All in vain

Some rants about technology, PHP, people, tools, web etc from a developers perspective. Feel free to copy ideas, code or anything from here.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Spaces in file path in DOS

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At last i am able to make it work. Thanks to this blog post i am able to get some headway in the problem i was facing. Basically i was running a php script as a batch script and i was not able to make some commands work because they contained space(s) in the path. There is a switch to DIR command in DOS "/X" which tells you the short name for any directory or file name.

So instead of "C:\program files\foo\bar.exe" you can use "C:\PROGRA~1\foo\bar.exe". May be it is helpful to someone.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

I want "no training wheels" attached PHP 6

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Yeah you read that right. With some time before PHP6 comes into the fore, i want PHP6 to be a real path breaker. That means effectively no backward compatibility. PHP5 was slow in adoption just because of this reason. People knew that their applications would work on PHP5, that is why they were in no real hurry to adopt it.

I want the core developers team of PHP to really do some nice things with PHP. For noobies PHP5 should be kept. But with PHP 6 i want them to break new grounds. Like APC (Alternative PHP Cache) should be part of the standard install. I want them to incorporate consistent naming schema for at least in-built functions. That means str_replace => natsort?? kind of naming schema should be made consistent.

I want PHP6 to be more serious about security. It should have features which would make incidence of user oversight things of past. I want the in-built functions in PHP6 to raise exceptions. I want PHP6 to have variable types. I mean i declare a variable to be of type INT and i want PHP6 to raise an error if it is used in string context.

With these changes i can see PHP6 gaining the respectability it deserves. It can move to the area called enterprise platform.

Jquery('MyLife').turnAround();

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This would summarize my development endeavors in JavaScript Land. I have lately come to love Jquery. So much so anything i do with JavaScript i do it with Jquery. I have also started using the latest Jquery UI. The tabs in JUI is truly amazing and easy to setup. Check out this collection of most popular Jquery plugins.

I am hoping one day we would see one widget system similar to ExtJS but using Jquery. Anyways if you are interested in Jquery, visit the site.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

CSS framework + layout

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You have heard about development frameworks in php,python etc. Now take a look at a css framework. YAML is the new kid on the block. It comes with its own slick layout designer so that you can create your own custom layout in a jiffy.

What i like about this css framework is that it gives you a clean slate to work with. You dont have to worry about the layout not behaving in IE etc. Kudos to its developers for creating such a nice css framework.

Friday, February 01, 2008

My own google gadget

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Just a basic Finance gadget. Check it out now!!
Add to Google

Monday, January 14, 2008

Minify JS and CSS

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So you just finished working on your new shiny web 2.0 application/site. It all looks very good until you open it on your friends computer to show off your baby. Its painfully slow!!. Hmm you must be wondering why its taking so much time to load.

The answer may be revealed to you once you see the source of your page. Its all good and dandy that you are using the "mini" version of Javascript frameworks like prototype, jquery, YUI etc. Whats probably slowing down your page is the sheer number of JS and CSS files you are loading on your page.

To mitigate the impact of so many files being loaded in your page you can use this novel idea. Look at this URL for more info. http://code.google.com/p/minify/ Minify.


What minif does is that it lets you load multiple JS and CSS files with one single call. It even caches the file generated so that subsequent requests don't have the overhead of "php" processing. I had some spectacular results with this approach where the sheer number of requests was taking a toll on the page.