code & rock

It’s weird isn’t it? You buy a few nice new shiny cams (or tech friends etc) and you can’t wait until you get out on some nice rock to use them and get rid of that never been used look! After a few trips your cams are looking a bit more used and hence you have entered the sweet spot. The sweet spot consists of when your cams are nearly new but don’t look it thus giving you the assurance of climbing with rock solid cams (providing you place them correctly) but not having that new noob look about them.

So you continue to climb with your cams and because you aren’t just a fair weather climber some of these trips are climbing in… absolute sh**t storms! You return from your most recent trip and notice that the action on a cam or two isn’t exactly what you’d call smooth and then you notice one where the units aren’t even snapping back after you pull them.

Now is the time to clean your cams!

This is the scenario I found myself in recently. At the beginning of 2012 I had a check over all my climbing gear and noticed that a few of my older DMM 4CUs weren’t operating as smoothly as I would like and one was even sticking. If a cam is sticking like this do not use it to climb with. I hope it’s obvious why.

I thought I’d put up a quick blog post detailing what I did to get all my cams running smoothly (mostly) once again.

The problem

Here’s a video of a stuck cam before I fixed it. It demonstrates one of the issues where cam lube can help. You certainly wouldn’t want this happening while your hanging from a few finger pumping out on real rock.

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I normally don’t like to post about things such as this as in the grand scheme of things they aren’t very interesting. However I’ve been bugged by the terrible interface for iGoogle for ages now. The interface nearly made me move to competing services so now that I can see the new interface for it I am a very happy man.

iGoogle is where I start most of my browsing sessions. It lets me see my email, RSS and calendar feeds all at a glance on one page. It’s a great little productivity booster for me. If you don’t already use a start page I would still recommend using one even though some opinion nowadays is less favourable towards them.

Anyway here’s two screenshots of the new interface. Judge for yourself. Give the images a click to see them full size.

The Good

Not too long ago I was developing a website for a pretty high profile technology conference. Of course it was being built with HTML5 and all that good stuff. As I’m sure you know dear reader if you plan on using features available in modern forward looking browsers you really should provide a fall back for older (read IE) browsers that don’t support the new approaches.

Instead of me just telling you what library is best why not give it a search using a term such as ‘detect browser features‘. What comes up top? Modernizr! Honestly you really should look into reading a few review of this library.

If you are a web developer and you don’t know about or currently don’t use this library you’re really really missing out! I’ll assume you know why simply detecting the user agent of the browser and serving customised code to it is the wrong path, if not read up.

Of course if you can’t use browser detection then what is there. capability detection. Essentially this is what modernizr does. It tests the current browser for certain capabilities and then appends a class to the page’s body tag to let you test for the inclusion/exclusion of that certain feature. For example if css3 background gradients are not supported then the body tag will have a class of ‘no-cssgradients’ whereas if the browser does support it then the class will be ‘cssgradients’.

What this offers the developer is priceless. A reliable and easy to implement method to do the right thing (capability detection). No more is there an excuse for mere browser detection.

The bug!

Now the thing is I was a bit lazy one morning and instead of going to the modernizer site and downloading the most recent copy of the library I simply grabbed one that I had already downloaded not too long ago. That was my mistake!

The version I was using was 2.0. Here’s the thing. Version 2.0 has a bug in it that causes IE7 to not visually display the webpage. It will either be white or the previous page displayed. If you view the source of the page it’s all present. This had me scratching my head a bit as well as unleashing a torrent of unsavoury terms at the test PC running IE7.

After trying a few investigatory things to prod the page and try and direct my search in the right direction (try searching Google for ‘blank webpage’!) I eventually thought about Modernizr. Not for any particular reason, it’s just that when you don’t have a clear idea of what is causing a problem the mind tends to wonder and come up with solutions.

So I head to Google and narrow my search down to focus on Modernizr issues, sure enough after opening and closing a few tabs I hit on this page – https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/issues/296.

The takeaway

The takeaway from this little article is to keep on top of new releases of libraries you use on your sites. I learnt my lesson. I saved 5 minutes but ended up loosing an hour or two. Learn from my mistake. Oh and if you happen to be using modernizr well done but make sure if it’s version 2 you update it!

If you happen to know of any other interesting bugs with modernizr do let me know. I hope this article can help someone in the future.

I feel I’m required to start by saying that I am no expert on the media industry and it’s machinations, well no more so than anyone else in the tech sector who have watched and indeed continue to watch the struggling fits of an industry trying desperately to (and who I sincerely hope do) adapt to this new(ish) digital world.

I was planning on going through the points Schmidt discusses one by one and giving my own opinion on them, however sense I mostly agree with what he has to say I don’t think it would make an interesting post to read so instead I’ve decided to take the easy way out simply embed it below.

Do have a watch as it’s really quite good. It start’s at roughly 36 minutes in and goes to the very end. Of course don’t forget to let us know what you think of Schmidt’s speech in the comment.

I recently met up with a few good friends from back home in Northern Ireland for a stag do in Liverpool and got talking to a particular friend who’s also a web developer. The conversation eventually turned to shop talk which while including many things got me musing on one topic in particular, PHP frameworks. It got thinking of my framework of choice and more generally the emergence and increasing popularity of frameworks within the industry on my drive back home. Is this reliance on frameworks good or bad? Does one miss out on anything by using a framework? Are they really all they’re cracked up to be?

I don’t intend this to be a long article. In fact I don’t intend this to even be an article that has a particular purpose, say to sway your opinion on anything in particular. Instead I merely wish to discuss how I view the current crop of frameworks and when the right time to use one is, that is if there is a right time.

So let me kick of the meat of the discussion with the question ‘Is a PHP framework a net benefit to the developer who chooses to use one’? I’ll do my best to explain why I think the answer is a resounding yes, albeit with a caveat or two.

As with anything there are advantages and disadvantages. Trade off’s which you have to decide are worth it or not. As I’m feeling in an optimistic mood tonight, most likely due to the choc fudge cake and ice cream I’ve just indulged in I will begin with the advantages.

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Boom! Not to steal Steve Jobs’ catchphrase but that does sum up how I felt when I came back after lunch to launch Google reader and see 10 articles stating Google just spent a whopping 12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility. Motorola Mobility is the phone hardware division of Motorola. Essentially it is what everyone thinks of when you say Motorola.

To put this deal into perspective the last major deal that Google made was to acquire DoubleClick in 2007 and that was for the grand sum of 3.1 billion. That deal turned out to be excellent value for Google. DoubleClick ad exchange eventually became Google ad manager and allowed Google a massive leap up into the display advertising game. It’s interesting that Microsoft was also interested in DoubleClick back then and they were reportedly interested in at least acquiring Motorola’s patents. Burned twice by Google in two very large acquisition attempts.

The question everyone is scrambling to answer is will the Motorola deal be as big or bigger success as DoubleClick or fall flat on it’s face.

Here’s my take on what the deal’s about.

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You will have to forgive me this opening paragraph dear reader for its self congratulatory tone. You see back in university roughly 7 years ago now I approached a point where I had to decide whether or not to truly throw myself into acquiring a deep understanding of Abobe Flash and make the bet that it would be time well invested in respect of being able to get a good job and progress in my career. The issue I had was that I never felt ‘right’ in Flash. I understand it’s benefits, and I’m not one to suggest it doesn’t have some advantages. The problem was I never thought of it as being the future. I went back and forth internally on whether to become and pitch myself as a Flash developer. One day I may have seen a cool Flash site and thought let’s do it while the next day I was back to worrying about the plug-ins long term viability. Anyway not to bore you any longer than necessary I eventually decided to focus on becoming a web developer with a focus on open and standards compliant technologies.

I’m ecstatic to say that my analysis and choice were bang on! With this decision myself and all others who agreed with me managed to hit the ball out of the park. Of course to anyone watching the industry this is old news. Some would say that Adobe Flash was ‘dead’ the minute the iPhone caught on. Personally I hate the tendency of recent articles to brand things as dead and pitch rival approaches to problems in the technology sector as a ‘there can be only one’ fight, though minus the swords and beheadings!

What I believe is that Flash isn’t necessarily dead but rather becoming a more niche solution to the problems broached in our industry. Eventually I think it may disappear into obscurity but that day is many years away Consider for a minute the sheer penetration Flash has as a plugin and how many sites currently use it and continue to do so.

So why write this article now? In essence because I believe we have reached a sort off critical mass with HTML5.

A quick note before I begin. When I say HTML5 I include in that statement a number of technologies such as CSS3, Javascript, SVG and WebGL in addition to the actual HTML5 markup.

In no particular order then let me sum up my reasoning.

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For a few hours yesterday I was driven mad by not being able to get a simple system command to run at all. Let me quickly detail what it was that threatened to drive me round the bend.

The database powering a high traffic site we developed for a client had become too big to be backed up using the standard PHP method. In my case I was using Codeigniters database backup utility. All this does is put a nice wrapper around the standard approach. As an aside if you haven’t looked into Codeigniter I would recommend you do so. Compared to the other frameworks available it is one of the fastest (Cake coming in the slowest) and easiest to get going with. Escpecially in it’s 2.0 version rev where it dropped it’s support for PHP4 (finally!) it is I think a brilliant choice to build your web sites/applications on. Of course the other good approach being WordPress.

Anyway back to the tip! If (when?) your database becomes too large to backup using PHP you have to use another approach. Luckily MySQL has a backup program built into it. You can access it via the shell. It’s called ‘mysqldump’. It isn’t bothered by the restrictions that bug PHP such as a scripts memory limit or max execution time. Because of this it can backup large databases. Now to be clear the database wasn’t massive. I’m not talking terabytes but merely a few hundred megabytes.

The first and most common command that most tutorials/troubleshooting guides show is something similar to this:

$result = system('mysqldump -hhost -uuser -ppass database_name > '.$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/backups/backup.sql');

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I rarely say this outright as I believe most things in life are not black and white but… social scientist Sue Rabbitt Roff from the University of Dundee you are utterly wrong!

If you haven’t yet heard about Sue’s views on why people should be able to sell an organ I suggest you read up on it. You can take your pick of news sources or go for the mail online one which get’s the gist of the story across.

What’s wrong with the argument exactly? Most pressingly the fact that she is condoning financial motivation as a valid motive for a person coming to the decision to give an organ away. Coming to such an important decision should be powered by a deep desire to help someone. A person should feel it deep within them. It’s hard to quantify but the way I like to think of it (and this applies to any major decision in my life) is that when you think of the decision you’ve made that you feel nothing but a deep comfortable calm inside your heart and mind. No nagging doubts and a certainty that in many years time it will remain so.

Money doesn’t factor into any part of the above process and if it’s allowed to be used as a primary motivator of the decision it will almost certainly be followed by regret or at the very least a nagging doubt over the decision for the rest of a person’s life.

The other thing that rankles me with her suggestion is why people need the money. She says they could pay off their student loans with it! Well I’ve already made my opinion clear on that matter so I’ll not go over it again. Suffice to say people should not have to consider selling their organs to finance their education. How about we retroactively take an organ from all the politicians that got a completely free education!

As always I love to hear disagreements (and agreements).

I’m 25 years young. Finished high school, college and university and am currently working. I have just finished paying of my University student loan which was a measly £2,000. Recently the office got talking about the new student loan system coming into force for students who start their course in 2012. The more I look into it the more mind boggling I find the debt they will be coming out with.

As the kids say ‘lets’s break it down man’. Here’s what we think the major typical costs for a student starting in 2012 will be.

• £9,000 per year course fee
• £3,000 – £4,000 per year for cost of living
• £3,690 average cost of accommodation (£90 per week for 41 weeks)

Lets start doing our sums. I’ll base the figures on a typical 4 year university course.

• £36,000 total course fees
• £14,000 total cost of living (based on £3,500 per year)
• £14,760 total cost of living

This gives us a grand total of – £64,760!

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