sam keen's corner of the web

Monthly Archives: January, 2007

Example Development Environment

This is an outline of a development architecture I put together for a client.
A example software development environment utilizing, Linux, Apache, PHP, and Subversion.
No testing environment is shown here but it is easily added by cloning the dev env.

Outline of the Sandbox Environment

The Development Environment

The Production Environment

PHP Data Objects

DataObject is a design pattern that incapsualtes the database with a simple to use interface. This alows the Controller to interact with the database layer in an SQL’less way. To acomplish this you build a base DataObject abstract class that implements the base functionality and sets up the interface for a Data Object. Then for [...]

Very Simple Captcha

Very Simple Captcha or “Poor Man’s Captcha”

This is a very simple way to implement a Captcha concept. It is less effective than say a generated on the fly image (using something like GD), but it is far better than using nothing at all.
Summary of Usage
In the PHP scripts that controls a page that requires a [...]

Drupal Caching

Drupal 5.0 With caching off
ab -c100 -n10 http://example.com/index.phpThis is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev apache-2.0Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking example.com (be patient)…..done

Server Software: Apache/2.0.59Server Hostname: example.comServer Port: [...]

Character Encoding 101

Although the discussion of character encoding for web developers is vast, This article by Tommy Olsson on Sitepoint is a great starting point. It does a supurb job of explaining the basics and defining the needed terms.Another great article on encoding is over at Joel On Software

Get Lazy

After much deliberation and discussions with friends (thanks Mark), I have decided to embrace PHP5’s built in __autoload function. I have chosen a method briefly documented on phpKitchen. For those of you who do not know what PHP5 __autoload is, no worry go here for a review
The short of it is for [...]

Back to school

For those of you who are into education for the knowlege (rather than the diploma), be sure to check out MIT Opencourseware. The couse selection is imense and the course materials are thourough and well organized. You will not get any ‘official’ credit for taking these courses but you cannot beat the price.

Aeronautics [...]