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MySQL WTF?!

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I’m currently in the process of extending demiblog’s database support. Version 0.1.0 only supports PostgreSQL, but I plan on also supporting MySQL in the next release, and a few other databases further down the line. Because this cross-database support had always been planned, I’ve been very careful in writing my SQL to make sure that … Continued

Shooting in Lewes

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About five minutes’ walk from our house: A man has been seriously injured in a shooting in Lewes town centre, Sussex Police have said. Officers said they were called to Southover High Street in the East Sussex town by a member of the public on Tuesday evening. (From BBC News) Part of the reason we … Continued

Keen on Web 2.0

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The Observer has an interesting article about Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Although the book isn’t released until early June, according to the Observer article the basic premise is that: bloggers and other evangelists for the web [are] destroying culture, … Continued

London Goes Wi-Fi

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The square mile now has Wi-Fi. The Cloud, as it is called, is to be free for the first month, but after that there will be a charge. Contrast this with the proposed San Francisco Municipal Wireless scheme, and the Cloud starts to look fairly weak. In contrast with London’s single square mile of coverage, … Continued

Ogg Theora Support in Opera 9.5

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In Hâkon Wium Lie’s latest missive on Opera Labs he details Opera’s upcoming support for the element in HTML 5. He points out that it’s not much use without at least one defacto standard web video format (much like JPEG, GIF and PNG have become for the element. A preview release of Opera 9.5 includes … Continued

The Importance of Software Testing

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Most programmers, especially those who work on server software, will have been in a situation when we’ve been reconfiguring, upgrading, modifying or otherwise replacing some piece of vital software on a physically remote server, and things haven’t gone quite as expected. Often, fixing it is a simple matter of logging into the server remotely (via, … Continued

BoJo on MySpace

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The BBC on Politicians with MySpace pages: In the UK, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell has registered on MySpace — and has an unofficial fan club page, “Proud to be a Minger”, with 161 members. Meanwhile, the Boris Johnson Appreciation Society, which recognises the shadow higher education minister as “the vital free agent of … Continued

The Tao of HTML 5

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On the 10th of June 1215, the a group of English barons invaded London and five days later forced King John to attach his seal to the Magna Carta in Runnymede, on the border of modern-day Sussex and Berkshire. (In those days it was customary to attach ones seal to an agreement rather than sign … Continued

BBC News Roundup

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Scientists Produce Sperm from Bone Excited scientists have announced that they produced sperm from bones. No sniggering at the back. Sperm made from human bone marrow. Teen Trashes House In a completely unrelated story, Police interview web party girl.

Opera 9.2

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It seems that a couple of days ago Opera 9.2 was released. That one passed me by — I must start reading the opera.* newsgroups again. The big new change is Speed Dial giving you even faster access to your nine favourite websites and one favourite search engine when you open a new (blank) tab. … Continued

The Way Bureaucracies Work

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In 1950, publish a comprehensive set of rules. In 1974, publish a note which adds a few more rules and rescinds several of the old one. In 1981, publish a note which adjusts one of the conditions for the a particular rule given in the 1974 note but doesn’t otherwise rescind it. In 1987, publish … Continued

Life on Mars

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Well, the Life on Mars finale was last night, and I thought it came to a brilliant conclusion. Sentimental without being too cheesy. It seemed to make sense of the whole series, but upon reflection, the big question, “am I mad, in a coma or back in time?” was left open. The BBC has news … Continued

THIS IS TRUE

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PLEASE DON’T READ THIS. In 1876, a young girl named Jenn was walking down a river, an insane man killed her by stabbing her in the back, raping her, and then hanging her in his closet. Then a she just dissapeared no one ever found her untill 2000 when a yoing girl called Mary found … Continued

How PHP programmers get things wrong

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Firstly, three disclaimers: PHP is a great programming language, one of my favourites — this website is written in PHP; there are many great PHP programmers out there, some of whom probably never get things wrong; I probably get things wrong a lot of the time. The majority of the database-backed Open Source PHP projects … Continued

Hurrah! A Blog for Toby!

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At last, my new CMS is at a stage when I’m able to actually start publishing with it. Now that I have an easy-ish tool to publish with, you can expect that this website will be updated more frequently and with more and better content. Updating this website in the past has been a major … Continued

Re: Building a “modular” PHP site

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Tyno Gendo wrote: I have been pondering over building a “modular” site which accepts add-ons built by other people. I was wondering if anyone has any links to any reading material on how you build this kind of facility into your site? The basic technique is this: Firstly, provide a plugin registration function, which we’ll … Continued

PHP UTF-8 Validation Library

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lawrence k wrote: What PHP code would give me this kind of 100% certainty? I was bored so wrote this. I’m quite proud of myself, as I wrote it and ran it and it worked first time! 🙂 It not only checks that the UTF-8 is valid, it forces it to be valid.