Wednesday, 13th August 2003
PHP Library Tips
Kellan Elliott-McCrea (author of the popular Magpie RSS parser): A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP. Kellan makes the interesting observation that PHP encourages a culture in which most development occurs in the context of either full applications or C extensions, with few people devoting themselves to releasing libraries.
[... 56 words]Note to self
When writing an XML parsing class in PHP, don’t forget the ampersands in the following code snippet:
[... 85 words]Python never copies implicitly
10 Python pitfalls by Hans Novak (via Simon Brunning) is essential reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in Python. Python never copies implicitly
. If only that were true of PHP.
Artificial Diamonds
Wired: The New Diamond Age. Two companies in the US have perfected techniques for creating cheap artificial diamonds, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The story of how they got there is riveting—retired army generals purchasing cold war soviet technology, veiled death threats to scientists at conferences and best of all, a very real threat to the De Beers diamond cartel / monopoly.
[... 137 words]On blogging technique and better tabbed browsing
I’m addicted to tabs. Several times a day, I scan down my blogroll looking for blogs that have updated since I last checked, then middle click each one to open it up in a new tab in the background. I then work my way through each one, reading the earlier ones while the later ones are still loading (tabbed browsing makes being stuck on a modem a lot less painful). If I see anything interesting linked to from a blog entry I’m reading, I’ll middle click that as well. Within a few short minutes I’ll have so many tabs open I’ll be running out of space in my tab bar.
[... 399 words]