Tag Archives: Development

Simon Sillison posted a great article on making forms more usable. I use a few of the techniques already but I didn’t know others. A comment left on his site indicates problems with browsers other than Mozilla, so maybe it’s about time you all upgrade! 😉

There’s probably something to be said for this quote but I would hasten to add that once you start hacking I don’t think everything that’s been learnt before goes out the window!

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack. — George Carrette

Esos shows a good way of removing duplicate entries from a database table. Of course, if primary keys were used this shouldn’t happen, but doing a select distinct into another table is neat !

This post by Justin Mason is a fwd of a mail announcing the startling news that software patents are now legal in the EU. *bam* There goes Free Software in Europe! (maybe..)
UPDATE! Justin posted a follow up stating that there’s another stage to go through before it’s law in the EU. Colm replied saying it was at the “committee” stage still, and asking people to get in touch with their MEPs to reject the upcoming law!

This looks really useful. A script that’ll convert CPAN Perl modules into RPMs. Thankfully I haven’t needed to use CPAN in a while so I haven’t had to use this yet, but I will!

John points at a story about relaunching websites. I dunno, It doesn’t make sense to completely revamp your site, but it still happens. We’re in the middle of a relaunch, and while the site design is going to change, the basic contents and structure isn’t. Does that count as a redesign? Incremental changes happen all the time of course, without them the site would stagnate and glaring bugs wouldn’t be fixed!

Never trust the data entered by your users. hehe.

Simon pointed me at this document that should make for good reading tomorrow morning. zzzz. I’m off to bed, ‘night!

I’m still working away at a registration process using the MVC pattern. It’s coming along very nicely in fact! Here’s an article describing it in some depth.
I’ve hijacked the idea somewhat for my project. I have one controller, and multiple views/models. There’s one model and view for each page. The view is split between PHP code and Smarty templates. The PHP code doesn’t do much beyond assigning variables for the Smarty templates but I wouldn’t put those assign calls into the model, as then the model would have to know about Smarty. This makes it easy to figure out where something is going wrong, and where I need to _put_ code.
How many of you have “super” classes with thousands of lines of code? That sucks for maintainability.
While some of the Java examples I’ve seen redirect the browser to the new view, I simply unset the old model and view and create the new model and view. The single solitary display() call at the end of the controller takes care of displaying whatever view is active!
Must post some example PHP code later.

Looks like I’ll have to update my Install-Sendmail script again. I was sent a Polish translation last week, but the script fails in Red Hat 9 because the hash command requires different parameters now.