Zaemis

Experience has shown me frameworks can be useful for maintaining structure in large code base developed by multiple teams. Every developer has different abilities and a framework enforces structure and consistency throughout the code. But I've not experienced saving any substantial amount of time on a PHP project because of a framework. The other day someone posted in the PHP subreddit asking for advice. He was about to begin work on a small project and wanted to know whether he should use a framework, and if so then which framework would be appropriate. I should have known better than to offer my two cents but I did anyway. Slim + NotORM + Twig is nice. If it's a simple project, you probably don't need much more than that. I'm not a fan of frameworks in the slightest but I do enjoy the aforementioned combination. They're lightweight and stay out of my way, allowing me to write my functionality. Another redditor picked up on my distaste for frameworks and ask...

Writing can be a fun and rewarding way to share your knowledge, experience, and opinions with others. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating or frustrating for some people. When I was managing editor for SitePoint's PHPMaster property, I prepared a guide to help alleviate some of the frustration and self-doubt that new writers (and even experienced writers) might experience. The guide wasn't something commissioned by SitePoint; I wrote it on my own for my authors. And though it's been about eight months since PHPMaster was absorbed into the main SitePoint site and I stepped down as managing editor, people continue to ask me about it. So, I've decided to make the guide publicly available. The New Writers Guide offers advice for finding inspiration, structuring an article's content, growing one's self-confidence, and overcoming other challenges that programming writers may face. Hopefully it'll continue to help people write awesome articles and realiz...

Developers have been using Ajax techniques for years to create dynamic web forms, but handling file uploads using Ajax was always problematic. The crux of the problem was security – it's not a good idea to allow arbitrary code access to any file it wants on a user's system so JavaScript was intentionally restricted in how it could interact with things like file input elements. Uploading a file with JavaScript was essentially a standard form submission that targeted a hidden iframe. It felt dirty but it got the job done. The W3C began work on standardizing a File API for JavaScript sometime between 2006 and 2009 and we're now at the point with browser support where developers can take advantage of it. Developers supporting web apps on IE8 and 9 still need to use iframes, but those of us targeting newer browsers can finally take a pure JavaScript approach to file uploads. And as more users migrate from IE8/9, the iframe approach will eventually be left in th...

I ran across an old question on Stack Overflow the other day in which a user was having issues maintaining his connection to MySQL from C. I left a brief answer there for anyone else who might stumble across the same problem in the future, but I felt it was worth expanding on a bit more. The error "MySQL server has gone away" means the client's connection to the MySQL server was lost. This could be because of many reasons; perhaps MySQL isn't running, perhaps there's network problems, or perhaps there was no activity after a certain amount of time and the server closed the connection. Detailed information on the error is available in the MySQL documentation. It's possible for the client to attempt to re-connect to the server when it's "gone away" although it won't try to by default. To enable the reconnecting behavior, you need to set the MYSQL_OPT_RECONNECT option to 1 using the mysql_options() function. It should be set after mysql...

Lately I've been exploring some syslog configurations and needed to generate some log messages to verify they were routed correctly. Of course doing so programmatically would provide an easy and repeatable method to generate a batch of fresh log messages whenever I needed, but because of the number of facilities and priorities defined by the syslog protocol , it made sense to write a code generator to iterate the different permutations. The following Lua script generates boilerplate C code for each of the 64 messages needed to test LOG_LOCAL 0-7 with all priorities. I chose generating the code in this manner over writing a nested facilities/priorities loop directly in C so I could easily include a textual representation of the facility and priority constants in the log message (this seemed like a cleaner solution to me than having to maintain a mapping of constants to char* strings as well). And why Lua? Well, it seemed a better idea than M4. :) #! /usr/bin/env lua local fa...

It's not as easy to set up as clicking a checkbox like Ubuntu/Gnome , but it is possible to type proper Esperanto characters in Windows using Right Alt as a modifier key. You need to create and install an alternate keyboard layout and then set the new layout active. The program Keyboard Layout Creator is used to create the layout, and is available for free from Microsoft. Once it's downloaded and installed, start the program. Navigate File > Load Existing Keyboard and then select your primary keyboard layout (standard US layout in my case). You'll use this as a base and augment it with the Esperanto characters. For each key that will should an accented character, right-click its position on the virtual keyboard and click "Properties for VK_? in all shift states". A dialog will appear in which the necessary Unicode code points can be entered. The code points for the accented Esperanto letters are shown below, as well as for the Euro and Spesmilo just fo...

Happy belated International Change-Your-Password Week! Earlier this month, thanks to the generous sponsorship by the great folks at Adobe , people all around the world were changing their passwords and tech blogs were parroting guidelines for choosing a strong password. But let’s be honest – passwords are a hassle. And, as Adobe was so kind to remind us, even the strongest unique password can be an open door if the company storing it isn’t doing so competently. As someone who is a programmer, I’m aware of several technical solutions to our password woes. As someone who suffers from cynical realism, I believe the barrier to adopting these solutions to be red-tape and human nature (ego and laziness). There’s no reason for every website to require their own login credentials when OpenID and OAuth exist. Perhaps we should increase liability for password storers and provide incentives to the crackers who hack them. A smart company would migrate to an SSO-provider to mitigate their responsi...

The following is an translation of the article I wrote for La Ondo de Esperanto to share the Urban Weekend: Syracuse event. Thank you to everyone who attended and helped make the event a success. Urban Weekend: Syracuse, the third Urban Weekend event to happen in the United States, took place during the weekend of August 31 in Syracuse, New York. Esperantists came from near and far to meet new friends and explore the city. As the main organizer, I was a bit nervous. I had never organized an Esperanto event before. Would the weather hold out? Would anyone come? Would they enjoy their time together? But indeed the weather was beautiful, and people came from Rochester NY, Virginia, and even Brazil! Everyone had fun and Urban Weekend: Syracuse was a success. A little before noon on Saturday, four of us met the city's central park and then walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch. The restaurant is popular for its beer, brewed on-site, and also for its support of Central New York...

Whether it’s twisting a function or taking advantage of side effects and flexible language constructs, it’s no secret I occasionally take joy in writing bastard PHP code. The other day I was in an evil mood and used array_reduce() to construct an array. If you’re not familiar with array_reduce() , it’s a function that iteratively reduces a given array to a single value using a callback function. For example, suppose the function array_sum() didn’t exist. We could achieve the desired functionality using array_reduce() like so: <?php $nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; $sum = array_reduce( $nums, function ($acc, $val) { return $acc + $val; }, 0 ); array_reduce() executes the callback function for each element in the array, passing to it an accumulator and the current array member. The returned value is used as the accumulator value for the next iteration. This is roughly the functional equivalent of this iterative approach: <?php $acc = 0; foreach ($nums as $val) { ...

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...