SolutionBot

Silverlight Google Static Map imaging

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:54:51 +0000

I recently had the need for printing a Google maps static image map in a Silverlight application. It needed to actually be embedded in the Silverlight app to take advantage of the Silverlight 4 printing library (a topic I will touch on later). I wrote an API to make it easy to do pretty much [...]

MYSQL date format in PHP

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:27:53 +0000

date("Y-m-d H:g:s", strtotime($data)) If that needs explanation then I cannot help you…

Don’t be a perfectionist

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:52:52 +0000

This is a great article: http://virtualrealityblog.com/random/dont-be-a-perfectionist/. The author is NOT saying to not strive for excellence rather do not try and be something that you inherently are not and will never be. If you really try to reach out for perfection you will always be disappointed. The same goes for your expectations of others. If [...]

PHP recursive includes

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:25:09 +0000

Something that can become annoying when working on a php project is all of the includes you have to do. More to the point is all of the path changes you have to do. Depending on how the project was built it could be an easy task such as ‘include(”../file.php”)’. However in the real world [...]

Motorola 2GHz Android Phone raising the stakes

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:19:28 +0000

PC World put out an article talking about the new Motorola Android phone touting a 2.4 GHZ processor. That is more than double the speed of any smart phone on the market to date. This opens the door for many possibilities of creating programs that were impossible to build up to the standard of a [...]

PDO, Where PHP is headed (PHP Data Objects)

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:55:40 +0000

PHP has typically been partnered along side of MySQL as a DBMS for a long time now. While MySQL is very powerful PHP can utilize many other DBMS's as well such as PostgresSQL, Oracle, and even Microsoft SQL. The problem is that connecting to and using the different databases means you have to load different drivers with different coding conventions. For a long time you couldn't use the same code with Microsoft SQL as you did with MySQL. Not until PDO.

Fighting for respect

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:26:22 +0000

I was recently watching a show on my netflix ‘watch instantly’ called Fight Quest. While I’m no fighter myself, I appreciate the time, effort and dedication it takes to become an expert in a fighting style. If you’ve never seen the show before it’s about 2 American expert fighters traveling all over the world learning [...]

Dr. Peter Grogono – Living with Concurrency

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:55:08 +0000

Dr. Peter Grogono – Living with Concurrency from CUSEC on Vimeo. I really enjoyed this lesson given by Dr. Grogono. Concurrency is very quickly becoming a bigger and bigger problem that must be solved as computers are being distributed with more and more cores. While at this stage of the game it is typically a problem [...]

PHP string functions

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:01:19 +0000

One of the most common things any programmer will have to do is work with strings. Whether it be validating, checking value or sanitizing. Something I find helpful is to wrap functionality in classes so I can easily reuse them later. Here are a few string functions that I’ve found helpful. Don’t hesitate to comment [...]

PHP check request method

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:14:23 +0000

Most PHP developers will check to see if a page request method is ‘POST’ by checking to see if an input exists by isset() function and if the value of that input is null or not. While this works a better method of checking the method is: // you can check: 'GET', 'HEAD', 'POST', 'PUT' if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] [...]