Code and Whatnot

I tested Drupal and Joomla! to see how easily I could set up a CMS that had basic site & content control, image galleries, video content, blogs, and a calendar of events.
The winner: Drupal
The installation was quite painless. Finding and installing modules was also a breeze. I haven’t yet had time to screw […]

$user = new User($userID);
An oxymoron. If I have the user’s ID, it’s not likely to be a new user, is it? There’s a disconnect between the lifespan of an object and the lifespan of the entity it represents. If I’m not creating a new user, that is, the user I’m dealing with […]

I’m working on revamping PDF generation. At the moment, we’re switching to PDFlib from FPDF. Since PDFlib is licensed on a per-server basis, we’re going to have just one dedicated PDF server for the time being. I’m sending requests to the PDFlib backend using HTTP post, and I found the information I […]

My buddy Southard and I are working on a little side-project: developing web services for an electronics wholesaler. They’re not paying us in any direct way, but we’ll be the first to launch a storefront that runs directly from the web services, and we might resell our own solution as a turnkey product.
At the […]

OnForce will be sending me to San Jose around Halloween for a 4-day stint at the Zend PHP Conference. I’m really looking forward to hearing some speakers on PHP frameworks and advanced web service implementations. One of our own, Scott Mattocks, will be presenting on "Consuming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2". Scott […]

UPDATE: This software has been released.
COMET
My boss wanted to watch the Apache access logs from a web page. And top, and mytop. My first solution, which worked (and still works) great, was using a simple COMET stream for each feed. Keeping a process open in php means waiting for output, so I […]

I’m working on a project that’s requiring me to learn a little AJAX. I decided early on to use the Prototype JavaScript framework. It adds a number of things that really should be in JavaScript to begin with, and a few others that it could really use (another post?). It also speeds […]

the first thing the boss asked me was “What OS do you want?”

…logging in as someone else, or even knowing their password, is pretty sketchy

So I came up with a little scheme to generate URLs in PHP to go along with a new set of Apache mod_rewrite directives. Basically, rather than having URLs hard-coded, many of them with GET parameters attached, I needed to design a method that could first decide whether URL-rewriting is enabled (this software runs […]