A common and simple way to store them is with a table structure similar to the following.

Now there are several ways to return this to a multidimensional array or other navigable structure. A painfully common and naïve way would be recursive queries ala:

function fetch_items($parent = 0) {
	$data = array();
	$qry = mysql_query("select * from `tablename`  where parent_id = " . (int)$parent );
	while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($qry) ) {
		$data = array('data' => $row, 'children' => fetch_items($row['id']));
	}
	return $data;
}
  

The problem with this approach is the sheer number of queries this approach uses. Our simple example hierarchy would execute 6 queries, whereas more complicated hierarchies would execute many more.

A better approach is to pull all the data out with a single query, and then process it into the structure we need.  There are several ways to do this, but I find the following DOM like structure this generates incredibly useful.

function fetch_tree() {
	$data = array();
	$qrt  = mysql_query("select * from `tablename` order by parent_id asc");
	while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($qry) ) {
		$data[ $row['id'] ]['data'] = $row;
		$data[ $row['parent_id'] ]['children'][ $row['id'] ] =& $data[ $row['id'] ];
  		$data[ $row['id'] ]['parent'] =& $data[ $row['parent_id'] ];
 	}
	return $data;
}
  

Essentially, in a single pass through the data, this gets us an array of hierarchy elements, where rather than an element directly having its children, every entry has a pointer to its parent element as well as an array of pointers to its children. This is incredibly flexible, and as the tree is flattened it allows you to start at any point in the hierarchy by ID ala $data[id], and navigate your way up or down. Viewing any elements children is as simple as $data[id][ 'children'], and its parent as simple as $data[id]['parent'].

I use this basic methodology a ton in my work, personal and professional (the comments and sitemap of this site are powered by it!) but the concept seems foreign when I try to explain it to people.  I hope this explanation sparks some ideas for people.

20 minutes later I had the following PHP Shell Script! It works by simply sampling the saturation of every Xth pixel and mapping that saturation to a character from an array. There is no nearest-neighboring or anything like that, just straight up sampling.

Huzzah!

And there you have it! A whopping 35 lines of code. There is a ton of tweaking you can do like changing the array of characters, or adjusting the $scale variable which is simply how wide of a sample it makes. Setting it to 1 for instance should sample every pixel on the Y and every other pixel on the X (so it scales propperly). To the right is a sample output of the script.

Do You Trust Me?

The script accepts local or remote image paths as the first argument. The following is a simple usage example you can use to get you started.

./ascii.php "http://donatstudios.com/images/site/JesseDonat.jpg"

It was a fun little project and I look forward to seeing if/what the internet comes up with for it. Fork me on Github, or post links in the comments! Happy hacking!

I did though have a backup of my Photo Booth Photos and wanted to get them to be recognized by the application. It is admittedly simply a matter of entering them into the Recents.plist file, but having several hundred photos across three operating systems and three naming schemes (was that *really* necessary, Apple?) getting these into the proper order by hand would have been a nuisance to say the least.

Alas! A use for my PHP skills! I went ahead and wrote a simple PHP based shell script you can use to create a new .plist file with your images properly ordered.

This will back up your current Recents.plist as Recents.plist.bk.[time] so if you decide to roll it back, it will be there for you

Basic Operation

Familiar with Git?

Simply executing

git clone git://gist.github.com/1108691.git PhotoBoothRepair

Not Familiar with Git?

• Ensure that all the Photos / Movies you want loaded into Photo Booth are located in

  ~/Pictures/Photo Booth Library/Pictures/

• Ensure Photo Booth is closed to avoid overwriting our changes
• Save the file below somewhere accessible to you via Terminal.
• Correct the noted path at the top of the file to reflect your home folder
• Navigate in Terminal to the directory where you saved the shell script
• Set the file executable by running

  chmod +x Photobooth_rebuild.sh.php

• Execute the shell script

  ./Photobooth_rebuild.sh.php

• All Done - Fire up Photo Booth to see our results!

I welcome any and all feedback. Feel free to fork this code on Github - I'm open to any updates.

Limitations

• It presumes all Leopard format names are pre Snow Leopard and Lion simply for lack of anything to go on (They're just numbered)

Well let me know in the comments if you find this useful. I wrote it for my personal use and it saved me a ton of time.

Screenshots

Download and Installation

The first step is to download the proper version.
Click here to download the PhpED 6 Version or here to download the PhpED 5 Version.

After you have downloaded the file you will need to replace your hl.cfg.

In Windows 7 or Vista this should be located in or around:

C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\[Roaming / Local]\NuSphere\PhpED\config

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\NuSphere\PhpED\config

The final step is to simply change your background color to a dark color. The background color is oddly saved in a different configuration file than the highlighting. This can be found in Tools ⇒ Settings ⇒ Editor ⇒ Appearance

While you're in there you may want to tweak the settings some to your taste, but that is all there is to it.

Update May 12th, 2011 Anaglyph ability added! I don't believe Red/Green is correct but I have a pair of glasses on the way to test it out.

Convert MPO files like those generated by the Nintendo 3DS into Stereoscopic JPEG Images or Anaglyph like you would use 3D glasses for.

Examples and more info to come!

While you're here, feel free to download the source below. Source to anaglyph will be available soon after some slight refactoring.

The interesting problem with JumpLists is they are just shortcuts.  They call an executable with the specified arguments. Microsoft’s reasoning for this is that they are still available while the program is no longer running. The initial execution of an application placed in the taskbar registers the JumpLists, after which point they are cached by the system and continue to be available even when the application is no longer running. This potentially limits the usefulness of JumpLists as they do start a new instance of your application.  If anyone knows how to catch the arguments on a single instance application, I would be very interested to hear it.  The best I’ve come up with is simply passing messages to my current instance from a new instance and then terminating the second instance, but this is awkward to my eye.

XAML can be used to create JumpLists in the Application.xaml file, which many other examples will demonstrate – but the issue here is there is no way to get the path to the current executable via XAML, so you can only call other executables whom you know the full path to.

The answer then is to create our JumpLists dynamically.  The best place to do this is in your Application.xaml.vb file.  The New method will be used to instantiate and register the JumpLists, whereas the Startup event will be used to handle arguments passed to the new instance of our application.

Below is a very simple example of JumpLists not too far off from what I ended up going with in my own application. Feel free to leave me comments as to any improvements or changes you would make, or go ahead and fork the gist.

There are many User Agent string parsers out there, many PHP ones infact, but none of what I tested were able to do all of the following.

1. Correctly identify certain versions of IE7 and above that included a user string mentioning IE6 as follows

   1. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1))

2. Correctly identify various mobile platforms, Android and Windows Phone 7 in particular.
3. Operates simply without large class structures.

This is why I set about building my own.  I don’t guarantee it to be perfect, but it works for my needs. I strongly welcome forking and pull requests through Github for any changes. 

Comments are more than welcome below.

Known Limitations

• Does not detect Linux platform other than Android
• Does not detect Ice Weasel as Firefox
• Probably many others not coming to mind right now.

View the test suite of User Agents I'm currently running it against here.

<?php

/**
* Parses a user agent string into its important parts
* 
* @param string $u_agent
* @return array an array with browser, version and platform keys
*/
function UserAgentParser( $u_agent ) { 

    $data = array();

    # ^.+?(?<platform>Android|iPhone|iPad|Windows|Macintosh|Windows Phone OS)(?: NT)*(?: [0-9.]+)*(;|\))
    if (preg_match('/^.+?(?P<platform>Android|iPhone|iPad|Windows|Macintosh|Windows Phone OS)(?: NT)*(?: [0-9.]+)*(;|\))/im', $u_agent, $regs)) {
        $data['platform'] = $regs['platform'];
    } else {
        $result = "";
    }

    # (?<browser>Camino|Kindle|Firefox|Safari|MSIE|AppleWebKit|Chrome|IEMobile|Opera)(?:[/ ])(?<version>[0-9.]+)
    preg_match_all('%(?P<browser>Camino|Kindle|Firefox|Safari|MSIE|AppleWebKit|Chrome|IEMobile|Opera)(?:[/ ])(?P<version>[0-9.]+)%im', $u_agent, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

    if( $result['browser'][0] == 'AppleWebKit' ) {
        if( ( $data['platform'] == 'Android' && !($key = 0) ) || $key = array_search( 'Chrome', $result['browser'] ) ) {
            $data['browser'] = 'Chrome';
        }elseif( $key = array_search( 'Kindle', $result['browser'] ) ) {
            $data['browser'] = 'Kindle';
        }elseif( $key = array_search( 'Safari', $result['browser'] ) ) {
            $data['browser'] = 'Safari';
        }else{
            $key = 0;
            $data['browser'] = 'webkit';
        }
        $data['version'] = $result['version'][$key];
    }elseif( $key = array_search( 'Opera', $result['browser'] ) ) {
        $data['browser'] = $result['browser'][$key];
        $data['version'] = $result['version'][$key];
    }elseif( $result['browser'][0] == 'MSIE' ){
        if( $key = array_search( 'IEMobile', $result['browser'] ) ) {
            $data['browser'] = 'IEMobile';
        }else{
            $data['browser'] = 'MSIE';
            $key = 0;
        }
        $data['version'] = $result['version'][$key];
    }else{
        $data['browser'] = $result['browser'][0];
        $data['version'] = $result['version'][0];
    }

    if( $data['browser'] == 'Kindle' ) {
        $data['platform'] = 'Kindle';
    }

    return $data;

}

You can simply enter a list of tab or space delimited urls (copied from Excel works great) and it will spit out the generated RewriteRule’s for you. GET parameters on the old urls are broken up and built into multiple RewriteCond’s set up to work in any passed order.

I hope someone finds this useful. Any comments are welcome below, of feel free to fork me on github!

If you, as I, grew up during the web bubble we call the 90’s and were interested at all in web development my guess is that you probably didn’t learn most of your skills from a book or a class.  You probably would run across a site that had something cool on it and ponder  “Oh my, how does that work?” right click, view source, and after some digging were enlightened.  I’m certain this is how most of my generation learned their HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills, it is certainly how I did, and often how I continue though now I have tools to help me even further pick apart a page such as Firebug.

Where I take issue is CSS and more so JavaScript minifying. Google wants essentially all your CSS and JavaScript minified. This lessens the bandwidth Google has to use, but in the process makes the source complete illegible to a human being.

I personally, on this site, lose a fair deal of my Page Speed Score because “Minifying http://donatstudios.com/js/general.js could save 311B (23% reduction)”.   My general.js file is at the moment 1.3 kilobytes; I am losing points off my Page Speed score over 311 bytes simply because I want my source code to remain legible.  Can we please get a sanity check on this, Google.  311 bytes is not going to kill you.

SEO is Destroying the Spirit of the Internet

Back in the hay day of Geocities if you did a search you were likely to get a few if not mostly amateur pages in your results.  They weren’t usually well designed perse, but they were often very useful. I can recall of the top of my head a few instances where they saved the day.

In steps “Search Engine Optimization”. Corporations are gaga over paying people to dig through content, study their keywords, rewording things and saturating content with keywords (often at the cost of readability I might add).

Now let’s compare that to an amateur, who’s content is designed for human consumption rather than googles and now has no way to keep up in this arms race. There usually isn’t the money nor the desire to pump into SEO and content development.  They just want to provide some useful information to the public.  These kinds of sites are becoming increasingly hard to find, with corporate sites taking the lion’s share of the hits.

Frankly I believe a lot of great content is getting missed thanks to SEO.  The spirit of the internet years ago was driven around the fact that anyone could write something, and have it read by millions of people.  While this is still the case, I find it far less likely now than it has been in previous years.  I don’t think there is a solution; I just find the corporatization of the web a little disheartening.

I have been aware of Grid Style Sheets for quite a while, but I long ago dismissed them as a fad like CSS Resets.  Recently though it came to my attention that OSCommerce 2.3 switched to the 960 Grid Style to replace its table based layout system.  I spend most of my development time working with OSCommerce and thought it would be good to understand this change so I could decide whether or not to integrate it into our fork.

My general impression playing with the latest nightly of OSCommerce 2.3 from Github though is that I don’t like it – maybe I’m old school, but in my view Grid Style Sheets go against what we spent the previous decade fighting for, separation of our concerns… separating presentation and content.

You’re Doing it Wrong

Let’s talk about separation of presentation and content.

Ideally, content and layout information should be entirely separate.  Class names should be used to describe the data they contain, and nothing to do with the style the class will contain.  You should be able to completely rearrange / restructure a page simply by switching out a stylesheet.  The HTML should strive to be as purely a data delivery mechanism as possible, similar to that of an XML request, and the CSS is there to make it something a human can digest.

Using a Grid stylesheet – your class names purely apply to your specific layout.  Class names like “grid_1” or “container_12” are not indicative of content in the slightest, but rather where they are placed on the grid that is your page. Grid_1 will always be leftmost. Always. Might as well use <left> Correction: Grid_1 will always be one twelfth of your page wide (on a twelve Column Grid) , Grid_2 two twelfths, et cetera. Nothing to do with describing the content contained.

Grid Style Sheets are Extremely Limiting

With a well-structured CSS layout, deciding to move your navigation from the left to the right is as simple as flicking a switch.  Usually after changing one to a few lines of CSS, and its switched. It cascades across your entire site and everything floats and adjusts.  Same goes for altering the width, or even the entire flow of your document. You can quite easily decide your left navigation is now a top navigation with no alteration to the content.

Contrast this with a grid style sheet – to reposition anything you will have to edit the HTML – change the class you call.  Restructuring a site is a major task. They are essentially tables done in CSS with all the drawbacks of tables with few of the benefits (*cough* valign *cough*).

Why Does this Matter? 

Flexibility, sustainability, scalability – these are not just buzz words – these are important attributes of a well-developed site – these are things a grid layout does not deliver.

Let’s look at this from a prebuilt application perspective. In OSCommerce 2.3 the left navigation is classed grid_4 which places it 4 gridlines out of 16, and the content area is push_4 which aptly pushes it over 4.  That defines not only where my navigation appears, but also its size.  Its inflexible without changing HTML, and quite honestly wouldn’t work for the majority of carts I develop.

Final Thoughts

Grids, from a design perspective are not just useful, they’re downright ideal.  Clear alignment of elements creating strong visual lines is something strived for.  Consistent padding and margins are all very important – and all of these are honorable virtues of a grid style sheet.

I definitely understand the draw and the time saved in the initial build of a site, but a meticulously well engineered style sheet supporting semantic CSS will in the long run pay back the initial investment many times over.

Post Script

While writing this, I’ve decided I really like the concept and aim of the grid style sheet – and would love it if it did not interfere with the semantic nature of CSS.  If I could simply do something like the following, I would be using it 10 minutes ago.

#leftnav {

	imports: .grid2;

}

W3C – I’m looking your direction to see this happen.  Until then, I’m sticking with my old fashioned meticulously crafted CSS.

I threw together a little script in PHP to test the idea, and the results were kind of interesting so I figured I'd throw it on my site - Anyway, here are some examples in action – you can hit reload for a random ipsum!  The code and a sample dataset are below.

I use git on my projects - but they're not similar enough just to be branches. Recently I came up with a way to patch one or more commits from a project to another easily. Here is a simple shell script I wrote to handle the task.

Simply put, you can use it either by

fast-patch.sh /z/my_project

fast-patch.sh /z/my_project 5

Also, it will generate a patch log to ~/fastPatch.log which I generally use directly for my commit message by way of

git commit -F ~/fastPatch.log

Any comments on how I could improve it, or questions are quite welcome.

There are two main ways in PHP to go about implementing GZIP. The first is ob_gzhandler.  Basically all that is really involved in setting this up is adding ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); anywhere before headers are sent, and it will blindly handle this for you.

The second is zlib.output_compression which while entirely transparent and Zends states that using zlib.output_compression is preferred over ob_gzhandler().

This method can have a huge downside for users.  It can for instance greatly exacerbate the sluggishness of an already slow page or even site. Right now your probably saying to yourself "What? I thought GZIP made everything faster. This guy is crazy.". Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you have a site with no all encompasing output buffer.  As PHP works its way through your script it occasionally flushes out its internal buffer to apache, which in turn flushes it out to the browser, allowing the browser to begin rendering the incomplete document. Also, let’s say as an example you have a hold up slowing down your page in the footer of your site. The user would already have the rest of the content and could begin reading and enjoying the site.

Now let’s compare to a site GZIPed with an output buffer callback, e.g. ob_gzhandler. After the output buffer is started, your code begins to execute.  Everything echoed is held in the buffer until the page is completely done and the output buffer closes, at which point it is GZIPed and flushed out to the user.  The user recieves less bits, but that hold up in the footer we spoke of before halts up the entire rendering process, and the user cannot see anything until the footer completes.

For your viewing pleasure, a demonstration:

Take Note

I am not stating that all GZIP is bad. To the contrary, GZIP can be very beneficial and I absolutely sympathize with google wanting to cut down on their bandwidth. If you have Firebug or something similar you can note that the request for the Non-GZIPed example is a whopping 100 kilobytes, whereas the GZIPed examples request is a measily 323 bytes! The reason for this is I did not have enough content to get Apache to flush so to get around this I added the following line.

echo str_repeat(' ', 100000); //This creates 100kb worth of data, enough to trigger my copy of Apache to flush;

Not only does this trick cause Apache to flush, but it exagerates the positive effect of GZIP. Simple patterns, or in this case large amounts of whitespace, will compress quite wondefully.

Uncompressed static files, JavaScript and CSS being two of the best examples compress quite well. The best way to do this is on an Apache server is with

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

Looking for a Solution

I've posted a number of questions to Stack Overflow [1] [2] researching this writing and actually found very limited help.

It appears murky whether or not the protocol even supports the functionality of chunking GZIP results into separately compressed blocks, as would be required to decompress portions before the page is done – you can chunk a complete GZIP response, but the advantage of this is limited.

Lastly I have seen “promises” of ob_gzhandler caching the results leading to a speed boost on a number of blogs – this is purely fiction and not to be trusted.

Moral of the Story

Understand what you’re doing before you do it.  Blindly using output buffering for GZIP can have adverse effects on your site. 

Recent Activity

Jul. 12, 2010

Jul. 10, 2010

Jul. 8, 2010

Jul. 1, 2010

Jun. 30, 2010

SimpleCalendar is a very simple PHP calendar class written to be easy to use and flexible.

It includes basic event logic and is made to be modified to your particular needs.

More Details Soon

Sample Usage

<?php
require_once('SimpleCalendar.php');
$calendar = new SimpleCalendar();
$calendar->addDailyHtml( 'Sample Event', 'today', 'tomorrow' );
$calendar->show(true);
?>

Example Calendar

Click here for the Github repository.

Recent Activity

Oct. 25, 2010

Oct. 8, 2010

Oct. 7, 2010

Jun. 7, 2010

JDZoom is a MooTools powered hover zoom / magnifier similarly styled to the one featured on Endless.com.

It is supported by IE6+, Firefox 2.5+, Safari 2+ and Chrome

It does not interfere with click though, such it can be used in conjunction with almost any lightbox. In fact by altering the selector when you instantiate it, most lightboxes can be extended with JDZoom without touching the HTML at all. See the advanced demonstration for more details.

JDZoom requires MooTools, and is Compatible with 1.2.5+ and 1.3+

It does not require any components of MooTools More.

Click here for the Github repository.

Demonstration

View Advanced Demonstration

Example Source

<html>
<head>
	<link http://donatstudios.com/Arrayhttps://github.com/donatj/jdzoom/blob/master/Demo/css/jdzoom.css">css/jdzoom.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
	<script src="js/mootools.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script src="js/jdzoom.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	window.addEvent('load',function() { 
		var jdz = new JDZoom();
	});
	</script>
</head>
<body>
	<a rel="jdzoom" http://donatstudios.com/Arrayhttp://donatstudios.com/assets/18/Demo/images/venus.jpg" target="_blank">images/venus.jpg"><img http://donatstudios.com/Arrayhttp://donatstudios.com/assets/18/Demo/images/venus_thumb.jpg" target="_blank">images/venus_thumb.jpg" /></a>
</body>
</html>

Recent Activity

Oct. 15, 2010

Feb. 18, 2010

This simple class allows you via PHP to export an XML Spreadsheet compatible with all versions of Excel 2003 and up.

The files generated will work with versions of Office 2003 and up. It is considered production safe, and is currently in use in a fair number of production sites.

Unlike CSV or HTML Table exports, you can have multiple worksheets of data! A sheets data can be added to the spreadsheet either by a MySQL query resource or as a 2 dimensional array.

Known bugs:

• Office 2007/2010 bark about XLS file extensions despite refusing to open XML file extensions downloaded from the internet. (Anyone know a solution?)
• DOMDocument incorrectly converts/removes non-printable/low range characters (eg: &#10;).

Limitations:

• File Format is not supported by:
  • Open Office
  • Google Documents
  • Microsoft Office Live

MySQL Example

require('includes/classes/XSpreadsheet.php');
$spread = new XSpreadsheet($fname)
$spread->AddWorksheet('Products', mysql_query("Select * From products"))
	->AddWorksheet('Categories', mysql_query("Select * From categories"))
	->Generate()->Send();

Array Example

require('includes/classes/XSpreadsheet.php');
$data = array(
	array( 'Column 1', 'Column 2', 'Column 3' ),
	array( 1, 2, 3 ),
);
 
$spread = new XSpreadsheet($fname)
$spread->AddWorksheet('Awesome Sheet', $data )
	->Generate()->Send();

For a very long time I was a Windows guy, I was once a DOS guy. I switched nearly exclusively to Mac for my home use about 4 years ago. I’ve been very happy with it. Its stable, well engineered, and - my favorite part of all - consistent. Yet, in this time there remain a few applications I cannot seem to replace.

Nusphere PhpED

I am a PHP Developer by trade, and PhpED for my money is by far the best development environment for the serious PHP developer. When I do develop on the Mac platform it is usually split between two applications – Coda and TextMate. They are fantastic text editors, don’t misunderstand, but when you are developing highly classed applications a strong IDE becomes highly desirable. PhpED’s IntelliSense style PHP auto completion is on par with and in some ways surpasses Visual Studios.

Applications like Dreamweaver, Coda, TextMate and Espresso by comparison provide very basic auto completion. Zend Studio, Aptana Studio and other Eclipse based solutions have varying qualities of auto completion, but are awkward due to Eclipses generality and slow and visually out of water due to being built on Java. Komodo comes the closest, but can be very slow at times. Weighing in at $299 its pricetag is also heavy.

To give you in an example, in my CorpusPHP Framework the user class is built specifically to be extended for the sites particular needs. The login class therefore has a member instance of whatever type of object extending user you might have. This member is dynamically set as an instance and therefore type cannot be determined by most editors and auto completion will not work.  PhpED on the other hand has a solution. This brings me to my favorite PhpED feature - deep phpDocumentor integration.

class Login {

    /**
    * Object that holds the user object, brought over from the session
    * @var User
    */
    public $user;

    … … …

}

The above code snippet shows the user member of the login class. It can be any type of user, for instance admin or limited. It will though be inherently be something that extends the user object.  Using phpDocumentor syntax here we imply that the type is a user and since PhpED is smart, it auto completes based on this.  If you are unfamiliar with phpDocumentor syntax you should read up on it, and begin marking your PHP up in this standardized syntax.

PhpED takes this integration further and will show descriptions of methods and functions as well as their parameters and return values based on their inline phpDocumentor documentation.

While auto complete is the PhpED killer feature in my book, it has many other excellent features.

 Its internal debugger  is second to none, and requires no setup unlike other debuggers. It installs its own copies of Apache and PHP 4 & PHP 5.2 or 5.3 which it uses to debug. The debugger can output to an internal version of IE or Mozilla or any external browser. Its quite configurable, everything you would expect like ability to set $_GET, $_POST, etc variables, break points, runtime analysis.

Some smaller features I personally enjoy are for instance:

• To-Do list shows you all the todo’s throughout your project.
• Continually improving, high quality CSS/HTML auto completion.
• The ability to set a default character set on a per-project basis
• Non-Ascii range characters show up dark blue in variable and function names, making them obvious – which is particularly helpful when working on code from a Cyrillic coder whereas Α (Alpha) and A are visually identical but entirely different characters.
• Great support – Support will work with you to fix a problem.

Update 7/7/2011

The dark PhpED Theme I use is now available here for PhpED 5 and 6.

Recent Activity

Aug. 31, 2011

Aug. 4, 2011

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Mar. 30, 2011

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Mar. 18, 2011

Mar. 1, 2011

Feb. 24, 2011

Jan. 28, 2011

Jan. 5, 2011

Dec. 21, 2010

Nov. 16, 2010

Nov. 15, 2010

Nov. 13, 2010

Oct. 16, 2010

Oct. 15, 2010

Oct. 13, 2010

CorpusPHP is setting out to be a world class PHP Framework. The aim is simple, to provide encapsulation, modularization, and helpful tools, all without changing the way you write PHP.

Project Information, documentation, and a timeline for the first release available availble soon

Nightly's available at GitHub, or download the latest milestone below.

Build	Date	Message
v0.99 Download	May. 12, 2011	Merge branch 'master' into autoload
v0.981 Download	Dec. 21, 2010	Optional $seperator paramter added to the breadcrumb generator.
v0.98 Download	Aug. 31, 2010	Arial Replaced with Vera, references to helvetica removed
v0.92 Download	May. 14, 2010	Basic SSL support added
v0.9 Download	Feb. 18, 2010	Repository Restructured -Working Corpus now in Source Folder -`Scripts` folder added, includes database dump batch, and README.md HTML viewer -`Local` folder added, for testing use with local database connections, etc Documentation -Finally! Created an initial README.md -TODO moved from includes folder into root
v0.85 Download	Feb. 8, 2010	Cache.php -Major rewrite of cache handling - now requires an instance Configuration.php -Added module option to constructor to interface Corpus class and module namespace Corpus.php -New __premeta function pulls the first scans data into the module namespace -$_cache and $_config added to the __load function, vis-à-vis the module namespace Modules -Updated for new 'name' meta attribute, 'call' depricated, 'callable' boolean added --Button.php --Crux.php --FlashLoader.php --FlickrFeed.php --LastFM.php --TwitterFeed.php -Configuration options added --FlickrFeed.php --LastFM.php --TwitterFeed.php
v0.7 Download	Feb. 3, 2010	functions/general.php -Updated nempty for PHP 5.3 compatibility (Weird casting bug) -Removed some unused, commented out, functions
v0.1 Download	Dec. 2, 2009	Initial CorpusPHP Alpha Release

]]> http://donatstudios.com/Andrew_Gross noreply@donatstudios.com(Donat Studios) Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:21:09 CST http://donatstudios.com/Andrew_Gross http://donatstudios.com/Donat_Studios_Launches noreply@donatstudios.com(Donat Studios) Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:45:28 CST http://donatstudios.com/Donat_Studios_Launches After much ado, Donat Studios is finally live!

There are a few things left to complete. Eventually setting up the documentation and public git repository for CorpusPHP will certainly take up a fair amount of time. I'm still not quite sure what to put in my portfolio, I was thinking of for the time being just throwing a bunch of my sketches in there.

My reasoning and goals behind this site are slightly different than my other sites. More than anything I wanted a place where I could rant about everything web related. I have strong opinions on many topics, and where Oasisband.net is good for movies and politics, and PHPStandards is pretty much just raw anger directed at Zend, and my live journal is for my personal life. Donat Studios on the other hand will allow me to express my thoughts on web development, databases, html, php, ajax, design, basically everything I do at work.

Where does the name "Donat Studios" come from? I was getting some photos printed by a great place in St. Paul, "White House Custom Color" and they needed to know the name of my studio. I didn't have a studio, so I quickly made up "Donat Studios". Later, I realized I liked the name, and it stuck.

Here's wishing my newest domain luck!

While building this site I was trying to bring in images from my Flickr account, as you may have noticed. Building the module in PHP, I basically ran file_get_contents on the feeds url and passed that directly into json_decode. On print_r’ing the results, it was null. It had failed.  As a test I echoed the result of the file_get_contents to see what was up. It was succeeding at retrieving the feed, and at a glance it looked like JSON, yet it was failing to parse. I knew something was up.

Here is an example result set:

jsonFlickrFeed({
                "title": "Uploads from donatj",
                "link": "http://www.flickr.com/photos/donatj/",
                "description": "",
                "modified": "2009-05-31T08:24:46Z",
                "generator": "http://www.flickr.com/",
                "items": [
           {
                        "title": "STP81353",
                        "link": "http://www.flickr.com/photos/donatj/3581174864/",
                        "media": {"m":"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3568/3581174864_be1a44764e_m.jpg"},
                        "date_taken": "2009-03-30T19:10:34-08:00",
                        "description": "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/donatj/\">donatj<\/a> posted a photo:<\/p> <p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/
photos/donatj/3581174864/\" title=\"STP81353\"><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3568/3581174864_be1a44764e_m.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"240\" alt=\"S
TP81353\" /><\/a><\/p> ",
                        "published": "2009-05-31T08:24:46Z",
                        "author": "nobody@flickr.com (donatj)",
                        "author_id": "30444376@N08",
                        "tags": ""
           }
        ]
})

On further examination I noticed, as you should have noted, the data is wrapped in a function.  My first thought was that this violates the JSON Specification, so I immediately tweeted about how silly it was for Flickr to have an invalid JSON feed when their parent company Yahoo employs Douglas Crockford, the creator of JSON. I soon received a response from a colleague informing me that this was JSONP. He explained what it was, and how to use it in jQuery.

It basically comes down to this:  XMLHttpRequest will not, for cross site scripting protection, work across domains.  Therefore, JSON cannot be directly retrieved nor parsed via JavaScript across domains.
This is where JSONP comes in.  JSONP is essentially a regular JSON result set wrapped in a function.  Rather than using XMLHttpRequest to retrieve the document, you dynamically attach a script tag to the page pointing the the JSONP document, which evokes a function call passing your JSON object to whatever function the JSONP is set to pass the data to, forgoing the need to eval anything.

I have a number of criticisms of this approach.

• First and foremost, JSONP is at its very heart remote code execution.  You must have absolute faith not only in the intentions of the site you are bringing the feed in from, but the security of said site as well, because the code is in fact being executed by the browser with no chance for putting regular expressions or other such safety mechanisms in place. This makes your site and visitors wide open to any and all malicious code a hacker may plant in the feed.
• JSONP is a language specific data type. What I mean by this is that JSONP is designed for JavaScript, and even then strictly in the context of a web browser.  There is no need, none, for JSONP anywhere else or in any other language (PHP, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails). Making a feed in a language specific format is inherently in bad form.
• Adding to the last point, other languages currently cannot naturally parse JSONP. As I ran into in PHP, it is not valid JSON and json_decode will not handle it.  My colleagues answer was to write a regular expression to remove the function, but this is at best a hack.
• Mixing function and data goes in the face of separation of concerns. You’ve got logic in your data, you’ve got data in your logic.  Bad form, good sir, bad form.

JSONP is in many cases an unsafe practice, and more over its just evil. It is a necessary evil in some cases, but evil none the less.

There is at least one safe alternative to JSONP, and I’m willing to wager more. The simplest solution provided you have access to server side code is to download, sanitize, optionally cache, and finally pass locally any remote JSON to the client rather than having the clients machine directly load the feed. Yes, this is added overhead on your side, bur for much added security.

If nothing else, it is up to you to weigh the risks and benefits before blindly using JSONP.