Archive for March, 2009
Friday, March 27th, 2009
I've added a brand new Articles section to the codeutopia.net website. Its purprose is to make it easier to find information on specific topics from the blog.
I've written a lot of posts, and it can be difficult to find interesting ones by just searching or browsing the blog archives. ...
Posted in general | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Most games on consoles are easier to play for a beginner, than their PC versions. This is due to various factors, but I think it's mostly because it's easier to get into the game on a console than installing, learning the controls and all on a PC.
Let's take a look ...
Posted in general | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible.
While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add ...
Posted in Programming | 15 Comments »
Friday, March 20th, 2009
I've previously written a post on creating a PDF generator class using Zend_Pdf, which detailed some Zend_Pdf usage and introduced a class which could be used to create PDFs easily based on an XML configuration file or such.
Zend_Pdf, while generally quite good, has one big issue: It does not support ...
Posted in Programming | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
I've been using Twitter for a while now. You can find me here.
But what about Twitter? What's it useful for? How to cope with the constant stream of mostly unimportant updates from the ton of people you follow?
Posted in Web | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 16th, 2009
In some MVC style frameworks the controller's action methods take parameters in the method signature, ie. someMethod($userId)
Zend Framework controllers do not - in ZF, you access parameters through the request object in the controller itself.
I thought it would be nice to get the parameters you want in the method, ...
Posted in Programming | 4 Comments »
Friday, March 13th, 2009
Recently in one of my freelance projects, the client needed a feature that allows them to search the database for records with a date between two specific dates.
Rather than opting for the typical three text fields + a date selector, I added a little trick to make it better...
Posted in general | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
I was recently contacted by Packt Publishing, and asked if I wanted to review a book they published - Object-Oriented JavaScript, written by Stoyan Stefanov. I hadn't reviewed books before, but I decided to give it a shot!
As stated on Packt's website, by reading the book you will learn:
Create scalable, ...
Posted in general | 7 Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2009
A relatively common task when working with forms is filling select boxes or checkbox and radiobutton lists from a database.
It's not very tricky to query a database, and fill a Zend_Form element's possible values from the resultset, but it can be quite boring and extraneous code...
We could also create an ...
Posted in Programming | 14 Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I have previously written a quick post on making files downloadable through PHP scripts. The example in the post reads the file itself into a variable, and as pointed out in the comments, it's not necessarily a very good idea especially if you deal with large files.
Recently at work, we ...
Posted in Programming | 12 Comments »
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