This website recently got a major rebuild; if you're missing something, let Lorna know.

    Blog


  1. 5 Ways to Make Friends at a Technical Conference


    These are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.

    Take an extension cable

    Conferences are notorious for having too few and too short power leads, and everyone needs to recharge laptops, especially in hands-on sessions like tutorial day. Having an extension cable will …

    Read more

  2. PHP 5.3 Feature: Late Static Binding


    With the release of PHP 5.3 comes the functionality "late static binding", a feature which I've been impatient to see for quite some time! This is something a lot of developers have been puzzled by in earlier versions of PHP 5, probably without being aware it had a name …

    Read more

  3. PHPUnit with Zend_Controller_Action_Helper


    I'm currently working on a REST service built in Zend Framework and I ran into problems very quickly - when I tried to write the first unit test for the first action in fact! PHPUnit was just dying when I asked it to dispatch() any URL which didn't return HTML, it …

    Read more

  4. Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Aspire One


    A while ago, actually quite a while ago in May, I put the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope onto my lovely blue Acer Aspire One netbook.

    The way this works is that on another machine (or I guess on an existing OS on the netbook …

    Read more

  5. PUTting data fields with PHP cURL


    This is a little post about how to PUT multiple data fields using the PHP cURL extension. Why I wanted to do this in the first place is beyond the scope of this post, since its quite a long story. The curl command line allows data fields to be sent …

    Read more

  6. New Bedroom Curtains


    This weekend I took some time to make some curtains for the bedroom. Since we bought the house we've had some rather unattractive and slightly broken metal blinds. The room was otherwise OK though and we just kind of moved into it and worked on the rest of the house …

    Read more

  7. Presenting with a Netbook


    I've been giving a few talks in the last few months and I'm increasingly realising that although I love my thinkpad, its overkill for anything where I don't really need the hardware, or where I don't want to be carrying a full-size laptop all day. So I'm increasingly taking just …

    Read more

  8. PHPNW: Site, Tickets and CfP


    The date for PHPNW was announced a few weeks ago as Saturday 10th October 2009, and now we've got all the official bits and bobs to go with it! In outline:

    The website: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk

    Tickets: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/register. Early bird pricing until September …

    Read more

  9. Status Codes for Web Services


    This the last entry in a mini series on points to consider when designing and building web services. So far there have been posts on error feedback for web services, auth mechanisms for web services, saving state in web services and using version parameters with web services.

    Unlike the other …

    Read more

  10. Version Parameters for Web Services


    This is a mini series on points to consider when designing and building web services. So far there have been posts on error feedback for web services, auth mechanisms for web services and saving state in web services.

    When designing a service API, there are lots of things you can …

    Read more

  11. Saving State in a Web Service


    This is a mini series on points to consider when designing and building web services. So far there have been posts on error feedback for web services and auth mechanisms for web services.

    Web services, by their very natures, are stateless, and this is no different to any other web …

    Read more

  12. Memcache Follow-Up Article on Techportal


    Today techportal published a new article of mine on their site - New Memcached Extension for PHP. Its a sequel to the article I wrote for them earlier in the year entitled Getting Started with Memcache. At the same time I wrote that first article, Andrei Zmievski released a new extension …

    Read more

52 of 89