Jul 25

Do Web designers need a body?

I consider myself a “Web developer”, but what does that really mean nowadays? Titles in the Web are a dime-a-dozen: “designer”, “developer”, “engineer”, “creative”, “producer”, “webmaster” and many more. Whenever I respond to someone that I’m a “Web developer” they instinctively think I singularly design Web sites. But they’re wrong. So very, very wrong. I actually program more than I design these days for Centation.

Jul 20

MySQL is 24 seconds too slow

1246402800. A perfectly valid UNIX timestamp, but one that created some confusion and head scratching in our office for one of our latest internal projects. The problem came around when converting the timestamp into a MySQL date using the FROM_UNIXTIME function which produced the wrong output. The timestamp is perfectly valid, it’s the timestamp for 1st June 2009, 00:00:00 (check it, if you don’t believe me).

Jul 12

PHP __auoload

PHP5 reared it’s head mid 2004, 5 long years ago and all PHP developers rejoiced. Especially me. It gave us lots of new shiny tools to play with, including the obvious improved OO support and my particular favourite: the __autoload function. For all you Java developers out there you know that you never have to include or require files, the Java language instinctively knows where to find them thanks to the…

Jul 4

A new beginning

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times. But it’s finally here. My new personal blog. Its predecessor was built on a system I constructed myself back in 2007—which is old in Web years. I started with good intentions of continuing to develop it and adding the features it needed. However as I grew busier and busier with Centation I just couldn’t spare the time.