Today I ordered my ticket for Dutch PHP Conference. Last year’s edition was great and this year it’s twice as long. This year I’ll skip the tutorial day though. For me the money is better spent on reading material. Anyone interested in going can save some money by registering before April 30th. My ‘usability and PHP’ paper didn’t make it but on the less PHP focused topics there is accessibility. And a lot of other interesting topics.…
Last night there was a phpGG (dutch php user group) meeting in Utrecht with a presentation by Lorna Jane titled ‘Linux-Fu’. Attended by about 10 people, console basics � tricks were addressed. I’m not unfamiliar with Linux so the basics weren’t that new. For development I mainly use IDE’s so I just use the console to edit the occasional config file, create some symlinks, that kind of stuff. For those tasks I find myself sticking to set of commands I’ve learned and just occasionally taking the time to do an in-depth google search for better ways to get the job done.…
Recently I started using jQuery in some projects. In past projects I have mainly been using Prototype and the fact that jQuery also has a $() function made me feel at home right away. That same fact put me a bit off-guard as both functions are in fact quite different: Prototype extends the selected HTML node with added functionality and returns it. Argument should be a HTML node or element id.…
Yesterday Internet Explorer 8 is released. I consider that a good things as it will move more people farther away from the severe case of release abuse called IE6. Improvements include integrated developer tools for css analysis and script profiling and debugging. And there is ‘Compatibility View’. Developers can specify, by adding a specific meta tag, that IE7 rendering should be used. There seem to be some tricky aspects related to Compatibility View:…
At the PHPgg Frontend Special I first heard of Fronteers, an association of dutch front-end developers. Past tuesday they had a meeting at Media College in Amsterdam. As meetings are open for non(yet)-members it was a nice opportunity to get to know more about Fronteers. Two topics were scheduled: jQuery and SUAVE. jQuery Until now I have mainly used the Prototype framework for Javascript projects. As the prototype library, escpecially when bundled with scriptaculous, is quite ‘big’ I was interested in hearing some more about the ‘lean and mean’ jQuery.…
Over the years the display size of the average computer screen has increased. As a consequence nowadays more and more websites are designed with a 1024 width screen in mind. For example: BBC, Adobe and The New York Times. With at least 78% of the users using a 1024 or higher resolution screen the time seems right to move away from the 800px designs. But what about accessibility? And usability? And is full page zooming really better than text scaling?
…Yesterday I attended a presentation showcasing Drupal. Like Joomla! and WordPress an easy install routine presents the user with a lot of functionality right out of the box. By adding modules as needed one can achieve whatever he wants. So it seems… After the showcase part, the session continued into a case study. The case at hand was a project were all sorts of specific functionality (think: facebook, digg, etc. web 2.0 you know) was required. And it didn’t go as smooth and quick as expected. How come?
…Last week I read an article on webwereld titled ‘2008 was year of the SQL injection attack‘. It was based on an article with the same title on networkworld.com. Apparently SQL injection has taken over the lead from XSS. Not surprisingly the first user-comment stated that almost 100% of the exploits were certainly in PHP applications written by would-be programmers. With things so obvious it’s of course unneccessary to provide factual data backing up such a statement. So, nothing to win in that discussion. Three days ago news came that a customer database of Kaspersky was hacked. By using SQL injection. On a PHP website. Could commenter X be right?
…Past saturday (february 7th) I visited Engineering World, a conference organised by Sogeti, as both attendant and speaker. With my colleague Richard de Vries I delivered a presentation on the topic usability. I attended some interesing presentations of which two were about methodologies: One about SCRUM and the closing keynote by Ian Spence of Ivar Jacobsen International about Agile. The latter with all of the myths about Agile (Doesn’t matter where the team is going, as long as it’s going somewhere) being tackled in true Mythbuster fashion.…
Although my blog was ready for quite some time I had some trouble getting my domain to point at it. The main problem was getting control over the DNS settings as tibobeijen.nl was originally registered with a shared hosting company. At that time a viable solution as registering a .nl domain used to be limited to companies. Although the whole procedure was a bit sluggish it’s finally complete. Kuddo’s to my friends at Yuna for providing quality hosting.…