Posts Tagged code
Super Useful Web Dev Tools
Posted by Howard Yeend in Firefox, javascript, PHP, Productivity, Programs on March 17, 2010
OMG, it’s been a whole month since my last update.
I have draft posts about all kinds of Good Stuffâ„¢, but none are quite publishable yet. So today I’m just going to point you at a few great resources I use all the time while doing my web development magic:
Break out of infinite alert() popups!
Posted by Howard Yeend in Firefox, javascript on February 17, 2010
How many times have you been developing in javascript and said “I’ll just pop it in an alert”, alt-tab, refresh and then the sudden sinking feeling as you realise that you’re about to get 300 alert popups?
Damn! Now you have to sit there and press OK a bajillion times, or restart the browser – which is a pain because you’ll lose all your tabs, and more importantly you’ll lose your concentration while you load everything up again.
We’ve all been there. But recently I found a neat little trick to break out of infinite javascript alert loops in firefox:
PHP error handling
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on July 5, 2009
Does this type of error handling code look familiar?
function doFunction($var) {
if(is_numeric($var)) {
/* do some stuff*/
} else {
return -1;
}
}
BLEH. How ugly is that? There’s no indication whether -1 is actually an error or a valid return value, or what it means. And other functions might use false to indicate errors so there’s inconsistency. So I’ve written a very simple function to help you give meaningful PHP error messages.
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PHP 5.3.0 Released!
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on July 1, 2009
If you’re still stuck in the old PHP 4 days, please please please take today’s release of PHP 5.3.0 as your cue to start learning about the wonderful world of object oriented PHP 5.
5.3.0 isn’t a hugely interesting release, but getting your PHP4 code compatible with 5 will ease the process when PHP 6 comes along. PHP6 is really where it’s at:
What’s out:
No more register_globals (finally)
No more magic_quotes (you kinda liked magic quotes? Admittedly it was handy, but when you think about it, having code that may or may not be sanitised depending on a php.ini setting is a Bad Ideaâ„¢)
No more HTTP_GET_VARS and cousins. Just change to $_GET etc and you’re fine.
What’s in:
A bunch of minor fixes aaand:
Namespaces – so we can section off bits of code properly. Woohoo! more info here.
Short post today I know, but I’ve got some real coding to do :) If you’re not doing anything better, go download PHP and have a play with it.
Backup your files in the cloud with Dropbox
Posted by Howard Yeend in Productivity, Programs, web on May 29, 2009
How does 2 gig of free online storage sound? Well you can with this really sweet application! I’ve been using it for 6 months and it’s just great to be able to “set it and forget”; once a file is in my dropbox I know I can blow up my PC and still have full backups. That’s a good feelin’ :0)
Google Images Link Improver WordPress Plugin
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP, Wordpress on May 1, 2009
Google Images Link Improver improves the way visitors find your site by redirecting hits from google images to more relevant content on your blog.
Here’s an example of how it works on an actual google images result for “earthrise”. The user clicks the following images result:
… and here’s how the clickthrough page looks:
 Before Plugin Installation |
 After Plugin Installation |
PHP ImageStringRight / Center / Italic
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on April 24, 2009
PHP’s built-in ImageString function is OK, but I often find it lacking some of the basic features you’d expect. So I’ve created ImageStringRight, ImageStringCenter, ImageStringItalic, and a few other goodies for writing text to images in PHP.
Image String Enhanced!
Demo and source code after the break!
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PHP 4/5 Image Blur
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on April 21, 2009
It’s not something that people require very often, but occasionally the need does arise and you have to ask: how do I blur an image in PHP? Here is some PHP ImageBlur code that works on PHP4 and 5.
What we end up with is a small fast function that can take a source image and create something like the following:
 No Blur |
 PHP5 ImageConvolution |
No Blur |
 PHP4 myImageBlur |
In PHP 5 you can just use ImageConvolution and the code example right out of the manual:
$gaussian = array(array(1.0, 2.0, 1.0), array(2.0, 4.0, 2.0), array(1.0, 2.0, 1.0));
ImageConvolution($image, $gaussian, 16, 0);
That’s a nice Gaussian blur in PHP5 for you. But what about your nasty old PHP4 servers? I have the answer. Actually the answer is probably “use ImageMagick and a system call”, but if you want a pure PHP/GD solution, read on.
Using a crafty mix of voodoo and ImageCopyMerge, you can create a PHP 4 blur effect that is virtually identical to the PHP5 method, as you can see by comparing the results of myImageBlur with ImageConvolution above. In tests on my local server, my method takes on average 0.43 seconds to blur a 1024*768 image, while ImageConvolution takes 0.40 – so it’s basically the same, and half a second to blur a desktop sized image is pretty decent – on a live server it’ll be even faster!
There’s some more comparisons and the source code after the break:
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PHP Digital Camouflage
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on April 20, 2009
The other day I was looking at demoscene videos on youtube (do yourself a favour and watch it!) and it made me think back to my PHP image hacking days. One thing led to another and I ended up saying to my partner Linds that I’d write her a little PHP demo. 3 hours later, I had digital camo in PHP (click the images for an online demo; refresh to cycle through the different types):
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The Online Demo generates larger camo patterns and has a few other camo types; refresh it to cycle through them.
Let me know if you find a use for this code :)
After the break, I go into the detail of how the code is constructed, and you get a funky debug image too!
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3D PHP – playing with ImageCreate
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on March 19, 2009
A PHP city (it gets better after the break):
Basically I was bored one day and decided to play around with ImageCreate and ended up making this “crate” demo (click the image for some other experiments).
And then everything got a bit silly and I made this:
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