Archive for December, 2008

Best of 2008

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Since the year is about to end, I think now is a good time to highlight some best things of 2008

Reusable “generic” actions in Zend Framework

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

Sometimes you will need nearly the same functionality in many actions. This can lead to unnecessary code duplication if you aren't careful, and there's been a couple of occasions on #zftalk, where people have been asking for a good practice to avoid this. There are several ways to deal with this, ...

Happy holidays

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

Merry christmas to everyone, or if you don't do xmas, happy <insert your holiday's name here>! Also, here's a small challenge for you: draw santa in mspaint (or something else) - but do it with your eyes closed!

What will you do during the holidays?

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

I've been asked this a couple of times.. What will I be doing during xmas? Since the people asking that aren't exactly computer people, the usual non-nerdy answer I give out is that I'll probably take it easy and relax - you know, the usual stuff. But since this is the internet, ...

JavaScript margin/block commenting system

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

On Djangobook, they used to have this interesting commenting mechanism on their book's pages: Each paragraph in the book could have comments, by use of a JavaScript commenting system which would display the amount of comments on each paragraph when you hovered over them with the mouse. You could also click ...

The problems faced by a common model interface in frameworks

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

You sometimes see people asking why the Zend Framework (or some others) don't provide a library for the Model part in MVC. While ZF provides data access classes in the form of Zend_Db and related components, it doesn't provide any concrete examples of how you would implement a model class. ...

Packageizer is fixed

Monday, December 15th, 2008

The packageizer had some problems determining the dependencies for the newly added Zend Framework 1.7 packages, but the problem is now fixed. The packageizer source-code has also been updated with the patch.

Scraping HTML with Python

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

Have you ever had to write a script that scrapes data from an HTML page? Was the page horribly bad HTML too? If so, you probably know how annoying and time consuming it can be to write a script that reliably fetches data from such a mess. I was recently asked ...

Thoughts on unit testing and application design

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Here are some thoughts and observations regarding application design and unit testing in the quiz-project I recently wrote about. When I was writing the Amazing Programming Language Guessing Script, I didn't first write any unit tests. Partially because I just wanted to test something quickly, partially because I didn't think there ...

Programming language guessing game

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Some of you asked me about the "quiz" thing that showed up in one of the screenshots in my NetBeans review... Well, here it is: During that weekend when I was trying out NetBeans, I wrote a small Zend Framework + Doctrine application which attempts to guess a programming language ...