RECENT ARTICLES

Creating a customised Windows PE 3.0 image

Other, Tutorials / Thursday January 14th, 2010 / No comments

Microsoft Windows PE 3.0 is a stripped-down version of Windows 7 based on the 7100 kernel. Capable of running Windows-32 applications, Windows PE can be used for deploying, servicing and repairing Windows installations, as well as running other tools, such as Norton Ghost. Windows PE 3.0 is created using the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7, a free application suite available on the Microsoft website. The Windows AIK for Windows 7 must be installed on a machine running Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Useful PHP debugging functions

PHP / Sunday November 15th, 2009 / No comments

While we all wish that we could program in PHP without making any mistakes, sometimes we do encounter bugs that prevent our scripts from running correctly. When this happens, we have to debug, however, especially when programs get very big, trying to figure out the source of the errors can get very confusing. Nevertheless, PHP provides some useful functions to help in the debugging process. Some the ones I find particularly useful are detailed below.

Digression - functions for the TI-89

Other, The Lab / Sunday November 1st, 2009 / No comments

Nothing to do with web development, but a while ago I wrote some Maths functions in BASIC for my TI-89, a calculator that has been in my cupboard gathering dust for the past year or so. However, I recently dug it out, and discovered all of my old code still on it. So, all the functions I wrote are now available for download through the Lab, at http://lab.aspektas.com/mkfunc.zip.

MySQL Querier - quick DB management

The Lab, PHP / Saturday September 19th, 2009 / No comments

A long time ago (e.g. a couple of years) I wrote a very small one-page PHP script for myself to use to quickly manage my MySQL databases through direct SQL queries, phpMyAdmin being to slow in some occasions. Now, I've put the source up in the Lab, so anyone can use it.

Notes on WYSIWYG

(X)HTML & CSS, Musings / Wednesday September 2nd, 2009 / No comments

I've been having quite a few discussions recently on the merits and disadvantages of using WYSIWYG editors, like Dreamweaver and iWeb, and even direct PSD to HTML converters such as SiteGrinder, for the creation of websites. Is it possible to create valid, accessible, and cleanly marked-up pages with such tools? These applications all too often create tag soups consisting primarily of tables and absolutely positioned elements, that browsers struggle to render and search engines fail to comprehend. However, in the hands of a skilled designer, can these problems be overcome?

URL rewriting using PATH_INFO

Tutorials, PHP / Wednesday August 12th, 2009 / No comments

There are many reasons to rewrite a website's URLs - for SEO purposes, better organisation or simply so that the URLs look nicer. The most popular way to do this on Apache servers (and on all servers it has been ported to) is to use mod_rewrite, a server configuration option that uses regular expressions to rewrite URLs dynamically. However, mod_rewrite isn't always available - you could be using a different server such as Lighttpd, or may simply not have rights to create .htaccess files on a shared host. For such situations, an alternative is needed, and one such alternative is the use of the PATH_INFO server variable.

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