Category Archives: Programming

Link Checker – Free Tool Launched on Site

  By Wade | October 22, 2009 - 20:02 | News, Programming, SEO
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I’ve just finished writing version one of my link checker tool and have now launched it on my site. The tool will parse a given  URL, extract all links on that page that point to the same domain and follow them, and keep doing that until it’s finished. It will then show you the results of the crawl (page details), along with any 404′s and redirects it encountered on the way. Of course there are limits (which I don’t intend to expose), and you’ll know if you hit them as the app will fail. They’re pretty high though and I … Continue reading →

PHPNW 09 – Food and Optimising front end performance

  By Wade | October 10, 2009 - 15:17 | Programming
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So lunch was ‘so-so’ – the dauphinoise were undercooked,  the duck sauce was too strong and overpowered the duck (probably good as they were rather cheap legs.) “Optimising your front end performance” was a very mixed talk. There were some generalisations that were seriously poor such as “80% of access to sites by end users is spent on the front end” – both vague and unfounded. However things like CSS/JS optimisation – specifically 304 Not-Modified headers and forcing caching but needed more expansion – this is a PHP conference afterall so implementation methods would be useful – so I’m going … Continue reading →

PHPNW09 – PHP North-West 09 Conference

  By Wade | October 10, 2009 - 12:34 | Programming
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Just started in the 3rd talk today by a guy called Rowan Merewood (twitter link). I had no idea he worked at Plus.net – for those of you who don’t know me, just take a look on Google for wade womersley plus.net. Unfortunately  that means I’m biased to this talk as he’s talking about a company that I know has a very sworded past with its customers and while I’m sure as a developer he’s very competent, his choice in company leaves something to be desired. He’s a good guy so far, talking with some level of comedic intent while … Continue reading →

Linux RAID, MySQL

  By Wade | September 10, 2009 - 21:51 | Programming, Software
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Ubuntu…it’s a great Linux OS to use on servers due to its speed and simplicity – personal preference based on no statistics, only personal use. However, one thing Linux drives me mad with is software RAID. It’s taken me the better part of a day to set up a few RAID partitions, two of which are joined via LVM (2 lots of mirrored disks, one big “partition” to store stuff on across all 4 disks). Persuading a developer in our office at work that Whitespace is better than PHP or persuading Ben that all graphs are excellent, informative tools would … Continue reading →

InnoISAM / District 9

  By Wade | September 7, 2009 - 22:15 | Films, Gym, Programming
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InnoISAM is what I need, a happy medium between InnoDB and MyISAM. I need the speed of inserts of InnoDB with the speed of selects of MyISAM – no HEAP will not work because the JOIN that I do results in the HEAP table being converted into MyISAM. You get two tables that deal with 2 extreme’s but not good happy medium table. Monday also became MarketDefender day today, a website I don’t like working on because the work I do on it involves working with a payment gateway – something I have never enjoyed but roped myself into technically … Continue reading →

Hidden things, lack of fries and pointless data

  By Wade | September 4, 2009 - 20:41 | Programming, Random Stuff
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Ah Friday’s, it’s always a good day in the office, everyone (at least in the dev team) know it’s Friday, and most weeks, Dan’s behaviour is a tell tale sign. Friday also means pub lunch day, something to look forward to…usually – however today was a sad day, our usual pub, the Wellington, let us all down. The waiting time for our fries was going to be at least 45 minutes, and I do mean just fries, chips, potato cuts, whatever you want to call them. It was almost enough to ruin the day, almost! However the pint went down … Continue reading →

Today’s musings

  By Wade | September 3, 2009 - 21:04 | Ego-centric, Programming
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Today’s work was a standard day, well except for the morning, actually no, that was a standard morning too, things didn’t work too well, they needed fixing, during which there were random jokes at Ben’s expense due to his pure love of graphs. With some help from Remo (my team manager) though, we did manage to work out some confusing MySQL queries – which as always, were actually remarkably simple, but until you see it, it’s harder than Michael Jackson visiting a pre-school (did I say this blog was probably bad for kids, fans of MJ and anyone who gets … Continue reading →

Another day, another group of PHP “funness”

  By Wade | September 2, 2009 - 13:01 | Programming, Random Stuff
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PHP and Serializing…don’t try and store the result in a plain text file, there’s just a chance you may end up storing NUL so when you go to read a line, you’ll end up only reading part of it (the serialized object had a stack trace in it from an exception.) Incidentally, don’t try and debug code that works – it’s always a good idea to read the code that is storing the data you think is wrong before trying to debug the output, I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t logging somethin only for certain exceptions, then eventually I … Continue reading →

PHP FUNdamentals

  By Wade | September 1, 2009 - 16:24 | Programming
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The title isn’t really correct as, well, they’re not fundamentals…however they’re not fun so that was my best effort to get sarcasm into the title. I love programming in PHP, and I must admit, I do enjoy finding solutions to problems that most people would probably tear their hair out over; but from time-to-time, PHP throws me a curve ball covered in shards of glass with a label attached that says “from PHP with love.” I’ve been working on some new classes and functions at work to make our web applications work faster and better and part of that involves … Continue reading →