Not for plumbing (although that’s a whole other story at the minute!!), but data pipes are always something that has interested me, my biggest issue I think is finding something that I would pipe together. Before I go any further I should explain what pipes are: You take data from a source (an RSS feed is normally best). You do some parsing of that data and extract some useful bits, that you then that input into another feed source. You then combine the two pieces of data to produce one RSS feed. All this in the past would have been the domain of programmers, but it appears Yahoo Pipes have made this easy, not something I’ve ever played with but… Continue reading »

No, I don’t want somebody to write them for me (although it would be very nice!), I want to speed up my development time sometimes. I get bogged down in the code and could do with sorting that problem. So I’m having a look at a few things that might help this, any advice anyone has on any them is appreciated (I’ve opened up comments, but you’ll still have to register). The Gubed PHP Debugger is Free and looks useful. dBQwikSite looks like it could spit out PHP & MySQL sites all day long, the licence is up in the $150 region, but that’s probably not out of the ballpark for what I want! Might download a trial of this… Continue reading »

Creating – yesterday, tomorrow, last month etc. in PHP time can be a little time consuming – here are some quick cut and pastes! < ? $yesterday = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d")-1,date("Y")); $today = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y")); $tomorrow = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d")+1,date("Y")); $lastmonth = mktime(0,0,0,date("m")-1,date("d"),date("Y")); $nextmonth = mktime(0,0,0,date("m")+1,date("d"),date("Y")); $lastyear = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y")-1); $nextyear = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y")+1); // The "t" below gives the number of days in a given month. $lastday = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("t"),date("Y")); $yesterday = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$yesterday); $today = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$today); $tomorrow = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$tomorrow); $lastmonth = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$lastmonth); $nextmonth = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$nextmonth); $lastyear = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$lastyear); $nextyear = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$nextyear); $lastday = strftime("%A %B %d, %Y",$lastday); echo "Yesterday was: $yesterday"; echo "Today is: $today"; echo... Continue reading »

Another piece of software I want to look at sometime!! http://www.visualwade.com/ VisualWade is a great free PHP code generator that generates web applications from design models. You will be able to design and deploy sophisticated web applications in PHP connected with relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL or ORACLE with a few mouse clicks. No longer it is necessary to program professional applications for the WEB! VisualWade generates feasible source code ready to deploy in your favorite web server. There is no need to use a propietary runtime library to execute your generated code. Take advantage of you favorite authoring tool to complete the final look and feel of your web application without getting to see a single line of source… Continue reading »

Must look at this software sometime: http://demo.sheddtech.com/ssm_1/index.php Description: SSM is a full-featured application which includes many powerful tools to allow you to easily add a complete Knowledge Base along with a robust support request or “trouble ticket” management system to your existing support services. Through SSM, users will be able to easily manage these effective systems and reduce the time and effort required in providing technical support.

function BSTCheck() { $ThisYear = (date(“Y”)); $MarStartDate = ($ThisYear.”-03-25″); $OctStartDate = ($ThisYear.”-10-25″); $MarEndDate = ($ThisYear.”-03-31″); $OctEndDate = ($ThisYear.”-10-31″); //work out the Unix timestamp for 1:00am GMT on the last Sunday of March, when BST starts while ($MarStartDate <= $MarEndDate) { $day = date(“l”, strtotime($MarStartDate)); if ($day == “Sunday”) $BSTStartDate = ($MarStartDate); $MarStartDate++; } $BSTStartDate = (date(“U”, strtotime($BSTStartDate))+(60*60)); //work out the Unix timestamp for 1:00am GMT on the last Sunday of October, when BST ends while ($OctStartDate <= $OctEndDate) { $day = date(“l”, strtotime($OctStartDate)); if ($day == “Sunday”) $BSTEndDate = ($OctStartDate); $OctStartDate++; } $BSTEndDate = (date(“U”, strtotime($BSTEndDate))+(60*60)); //Check to see if we are now in BST $now = mktime(); return (($now >= $BSTStartDate) && ($now <= $BSTEndDate)) ? TRUE : FALSE;… Continue reading »

A new European directive could put software writers at a serious risk of legal action! If the Dutch govenment get their own way at the end of their presidency over the European parliament, they will push through controversial law that the European Parliament has rejected, has little support from national governments and will leave millions of Europeans facing the possibility of court cases against them. Sadly, it’s getting little attention because it only really affect programmers: They want to patent computer programers. Bill Thompson recently said: After all, how much fuss can you generate about the Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions, and the way it amends Article 52 of the 1973 European Patent Convention? This could quite literally… Continue reading »