge.

[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

On PHP Debuggers

[The views expressed in this blog are definitely my own and not those of anyone I work for, have worked for, or even get drunk with.]

I’m used to Xdebug. We use Zend Platform. Am I going to have to have a Rodney King moment?

Here is Derek’s take on it, and here is some guy from Eclipse PHP IDE’s response.

I don’t care.

I want the developers here to use the development environment they want and me to use the debugger/profiler I want. Anyone know a solution? Currently it seems that if I use Zend Platform, we have to use Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT to debug. If I use DBGp, we can use ActiveState Komodo, NuSphere PhpED, or PHPeclipse.

Am I wrong? Are there other editors that support DBGp? Which should I use (in particular I want have valgrind for profiling output and I like the built in error system in XDebug, but I haven’t had a chance to delve into Zend Platform so you can try to sell me on that).

[Other rants after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2