Category Archives: General

General

After a brief exchange of tweets with @jsmag I discover this web development ‘podcast’ : webdevgeekly.com, which appears to be run by the same people as jsmag.com. About 9 minutes into the following podcast there is a 2 minute discussion about JASPA. Conveniently just 24 hours after I rescued my site from a hardware crash.

> http://www.webdevgeekly.com/r/www.webdevgeekly.com/mp3/geekly6.mp3

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General

Disaster has struck and I have lost all my uploads on this blog. Lots of links to code examples, Flash demos and images will be broken. I may be able to restore some, but it’s going to take a lot of work, and I may as well be honest – I’m probably not going to bother.

I’ll post with the full, fascinating story of my epic fail later on. Continue reading…

General

Microsoft slurs, geeks and bean bags

On Friday I was at PHP UK Conference 2009, thanks to my boss, and a charming discount from the Facebook Developer Garage. Here’s what I thought.

The biggest presence here was undoubtedly Microsoft, followed at a distance by Adobe. Zend had a very small stand and don’t appear to have been a sponsor. I found this a little odd from the outset, but I guess it’s the big corporations that have the cash, and can ensure they don’t miss a single conference. Microsoft bribed us with the usual toys: XBoxes, the magic table thing … you know the drill. I was of course there to hear about the future of PHP, particularly PHP 6, and why we’re still just a cool as Python and Ruby.

To save you skim-readers the full breakdown, here’s my conclusion up-front: All in all a good day, but I wanted more talk of PHP’s future and could have done with less of the Adobe stuff. Most of the speakers were great, even if the subject matter missed a bit in places. Also, I know we’re trying to save the planet and everything, but could Olympia please turn the heating on next time!

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General

« part 1 « part 2

 Part 3 – Hacking the library

Code libraries essentially provide abstraction. Abstraction is good. But anyone who regularly uses third party code in their work has at some point hit the knowledge wall; that point where the abstracted nature of the library leaves you helpless in resolving an apparent problem. You have limited choices – Wait for a patch, hit the forums, or hack it yourself. The latter is probably the worst thing to do, but deadlines are deadlines. Continue reading…

General

I’ve received quite a few emails recently asking me where the code is for jParser.

I’ve had to disappoint so far, because it’s not currently available for download. My web analytics also tells me that a lot of people are finding this blog by Googling “php javascript parser“. There’s clearly a need out there, so I’d better do something about it.

I know why I want a JavaScript parser, but what kind of things might you need it for? What API features/functions would you like to see? Please post a comment and let me know. Watch this space for a release, and in the mean time here’s some food for thought …

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