Computing: page 3

• Email me when the file changes January 25, 2017

  It is important to ensure that Google does not index sites whilst they are still on a staging environment, but you cannot lock it down completely - how would your clients proof it? So I run a simple global rewrite rule in Apache that redirects all requests for robots.txt to a central disallow all response. This works great and Google appears to honour the rule as one would hope. What happens though when something about that central file changes? Read more ⇒

• SQL style guide misconceptions December 9, 2016

  Many people have read, reviewed and even implemented the SQL style guide that I wrote. This is great, but there have also been a number of commonly held misconceptions or incorrect readings of the points made in the guide. I have decided to address some of the more common ones via a blog post that will, hopefully, clarify the situation. Basics A lot of people seem to have a very weird understanding of the basic terms used in the guide so here is what I mean when I say ‘Avoid’ and ‘Try’: Read more ⇒

• Quick way to create a PHP stdClass November 16, 2016

  A very short and simple trick for creating new stdClass objects without having to set every property individually. This is akin to JavaScript’s object notation, but not quite as elegant. Creating a new object in JavaScript looks like the following example. const x = { a: "test", b: "test2", c: "test3", }; With PHP it is possible to use type casting to convert a simple array into a stdClass object which gives you a similar looking syntax although there is a little more typing required. Read more ⇒

• Functional Programming in PHP Second Edition Available Now October 27, 2016

  It is with great pleasure that I announce the second edition of the Functional Programming in PHP book that I have been working on. There is twice the content of the first edition of the book as well as updates for PHP 7 and Facebook’s HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine). There are now more functional techniques and patterns included with pipelines, pattern matching and flat maps among them. I have added a section of the book dedicated to the handy syntax and functionality that HHVM can provide functional programmers with. Read more ⇒

• Importing and aliasing PHP functions October 18, 2016

  As a follow on to my short post about namespaces and functions from a year ago I thought it would be worth covering importing a specific function and aliasing functions via namespace operators too. This has been possible since PHP 5.6, but there is a nice addition in PHP 7 I’ll cover towards the end. In the previous article I demonstrated how you can namespace functions and use them, but as a refresher; you can enclose functions within a namespace just like a class. Read more ⇒

• Installing pgmodeler on Ubuntu October 18, 2016

  Pgmodeler is a handy tool for designing databases with an ERD style interface specifically aimed at the PostgreSQL community. It can come in a couple of different ways, but I am going to covering the self build process here. So if you want to learn how to build and install pgmodeler read on! To be able to build anything you’ll need to install the tools from Ubuntu’s repositories. sudo apt-get install gcc libxml2-dev postgresql The first dependency you will need to install is the from QT5 UI toolkit. Read more ⇒

• Intelligent Vagrant and Ansible files February 8, 2016

  I use both Vagrant and Ansible to run and provision development virtual machines for testing work locally. This provides an easy to build environment as close to production as possible that all developers can easily create from the source code repository. A simple vagrant up and the associated Ansible scripts will handle all of the configuration and package installation for the VM. This is unbelievably handy and it really helps to reduce the kind of bugs that are difficult to track down - “it works on my machine! Read more ⇒

• Scraping websites with wget and httrack September 5, 2015

  Scrapes can be useful to take static backups of websites or to catalogue a site before a rebuild. If you do online courses then it can also be useful to have as much of the course material as possible locally. Another use is to download HTML only ebooks for offline reading. There are two ways that I generally do this - one on the command line with wget and another through the GUI with httrack. Read more ⇒

• Crop and resize images with bash and ImageMagick August 24, 2015

  Not wanting to repeat myself I have written a small bash script to handle the parallel processing of the post images for this site. This involves resizing, cropping and then compressing the images ready for the web. Currently the script supports both JPEG and PNG images for all these operations. On top of this I wanted to ensure that only recently added or modified images would be processed rather than processing the entire folder again. Read more ⇒

• Namespace PHP functions August 10, 2015

  With the release of PHP 5.3 namespaces became a reality in PHP and they’ve made so much possible including better autoloading. The majority of the time you’ll be used to seeing them at the top of each class file. They can also be used to namespace functions however. A standard PHP namespace declaration would look similar to the following at the top of a class file. namespace Treffynnon\Html; class Tag { // . Read more ⇒