All entries of my technical and business blog

One of the biggest time wasters I deal with is parsing out static web designs given to me by designers. They don’t know programming, so they design it with static HTML in mind. Even if you’re using a tool like dreamweaver, updating static pages can be a hassle. Then, a lot of times, they have to remove their ’lorem ipsum’ text and send it to me - and then I continue to chop it up. Now, I’m talking about smaller 5 to 10 page sites here, not huge sites like JEMDiary or something. However, that idea birthed…

A while ago, I decided that I needed to have a better backup solution for my file server. After doing some research on various systems, I let my inner programmer take over - in addition to my desire to NEVER LOSE ANYTHING - and I defaulted to use SVN.

In this post, I’m going to cover what a System Architect/Analyst (SA from now on) is and why you need one.

PHP’s heredoc - good or bad? All silly titles aside, let’s check out some points.

At superdev, we have a distribution of a gentoo image made with vmware workstation. This works fine in vmware player - but not the free vmware server - and I wanted to have vmware server running so I could have more than one server running on my windows laptop. Well, there are two small simple edits I had to do - and it was all good.

If you’ve ever worked with a customer’s CMS pages and heard the term “Oh but I want some images underneath the links” - you need this script. Whether your using old style tables or the coolest CSS tricks, filling in space to the bottom of the page can be useful.

Unfortunately, at #superdev, there are times when the include_path in PHP is calculated. It is not always clear where to find a file. Other times there are just too many places to find the file. Because of this - and Eclipse PDT’s inability to find a file from an include or include_once statement when you ctrl click it, I needed to find a tool to find files fast.

There are many interpretations of MVC - there are less definitions but more implementations. I want to cover what I personally do when using PHP for MVC. I call it MVCFDH.

A useful reminder: you can make use of returning the results of comparisons for is*() functions. Let me explain that further…

Constants can be great. They can stand for things like web services keys, integers, flags, etc. Basically, anything that you aren’t going to be changing in your script - and most likely things that don’t change much outside of the script either. However, I’ve seen people use them in the global name space far too many times. A great alternative is the class constant. Let’s check out some examples: