I’ve been developing in PHP now for 6-7 years. On the latest website I’ve been building are a few little ajax widgets for the shopping cart and such. To accomplish this, I was including a PHP file, the the ajax script was targeting a second script which includes my functions file, then includes the original file.

Today I learnt about the require_once() function in PHP. You can include your functions file wherever you like, but if it’s been called already, it gets ignored. I guess I’ve never had a need for it until now, but another one of those “d’oh” moments.

I was recently introduced to jQuery by a colleague.  5 or 6 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of using javascript to such an extent, but I’m really starting to get into it.  Being able to produce even simple effects with only a few lines of code, that work in all browsers is quite a feat these days, and anything that adds a bit of polish to my websites has got to be a good thing.

Come payday, I will be investing in this: jQuery Novice to Ninja

In December 2009, We took a trip to Sharm el Sheikh.

We borrowed a fairly cheap Fuji underwater camera from my parents, and proceeded to snap away at the main reason anyone goes to Sharm.  We were fairly pleased with the results when we got back home, but today I found a colour correction tutorial for underwater photography.  A few steps later, a Photoshop action created, and a set of photos suddenly take on a whole new life.

Try it for yourself using this guide

Check out these before and after pics:

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my, er, iMac for nearly a year now.  I started off with 64bit 7 Professional, but have recently swapped to 32bit Ultimate.  I never got any benefits of 64bit. Drivers for the iMac weren’t up to scratch, and my older versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver didn’t support it.

Since swapping to 32bit Windows 7, my machine has been absolutely faultless.  It’s fast, stable and easy to use.  A year ago, I couldn’t see a time when Windows XP wouldn’t be the norm in my place of work, however I find myself on a daily basis starting to miss features of my home machine when at work.

The new start menu with items that can be docked is great.  A feature that was introduced in Office 2007, it shows recent documents as a panel, rather than the traditional 4 or so items at the bottom of the file menu.  7 goes further and puts them into the start menu, and allows you to pin your favourite documents to the menu for quick access.  Every single day, I click the start button on my work machine, and pause on Excel waiting for the menu to appear to the right with my documents in, but alas, it never appears.

I’ve never really been a fan of the new taskbar.  My first step was to add the text labels back in, show small icons, and stop them grouping.  Since installing 32bit Ultimate, I have left it as is, and I am warming to it.  The Windows taskbar hasn’t really changed in 15 years.  That’s more than half my life, so it’s understandable it’s taking a while to get used to the change.

I genuinely now believe that Windows 7 at work would be ever so slightly more productive.  The next machine I order for myself will have Windows 7 on it.  However, when will we see an office completely away from XP?  Who knows.  5 years, 10 years, before I retire?  I wouldn’t put money on any of those, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

It was with great excitement that me and a colleague watched Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 key-note speech.

Multi-tasking in particular is a feature that adds a great deal of extra functionality to the phone.  The key-note was fantastic, and 45 minutes in, we were left chuffed to bits that we’d bought the right phone, and that it would remain the greatest phone in the world thanks to great updates like this.  Oh how wrong we were…

At around the 50 minute mark, good old Steve-o announced that the updates would only be compatible with the iPhone 3GS and later.

I have (and this has been verified by a third party), the most immaculate iPhone 3G anyone has ever seen.  It is 1 year old, and half way through a 2 year contract, this being the cheapest way to get one at the time.  Now it’s being made effectively obsolete.  No more updates will be available for it, and pretty soon, apps will start being available for iPhone OS4 only.  However, reports soon started circling of Jailbreak users successfully using OS4 on a 3G.

This isn’t the first time Apple has done this to me, in fact it isn’t the first time in the last month!

Last month, after reading on the Apple site that bootcamp 3.1 was to support 64bit Windows 7, I immediately purchased it.  It installed perfectly, but upon trying to install bootcamp from the Snow Leopard DVD, I was told that 64bit Windows wasn’t supported on this iMac.  Outraged, I searched the net and found a very easy work-around which bypasses the check and installed the bootcamp 64bit software without a hitch.  Then updated it perfectly fine from Apple software update.

Earlier on in my mac life, I wrote about Time Machine backup not allowing you to use any old network drive, but instead requiring Apple’s own network drive.  Again, a simple hack, and there’s no reason you can’t aside from Apple saying you can’t!

So, how am I supposed to react to these acts of bullying from Apple? ” Oh, ok Steve, of course I’ll go out and spend hundreds of pounds on your latest product”.  No, I’m sorry, I won’t.  In fact, I will never buy another Apple product again.

Say what you like about Bill Gates and Microsoft, but Apple are scamming even their own faithful customers.  Is it any wonder they are a minority?

I’m writing this while waiting for my Playstation 3 to perform an update.  For those of you that don’t own a PS3, it offers a feature called “install other OS”.  This has long been used for Linux by users who either wanted to use the PS3′s vast power as a nice PC, or people who wanted a better media centre.

Sony, in an update released today, have disabled this feature labelling it as a security threat.

Now I’ve never used this feature, and I’m sure Sony has its reasons, but in searching for information on the subject, came across the Playstation blog.  On here are lots of views, generally bad, but some were basically labelling all Linux users as hackers.  Now I appreciate that some people that use Linux are potentially programmers, dabblers, or general Microsoft-haters, but that’s like Jeremy Clarkson saying that all lorry drivers murder prostitutes.

The last 2 weeks have been a nightmare.

To run a successful e-commerce website, you need a good domain name, a well built site, an easy to use payment system, and an efficient pick and pack system.  Having finished 2 websites 2 weeks ago we were ready for launch.  Cue website 1.  Time to change the dns settings.  What do you mean you don’t have control of the domain name? Who does? What do you mean you haven’t had control of it for the last 2 years…

Website 1 is beginning to look like a lost cause, cue website 2.  XML files submitted to fulfillment company.  Wait a week.  What do you mean you still haven’t tested them?  We want to launch tomorrow!  Ok, we’ll launch next week then.  Monday comes.  We’ll test them today, promise.  What do you mean the technical team have all left for the day, who’s testing my files?  We’ll do it tomorrow.  Yeah, sorry, there’s something wrong and we don’t know how to fix it.  It’ll be fixed tomorrow.

Right, well we’re launching anyway.  Payment system set to live account.  Live account doesn’t work.  Phone them.  Sorry, it’ll be fixed tomorrow.  Tomorrow comes, yes, it’s fixed, test again, no it isn’t.  Phonecall number 2, fix it, yes we will, tomorrow.  This pattern continues for 4 days.

Back to website number 1, domain name is looking promising, A record has changed, website still not there.  ARGH, I gave them the wrong IP.  Grovelling email, please change it again.  Finally fixed. Test newly live site, SSL doesn’t work…

Website number 2, yes, we’ve located the problems with your files.  Sorry, our instructions are erroneous.  New files, tested.  Yes, they look fine, let’s launch on Monday!

I couldn’t help feel guilty the other day.  A colleague casually mentioned to me that he had a HP laptop.  Straight away, I asked him how old it was.  ”12 months” was the reply.  I jokingly told him that he had 2 months left on it before it committed firey suicide…

Yesterday, he came in and told me that it had indeed died.  In actual fact, it died in exactly the same way as my one did.  The wireless adapter suddenly disappeared and the laptop doesn’t seem to acknowledge that it even exists.  I gave him the link for the free repair that HP performed for me.  Still waiting to see if the laptop is in fact one of the models listed on the HP site, but I’d place a fair amount of money on it.

So, why call it a virus?  It’s blatantly a case of poorly constructed hardware!  Well unfortunately, I bought the 2 machines based on recommendation.  Similarly, my colleague recommended the laptop to all his friends.  So, there we have it, the curse of failing hardware, spread by the good intentions of happy customers early on in life, only to be become a whole web of disappointment, in say, 14 months…

Back when I first started hand coding websites, it was all about tables.  Designs were cut up into squares and laid out in rows and columns.  This was ten years ago, oh how I miss those days…

While most of the world has moved on to CSS based sites, I just can’t be doing with it.  Don’t get me wrong, I have tried to embrace some things in CSS, navigation for instance, and divs for e-commerce sites have made my life a huge amount easier, but I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Today, a colleague was having issues with a 2 column layout.  To get 2 columns to stretch to fit the content, remain the same length, and have a footer that stays underneath them requires at least 4 divs, and 3-4 lines of CSS for each one.  A table requires 6 lines.  It does the job without any hacks, and remains the same in all browsers.

This brings me on to my second issue with CSS.  Almost every CSS site I have ever seen has some degree of hack to make the site look correct in all browsers.  Is this because browser makers are being lazy, or is it that CSS based design has opened the door to slapdash ‘designers’?  Either way, why make life difficult?  If a website needs columns, why not use the method made for it?

I use a combination of the two.  I normally use a container div, with a table inside that to split it into safe, predictable columns.  Then I style my TD’s and sometimes have divs within my tables.  People from the tables camp and people from the CSS camp probably look at my code and cry, but it works.  I don’t get issues that I have to fix with a hack.  Sure, you have to think about Internet Explorer, I mean you can’t even put a body tag on a page without IE8 screwing it up, but I don’t have to deal with items being a couple of pixels out of place.

A rant of a different kind tonight…

Did you know, the first computer mouse was invented in 1964?  Sure, it wasn’t anything like what we use today, but the basic concept was there.  For some time now, mice have had 1 or 2 buttons.  Later on came the scroll wheel.  Now, with optical technology, wireless, and the addition of a few more buttons, the mouse is a technical marvel compared to the old ball mice of the 90′s.

Where is this going you might ask?

I used a classic mac in secondary school.  One of the all-in-ones with the square mouse with one button.  This worked fine.  Why then, have Apple felt the need to mess with the design of the mouse since then?  The hockey puck, that rotates in your hand, meaning you get tangled up with the cable, and can’t press the button.  Then there was the mouse where the entire shell pressed down.  More recently came the “Mighty mouse”.  Every single one of these had a stupid wheel, which while nice to use, eventually stopped working.  It also had a one piece shell, but had two clickable regions.  I always had trouble with the right mouse button clicking when I didn’t want it to.  Now, the Magic mouse has arrived.  No wheel on this one, but it has multi touch capabilities.  You have to sit through a tutorial on how to use the most basic peripheral that’s been around since the 80′s…

A colleague recently compared me buying a Logitech mouse for my mac to “putting a K&N filter on a Ferrari”.  I replied with, “a Ferrari wouldn’t need a K&N because the standard filter works perfectly well”.  Said colleague has since purchased a Logitech mouse for his MacBook Pro…

Unfortunately Apple seems to have a style over function attitude in this respect.  A mouse has 2 buttons and a scrolly wheel.  Apple, pay Logitech to make you a nice white mouse, your users will thank you for it!