mrclay.rg

Customizing a Zend Navigation Menu

Zend Navigation has a menu helper class that can output a basic nested UL menu. You can set id/class attributes on the A elements, and it adds an “active” classname to A elements in the active branch, but customizing the markup beyond that gets complicated.

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Today’s kids have a few things left to tinker with

[Drafts clean out. This one from January] Mark Pilgrim laments the slow eradication of Apple products to which the owner has full (and gratis) software/hardware access. Anyone can develop [for the iPad]! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a

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Imagining Better E-mail

[Sitting in my drafts folder since August... Why not] For building a clean and complete “paper trail” within a single message (which is irrefutably valuable in situations), top posting works great. For responding to individual sections, inline reply is great. Combining the two is generally a mess. In both top/inline models the manual management of

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Perks of Life in the Kingdom of Nouns

Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns is one of Steve Yegge’s most entertaining posts about the verbosity and noun-centricity of Java (and other strongly typed languages without first-class functions). His post paints a picture of life outside JavaLand, where things are simpler and more straightforward: There’s rarely any need in these kingdoms to create wrapper

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A Zend Framework App in a Single File

Most PHP micro-frameworks I’ve reviewed have some major cons: incomplete namespacing of functions/classes/global vars; doing too much/little; being under-tested; and the worst: forcing a unique (and usually under-documented) code structure that will make it difficult to “graduate” an app into a more full-featured framework. It also seems silly to rely on “micro-optimized” code if performance

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Minify update

Minify 2.1.4 is approaching release and will have several long-awaited features and hopefully easier configuration. Looking towards version 2.2/3(?), I recently committed the beginnings of a complete refactoring of the Minify API. The goal is to have a more flexible and extensible design that can include plugins like LESS and maybe handle @imports on the

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Elgg Core Proposal: New Table “entity_list_items”

[This proposal has been superseded with ElggCollection.] As of Elgg 1.7.4 there’s no way to specify a specific list or ordering of entities for use in an elgg_get_entities query. E.g. one might want to implement: A “featured items” list for a group or user widget. On a group page this could be implemented in “left”

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Netscape 4 Source Code Hell

Netscape Navigator 4 was—very briefly—the best browser available, then the best available on certain platforms, then finally for the longest time a terrible wreck of a browser hated by every web developer. So it’s nice to see NN4′s programmers suffered working on it, because tons of people suffered working around it.

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Programmer Steve Yegge’s return to blogging does not disappoint

His latest: Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

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MVC: M != the Database

Great article on the misunderstood scope of the “Model” in the Model-View-Controller architecture. The takehome: Models are commonly thought of as wrappers for database access/stored objects, but application state and business logic need to go in them, too. Otherwise you get bloated controller and/or views that clumsily try to take care of these concerns. Earlier

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Google’s School for Hackers

Google is offering programmers their own personal sandbox application—called Jarlsburg—and hints of how to exploit the common vulnerabilities purposefully left in it. Although Google is basically walking folks through how to attack apps, publicizing this info is a necessary evil in order to build safer programmers. We have to start thinking of each line of

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Patent Absurdity

Don’t miss Patent Absurdity, a free half-hour documentary that “explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy.” When you open the page, the embedded video begins without human interaction, a violation of an Eolas

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Elgg, ElggChat, and Greener HTTP Polling

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins. On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of

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It could always be worse

OccasionallyVery infrequently, with help from my caffeine addiction and Intense Focus On Writing Awesome Code For Employers Who May Read This, empty Coke Zero cans will slowly accumulate in my vicinity. I couldn’t say how many. In the worst of times enough to not want to know how many. This morning I stumbled across a

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We need a distributed social networking protocol…Could Opera Unite be a key?

(Written July 2007) The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or

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Miško Hevery Programming Talks

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot

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Human cycles not wasted

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses,

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Spore

This game is all about scale. Think “The Sims” from the molecular level to the galactic with everything in between. At least watch long enough to see your animal doin’ it (soft jazz with sax helps set the mood). As a programmer, this thing makes my greatest accomplishments feel like Pong.

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Subversioning

I’ve been hearing great things about source control for awhile so I dug in and installed Subversion using this new tutorial. While you can interact with the svn server from the command-line, the TortoiseSVN Windows shell extension makes managing imports, updates and commits as simple as a right click. My first project contains all the

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Freenet overview

I was telling a friend about the Free Network Project the other day, which I’d read about a few years ago. I still haven’t tried it, but after refreshing my knowledge on it, here’s a little overview. A primer “Freenet” is basically a completely decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer internet. It has files, websites, hyperlinks, etc.

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