Sam’s random musings

How about them socks?:

(What about the socks? In an early in his career race Landis decided that there a bit too much emphasis on fashion and so wore a very “uncool” outfit… including knee high argyle socks pulled all the way up. He of course got the down the nose look from all the riders. He then rode away with the race taunting his fellow riders with shouts of “How do you like my socks now?” and “Maybe you’d like to see how they look from further away… lemme go up the road a bit.” He won by 15 minutes.

Just Like cousin Andy…

(Via Spoken.)

Advanced Box Model Testing:

From Qooxdoo.org, there are two new posts spotlighting something that developer after developer have struggled with at least once in their work - the differences between box models in the major browsers. They explore these differences in a two part series of posts.

Good useful information for designers out there (I am not one) I build the pig to put the lipstick on it

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

A collection of extensions from the Rails-Spinoffs list this will be a growing personal resource, send in more if you know of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Engineering food and drink experiences by and for geeks:

The geeks are cooking now. Or will be after they read “Cooking for Engineers.” Done by a software developer, Michael Chu, in Silicon Valley. Mmmm, this makes me hungry!

Fun, ok I have to admit just the title made me giggle…

(Via The Scobleizer Weblog.)

this look at the “Top Five PHP Mistakes” from Marco Tabini.

His list of mistakes is:

• Objects in PHP 4
• Function Naming Consistency
• Safe Mode and Magic Quotes
• Register Globals
• Lack of Unicode Support

Under each he explains them, noting why they are important enough to mention is the list. He does, however, end on a bit lighter note - the PHP, for all its problems and woes, is just like any other laugnage out there. It has its problems, but its learned from them and, as Marco puts it “has grown because of them”.

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p> Not mistakes that developers make with PHP but mistakes made in the development of PHP

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

How to get rid of purple fringing:

How to get rid of this unsightly effect…There are many technical reasons and some disagreement as to why purple fringing occurs in digital cameras. These factors include the lens, focus, leakage between pixels, and more…

What to do! You have taken a lovely photo, only to take it home and discover this purplish haze around the edges of the subject??

The most common cause of purple fringing is low light with high-contrast boundary areas in an image. So in the case of my example above, I took a photo of a reflective surface on a sunny day with the sun shining behind it.
Oh woe is me! Well.. never fear.. there is a way to fix this photo using Photoshop, I am going to show you the way that was easiest for me, of course there are a number of ways to do this… but I found this method to be the easiest to remember and most effective!

Worth marking down….

(Via CreativeBits.)

Commoditizing PHP security:

We think it’s time to commoditize PHP web application security. You may have heard of Chorizo!. We’re proud to announce that from now on it’s possible to register for a free account on chorizo-scanner.com.

We think that everyone should be able to find usual security bugs like XSS (especially with nowadays Web2.0 applications), SQL injection (i.e. in MySQL queries), Remote Code inclusion/execution, Session injection, PHP vulnerabilities and the like. As Chorizo! is based on a plugin architecture, it is likely that we’ll add more and more plugins for detecting new vulnerabilites.

This might be a good and worthwhile thing to investigate for some projects. So does one build in the cost to the development… or maintenance?

(Via Planet MySQL.)

Michael Tsai: Cocoa foreach Macro:

Once you start using a language with a built-in foreach statement, it’s irritating to go back to a language that doesn’t.

I’ll have to keep track of this one, I am addicted to foreach constructs in other languages…

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)