Author Archives: lornajane

18 Jun
2012

Bit.ly API: Bundles and Short URLs

I am a huge fan of bit.ly and use their tools for a wide variety of different things. They recently did a big relaunch with some lovely new features, which are for the most part pretty good, but which are inaccessible in places. In particular, it seems that there aren’t any short URLs for the bundles – which is annoying for me as I use that feature a lot!

To get around this, I used their API to make a page which lists my bit.ly bundles, and creates shortlinks for each of them (once you’ve created a shortlink for a given URL once, bit.ly just re-uses the same ones the next time you ask to shorten the same URL, so this is less silly than it sounds).

In case the code is helpful, I thought I’d share. Continue reading →

15 Jun
2012

LAMP and Beyond, 30th June in Manchester

Just wanted to share news of an event that I’ll be at in a couple of weeks: LAMP and Beyond. This event is organised by PHPNW and held at Madlab in Manchester on June 30th (it’s a Saturday).

The idea is that we bring together a bunch of interested developers plus a few people who know something about some of the technologies which are often used with LAMP but aren’t part of the acronym – and work on … whatever you want to work on! Between us we’ll be able to advise on choosing and implementing new technologies for solving particular problems, troubleshoot some sticky issues, and maybe whip up some new projects to give you a chance to play with something new and shiny!

If you want to join, you can get tickets (but be quick, there aren’t many left) on eventbrite: http://lampandbeyond.eventbrite.com/ – see you there!

14 Jun
2012

Proof that PHP 5.4 is Twice as Fast as PHP 5.3

So recently I was working on some benchmarks for different versions of PHP, because I heard that PHP 5.4 is “faster” and since I’m a data geek I want to know how much faster! Now, PHP 5.4 is, in general, faster than PHP 5.3 but not twice as fast* unless you pick a use case which has been particularly optimised.

My first attempt at benchmarking the two versions produced this:

graph showing php 5.4 taking half the time of php 5.3
Continue reading →

11 Jun
2012

Fetching Your Talks from the Joind.In API

I’m a regular speaker at a variety of (okay, mostly technical, so not really that varied!) events, and I submit talks to many CfPs (calls for papers). Whenever this happens, I tend to look back at whether I have any existing talks that I gave and liked and which would be a good fit. I use my joind.in speaker page for this: http://joind.in/user/view/110 as it’s simpler than dredging through my directory of talks/articles on my hard drive (this is now rather large and unmanageable!).

I’ve recently been thinking that I should also do a better job of linking through to the various talks I’m giving/have given – and at around the same time I was contacted by the good folk at mojoLive about integrating against joind.in. To cut a long story short, the joind.in API now has the functionality for users to retrieve their list of talks! Continue reading →

30 May
2012

Downloading Files from Faspex

This week, someone sent me a very large file using something called faspex. To begin with, it sent me a link to click on to download my file, but then started telling me “for best results, install a plugin”. And apparently “for best results” means “to download this file in any way”.
Continue reading →
29 May
2012

PHP Recursive Function Example: Factorial Numbers

I spun up the simplest example I could think of to illustrate a recursive function to a PHP beginner the other day, and I thought I’d share. I often don’t post really basic content but I should – people are beginning to be beginners all the time, after all!

Factorials

Factorials are a very easy maths concept. They are written like 5! and this means 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1. So 6! is 720 and 4! is 24.

6! is the same as 6 * 5!, or 6 * 5 * 4! … and this is where the recursive functions come in. Continue reading →

16 May
2012

How the Web Looks to Me

It feels like I’ve tried to field the question about how I can use the web without using a mouse (or trackpad or equivalent), without “pointing”, multiple times in the last couple of weeks. The answer is quite visual so I thought I’d share. This is how the web looks to me:

I navigate the web using the Keyboard Navigation extension in Google Chrome, which is what is adding all the little labels you see in the screenshot above. Install the extension, and press comma. The labels will pop up, then you type whichever character(s) show next to the thing you want to “click” on, and off you go.

It’s super-simple, and easier to use than I expected. Why don’t you try it out on your own sites? You’ll get a sense of how the web looks from where I’m standing :)

14 May
2012

Speaking at OSCON 2012

In July, I’m speaking at OSCON. Actually I have a few interesting speaking engagements coming up, and I haven’t got around to adding upcoming dates to my blog yet but I’ll be at phpDay in Verona next week with a talk on API Design and DPC in Amsterdam in June with a tutorial on Web Services and a talk on what OAuth is actually for.

OSCON is special because I have always wanted to go and never imagined it would actually happen. Every year I read the list of sessions from the year before, and decide that I absolutely must submit to the call for papers, regardless of how small I think my chances of being accepted are! I’ve submitted a couple of times in the past, excluding last year because I was newly freelance (OSCON does not cover any speaker expenses at all, they just give you a conference pass. That’s kind of hard going for those of us self-funding halfway across the world, and last year, I just couldn’t do it. This year I still can’t really justify it but I’m going anyway!) Continue reading →

09 May
2012

Using an Existing Vagrant Setup for PHP Development

I’ve been hearing great things about puppet, chef, vagrant, and friends for a while now, but since I work on my own I tend to either develop straight onto my ubuntu machine or grab an appropriate existing VM and use that. So I read about this brave new world of virtualisation but (as with most tools) they can be hard to introduce on your own, and I didn’t.

Then I went to WhiskyWeb, which had a hackathon. I’m unclear on exactly what happened because my attention was elsewhere but it seems like @JayTaph showed off puppet and vagrant to @deizel*, who immediately built a vagrant setup for joind.in, which is an open source project that I’m currently leading. With the shiny new technology all packaged for me, I decided it was time to take a look! Continue reading →