Ashley Etchell

Ive just discovered the symfony framework, and what can I say, its god damned UBER! Ive achieved more in symfony in 2 days than I did in 2 weeks in Zends framework. Im not being disrespectful to Zend, but symfony just seems more along my wave length. Long live symfony ( http://symfony-project.org )

So I made a boo-boo while doing some code and had the WIERDEST error returned:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /xxx/xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx/dataTablesWrapper.php on line 15

until a friend of mine googled for that error and found this: Paamayim Nekudotayim (pronounced [paʔamajim nəkudotajim]) is the official name for the Scope Resolution Operator (::) in PHP. It means “twice colon” or “double colon” in Hebrew.

Nekudotayim (נקודתיים) means ‘colon’; it comes from nekuda (IPA: [nəkuda]), ‘point’ or ‘dot’, and the dual suffix ayim (יים-), hence ‘two points’. Similarly, the word paamayim (פעמיים) is derived by attaching the dual suffix to paam (IPA: [paʔam]) (’one time’ or ‘once’), thus yielding ‘twice’.

Still, made me chuckle
My stupid code looked like this BTW:
$cli->class::getNextDay();

Just come across this blog by Lee Strafford while googlin’ for a friends name who appeared in my search engine referrer logs (you got to love the web!): http://plusnetter.wordpress.com. Makes for an interesting read for anyone who was working at Plusnet at the time and nice to see I was remembered! I enjoyed my time at plusnet, the work was hard and dealing with the odd-balls who called support was testing, but I loved it, and it pushed me to move forward into my current career.

 Lee had a bit of a reputation amongst the trenches at plusnet. He was scary and hard faced and staff generally secretley moaned about him or hid under desks as he walked by. I quickly learned to keep my head down and get on with stuff and because of this I simply ‘got on’ in the company. Lee managed to weedle out slackers and prats in a matter of seconds but if you impressed him then you couldnt go far wrong. I liked Lee, he kept people in check and ensured that ’shit happened’ and I liked his ballsy, ‘ a spade is a spade ‘ attitude too. I dont think plusnet would be where it is today without him running the show for so long. (and no, this isnt some kind of sycophantic post…..)

Today I decided to get my ass in gear and update my rather flagging skillset. Ive been meaning to pick up PHP/MySQL 5 for about 3 years now but family activities, the day job and an embarressing amount of time spent playing online games just seemed to get in the way. Well, today enough was enough, I purchased a bunch of reference books on PHP 5 and MySQL 5 a few months ago but did nothing other than read over the changes from previous versions. I’ve been fully aware of the changes between the versions for some time, but never really put my knowledge into practice.

 Armed with a little bit of knowledge (a dangerous thing?)  of what is involved I set about the task of choosing a new framework. I’ve been a fan of PEAR and Smarty for some years but I’m coming to the conclusion that while they are perfectly good libraries of code, they are quite old now and don’t do a great deal in encouraging me to further my skills.

 I’ve been keeping my eye on the Zend framework since it was announced a couple of years ago or so and it didnt take me long to decide that this would be my new framework of choice. Now at version 1.5.x, Zend’s framework (ZF) has a lot of attractive features available which will take the drudgery out of creating applications for the web and the form classes make me salivate with excitement.

After an initial look at the framework and some of the tutorials available (which are not that great to be honest) I am confident that this framework will push PEAR/Smarty out of the way pretty soon! You can even integrate Smarty into ZF with little fuss and override its default views.

I must say, the Zend ‘official’ quick start tutorial is pretty bad, even enough to put a lot of people off using the ZF, although some slightly better tutorials exist, they still lack some key information and pointers on how to perform some basic tasks. So i will construct my own tutorial in the next few days showing you how to create a basic skeleton for a site using ZF and maybe Smarty (I do love smarty). My tutorial will show you how to create modules and controllers, taking into account some basic URL formatting and keep everything nice and tidy.

Ive just been introduced to a rather funny website called will it blend, Where some egghead throws random objects into his blendtech blending machine. Funny it may be, but is it real? Id love to know what the blade in this blender is made of…..

Well, I finally decided that it was time to create a blog and catch up with the rest of the world. Im usuallly pretty anti internet buzzword oriented, ‘Blog’ being one of my all time most annoying words, along with ‘podcast’. So here I am, potentially kicking and screaming, creating a blog that will make me think that my comments and thoughts are of interest to the rest of the internet enabled world.

Are Blog’s written by people with an over inflated ego, thinking that others really care what they say, hanging on every word?

- now i sound like that Carrie Bradshaw woman in Sex and the City…..