Tierra Lab
Contributors's Archive
PHP Tip: Inline StdClass Object Creation
One of my pet peeves is that PHP does not have syntax to support inline StdClass object creation. This tip shows you how.
[Read More]MySQL Snippet: Pick a Daily Featured Item Automatically
Here is how to add a featured item on your website that changes automatically each day. For this example let’s assume you have an e-commerce site with a MySQL table called “products” that has a column called stock_count which contains the count of each product in stock. We want to feature products in stock, changing daily and also changing automatically if during the day the product goes out of stock.
[Read More]Code Snippet: Preprocessing Moveable Type import files for Wordpress
We’ve moved a couple of clients from older Moveable Type installations to Wordpress and each time Wordpress doesn’t handle the text paragraph formating from the Moveable Type import file. Here is a quick script we created to convert the BODY and EXTENDED BODY sections of the Moveable Type import file to HTML paragraph formatting.
[Read More]Processing: Merging code and design
Last week the local software developers group that I am a member of hosted a talk by Ben Fry, the co-creator of Processing. Ben holds a doctorate from the MIT Media Lab where he was a part of the Aesthetics + Computation Group. ACG’s purpose is to “…work toward the design of advanced system architectures and thought processes to enable the creation of (as yet) unimaginable forms and spaces”. In other words, very cool stuff.
[Read More]Continuous PHP Profiling
Donald Knuth, the demi-god of computer science, famously once said “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Though often quoted it is easy to misunderstand what Knuth was saying – its not that you should ignore performance until the project is complete, tacking on an “optimize code” task at the end, rather it’s that your design should not be complicated by performance considerations from the start.
[Read More]Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
I just finished a great book last night, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, and I thought I would write a little review while it is still fresh in my mind.
[Read More]New Years Habits
Looking for a quick and easy way to track all those New Year resolutions? Habits, an iPhone app from Lou Franco, lets you enter a set of recurring tasks and set how often you want to see them pop up in your to do list. It’s a great way to help those resolutions last past the second week on January.
[Read More]Code Snippet: Trimming text on word boundaries in PHP
I thought I’d share a code snippet that I wrote this morning to truncate long news titles that appear on the homepage of WNET’s worldfocus.org site. The code truncates on the nearest word boundary if the text is longer than the requested maximum length.
[Read More]A Simple Desk Hack
As a developer I spend most of my day at my desk, designing, coding, emailing and talking on the phone. I work from home on a huge 70’s “executive” desk I dragged home from a Freecycle posting and which, after lugging it up to the second floor of my house, I believe is lined with lead and so as a bonus my legs are shielded from cosmic rays It’s main feature, other than Supervision protection, is a 5′x3′ flat desktop that easily supports my four monitor/three machine setup.
[Read More]Tool of the Day: Synergy
I’m a big evangelist for Synergy, a cross-platform software based keyboard and mouse switch. I use three computers throughout the day – a Vista laptop for email and Twitter, a Mac Mini for testing on native Safari and synching my iPod Touch and a Vista desktop with two large monitors for development. Without Synergy I’d be swimming in keyboards and mice.
[Read More]Copyright © 2010 Tierra Innovation, Inc.
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