I am an Australian Zend certified Senior Developer at Aurion in Brisbane, Australia.
· 16 minute readI’ve finally found some time to look at my old remote control car again - I was so happy when I bought it as a kid nearly twenty years ago. I’ve still got the original nickel cadmium battery (all 1300mAh!) and charger so I charged it up expecting that there’d be little to no response from the car. Amazingly the kids and I got about 5 minutes of full throttle action out of it before it slowed to a halt.
Read On →
· 2 minute readWay back in 2007 I arrived in London, England ready to start a new chapter of my life working in the big city. I’d left a good job at a web agency in Melbourne - one of the world’s most livable cities - to experience the financial capital of Europe. It was a fantastic time and so much happened I could write a novel, but here are a few highlights. During my time in England I met my now wife and decided to move to the south coast.
Read On →
· 8 minute readI use both Vagrant and Ansible to run and provision development virtual machines for testing work locally. This provides an easy to build environment as close to production as possible that all developers can easily create from the source code repository. A simple vagrant up and the associated Ansible scripts will handle all of the configuration and package installation for the VM. This is unbelievably handy and it really helps to reduce the kind of bugs that are difficult to track down - “it works on my machine!” Shared configuration Recently, though I got to thinking about how the configuration is bound up in a rather unhelpful Vagrantfile, which is a Ruby script underneath in reality.
Read On →
· 2 minute readScrapes can be useful to take static backups of websites or to catalogue a site before a rebuild. If you do online courses then it can also be useful to have as much of the course material as possible locally. Another use is to download HTML only ebooks for offline reading. There are two ways that I generally do this - one on the command line with wget and another through the GUI with httrack.
Read On →
· 8 minute readNot wanting to repeat myself I have written a small bash script to handle the parallel processing of the post images for this site. This involves resizing, cropping and then compressing the images ready for the web. Currently the script supports both JPEG and PNG images for all these operations. On top of this I wanted to ensure that only recently added or modified images would be processed rather than processing the entire folder again.
Read On →
· 2 minute readWith the release of PHP 5.3 namespaces became a reality in PHP and they’ve made so much possible including better autoloading. The majority of the time you’ll be used to seeing them at the top of each class file. They can also be used to namespace functions however. A standard PHP namespace declaration would look similar to the following at the top of a class file. namespace Treffynnon\Html; class Tag { // ...
Read On →
· 2 minute readWhen you’re working in a team you need ways to easily share and denote good style and taste. This is true of your primary programming language with PEP8 for Python and PSRs 1 & 2 for PHP being well known. There is probably even a style guide for HTML and CSS set out at your company. So why should SQL miss out on the party? I have written a style guide for SQL to promote a consistent code style ensuring legible and maintainable projects - sqlstyle.guide.
Read On →
· 4 minute readI wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian you can use the repositories.
Read On →
· 5 minute readLocalising sites can be a chore, but PHP has the venerable setlocale() to use system locales. These are like templates or profiles that describe how various types of data should be displayed. Should a price have a comma or point to indicate the decimals? When printing a date should PHP output Monday or Montag? All of these considerations are locale specific and they map to a geographical area. Various cultures have their own standards for displaying this kind of information not to mention different languages to accommodate.
Read On →
· 8 minute readOnce in a while you come across situations where someone wants to know what a server can do or how many requests it can handle under a realistic load scenario. It could simply be that you want to hit a large selection of sites or even that you want to simultaneously hit a number of different pages on the same site. In my case I am testing the performance of a Drupal multisite installation where one core set of code is shared by many sites on different URLs.
Read On →
· 4 minute readA little known feature of PHP’s static keyword is that it allows for memoization or function caching. This is a process whereby a functions heavy lifting can be cached so that subsequent calls are faster. It is possible to store any value in a memoized way such as arrays or even objects. This is done without any external side effects - that is to say that the code calling the function will require no changes to support memoization.
Read On →Copyright © 2003 - 2016 Simon Holywell. All rights reserved.