Asymptomatic

Here comes the busiest conference time of the year - September. Apart from school starting, which probably merits its own posting (assuming I can ever get back into the swing of regular writing on this blog), there are any number of conferences to attend this month and next.

This month, I've got plane tickets to hit Columbus, Ohio for the Habari Party -- an event whose name I'm not fond of, but is good enough for the purposes of celebrating the third year of Habari development. It sure does not seem like it's been that long. While I'm there, I'll also be popping by the Columbus PHP Meetup chapter with skippy to pitch Habari in some fashion.

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This is a weird topic, since I'm not sure if it belongs here or at RedAlt, but I think until such time as I do it (since it's not talking about program planning), it's here for me to talk about. But if I do create the thing, I'll put it on RedAlt for other people to use as a resource. Ok, with that out of the way...

I have a problem remembering the codes for the obscure date characters that PHP's date() function uses. I know, it's something I should just know, but it's not. Yes, I have trouble remembering whether "M", "F", or "J" outputs the abbreviated form of the month name. I can never remember how to get the number of the day of the year. It's a real mental block and an impediment to my day-to-day life.

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On the Habari development mailing list, Daniel Smith writes:

I am interested in learning PHP (object)/MYSQL programming in general, and Habari-specific in particular. As a php newbie, could anyone please point me to any resources, latest quality books, tutorials or whatever, that could help me to learn how this all works?

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On page 74 of Web Designer magazine #130 is an article on making tag clouds in PHP. I suppose you could do it their way, but a few little things left me puzzled about their implementation, and I thought I would give it a go myself.

I'm a big, big fan of associative arrays in PHP. Most people who know arrays know that they are variables that contain a set of elements indexed by numerically, but PHP can index arrays in two ways. An associative array allows you to use a string key to identify each element of the array, rather than a number. The strings have to be unique, but for the purposes of creating a tag cloud, this is perfect because we only want to list each element once.

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I wanted to get some thumbnail creation code in PHP to use for a little project I was working on, and so I traipsed over to Google and asked for "php thumbnail". I took a peek at the first search result, snagged the code, inserted it in my test app, and went merrily on my way. And that will be the last time I trust Google to find me code.

There are many problems with the code that I got. It's not malicious, but it does many easy things wrong. And the one thing that it's supposed to do well - the thing for which Google found it - it doesn't do correctly.

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