wade womersley – york based software engineer
Good start: don’t use it unless you need to, there’s plenty of alternatives, e.g. DOMXML, str_replace, etc. Also PHP5+ has lots of filters for email validation and URL validation etc, function calls you can make rather than complex regular expressions. Regular expressions can slow down quickly due to back tracking, pattern complexity and long strings. … Read More “Regex-fu #PHPUK2010” »
Just picked up a nice tid-bit on creating a unique index on a two column table where the values in each column may be either way around but you only ever want one instance of the value in that row. So what this means is, inserting 2,1 and 1,2 for example would result in only … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 2 (MySQL stuff)” »
Josh began by using the dictionary definition of simplicity (as given by Wikipedia) pointing out that the word is often used as a derogatory statement. He then went onto “clarity of expression” and that striving for it while programming is something a lot of people do but never quite seem to achieve. He spoke of … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 1” »
This amazing picture of an ant holding its own bodyweight while upside down was taken by zoology specialist Dr Thomas Endlein of Cambridge University while researching creatures sticky feet. This photo snatched the guy £700 in photographic vouchers from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. His hope is studying the way ants feet self … Read More “Photo of Ant Holding 500 times its own Bodyweight” »
We are sitting on the sofa at home at the moment discussing our holiday plans for the year and I got a song in my head that I started humming. Remembering the adverts on TV where you hold your phone up to a speaker and it tells you the song, I thought there must be … Read More “Find Music by Humming – it really works! #midomi” »