Tudor Barbu's professional blog

PHP switch

Tudor — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:10:24 +0000

Over the years, I’ve encountered a lot of strange things in PHP, but this one is off the scale: $value = 'zero'; switch ($value) { case 0: echo 'value is zero'; break; default: [...]

JavaZone by Lady Java

Tudor — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:51:01 +0000

Viral advertising in IT. I’m starting to like this…

Accessing a method defined in the current class’ “granpa”

Tudor — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:18:29 +0000

Problem: we have an hierarchy of 3 classes, each extending the one in front (grandfather, father, son). A method – let’s say foo() – is defined in the grandfather class and overridden with a new functionality in the father class. Question: Is there a way in the son class to access the original method (with the [...]

PHP 5.3 certification beta-testers

Tudor — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:44:53 +0000

Zend is looking for beta-tester for its new PHP 5.3 certification programme. If you’re interested, all you have to do is simply take this survey and provide your contact details (so that they can find you).

Remove empty array elements with recursive lambda in PHP 5.3

Tudor — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:08:52 +0000

How do you remove empty elements from a PHP array? The answer’s quite simple: array_filter(). Straight from manual and works like a charm: $filtered = array_filter($raw); Well, most of the time. It’s not recursive by default, so it only removes empty items on the first level of the array. If you have nested arrays and wish to [...]

Javascript based Flash Player

Tudor — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:18:21 +0000

I stumbled upon this Slashdot article, about Smokescreen, a Flash player written entirely in Javascript and which can…are you ready for this…run on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. In your face mr. Jobs!!! Take a look at the demo, it’s very impressive. I’m quite sure that by the end of the week Adobe will buy RevShock, the company that [...]

Constants for table names

Tudor — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:19:44 +0000

While working on a PHP project, I had the following idea: wouldn’t be better to use constants for table names? I mean, having a file, let’s say /application/config/tables.php, which would look something like: define('TABLE_USERS', 'users'); And afterwards, use this value throughout the application: …in the associated Zend_Db_Table_Abstract class Users extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract { protected $_name = TABLE_USERS; } …in joins: $this->select(Zend_Db_Table::SELECT_WITH_FROM_PART) [...]

Serious privacy issues with photocopiers

Tudor — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:02:57 +0000

…scary

Strange PHP scoping

Tudor — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:03:23 +0000

I came to the conclusion that PHP is the programing language with the weirdest features. After the variable variables mess, that allows to you to name your variables stuff like !@#$%^&*()_+= and not be able to use them directly, I thought I saw everything. But no, yesterday I’ve bumped in another strange PHP feature. An [...]

Macbook – first impression

Tudor — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:38:32 +0000

Last week I got my hands on a Macbook for the first time and I must say I’m quite impress with it. I’m not an Apple fanboy that likes everything that has Apple’s logo on it. I bought once an iPod and that’s it. No iPhone, no iPad, no Apple stickers on my car. [...]