Debugging with audio
8 Sep 2011 12:00am GMT echo "here"; Sometimes you just want to know that you took the right branch in an if statement, or that the value of a variable is what you expect it to be. Sometimes you don't have the need, time or incentive to fire up the debugger, you just want to dump a few variables to stdout. That works really well if you're writing a CLI script and it's okay if you work on old-fashioned HTML, but when it comes to debugging AJAX requests, it's pretty useless. When the response comes back to the...
PDF DOC XLS ODF from PHP?
1 Sep 2011 12:00am GMT Every PHP developer will sooner or later face a request to output a document as a PDF, XLS, DOC or ODF. Exporting each format by hand is as time consuming as it is dull - especially things like point-by-point positioning of elements in a PDF. So how can we get around this tedious chore using PHP? Continues...
Writing MySQL functions in C
15 Dec 2010 12:00am GMT In the previous post Zdenek explained how to use MySQL stored functions to calculate the distance between two points on the lat/lon plane. Here I take his function as a starting point to describe how to implement user defined functions written in C, and import them into MySQL.
Automatic geolocation and SQL
16 Nov 2010 12:00am GMT Recently we launched a website and platform for iGo Gift Vouchers. One of the screens shows an interactive list of the shops where vouchers can be used. The classic interface design pattern for this is to ask users to provide a postcode, or the name of a city or town, and then display the shops in that area on a map. As usual, we decided to try something new and improve a little on the traditional functionality. We wanted to automatically detect where the user is right now, so we can...
Our brand new tech blog
24 Apr 2009 12:00am GMT Welcome to it!