Realm of Zod
Programming and Technology
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Portable File Encryption with PHP and Java
Posted on June 9th, 2010 No commentsI had a client project come up recently that required HIPAA compliance which meant encryption was going to be involved. The goal was to collect patient information and then store it in encrypted pdf files so they could be downloaded, decrypted, and entered into another system. It did not sound like the most efficient system however that was the spec I was given. I had never worked with symmetric encryption before although it has always been a topic of interest so I jumped at the opportunity to expand my knowledge of cryptography.
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Cryptography, Java, PHP Cryptography, decryption, encryption, Java, mcrypt, php, security, swingRelated Topics
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How Google Won the Html5 Video Standards War
Posted on May 19th, 2010 No commentsToday google open sourced the vp8 video codec which they acquired when they purchased On2 Technologies which has triggered the largest splash i’ve seen in the internet world in a long time. Everyone knew they were going to do it and there was a buzz of speculation surrounding the rumors of what it would do for current standards war occuring in the web browser market. I, myself, stated some time ago that it could be game changer since it would provide the much needed ‘third party’ standard that was needed to prevent another standards fragmentation for web content.
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Dynamic paths in external javascript and stylesheets
Posted on April 19th, 2010 No commentsBest practices dictate that unobtrusive javascript is king these days which means that all javascript should live in external js files instead of cluttering up the html. Simple enough, however, situations arise sometimes where you need to adapt your javascript for dynamic conditions of the application, most notably, the current base directory where your application lives. If your application is small enough you can just hard code paths to images, other scripts, or internal urls however if you are anything like me, you probably shudder at the thought of hard coding any thing. Take this use case into consideration: let’s say we have an external javascript file called myscript.js which houses all of our javascript for handling click events on ajax powered links throughout the site.
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Silk CMS Progress
Posted on April 13th, 2010 No commentsI’ve gotten some inquiries regarding the status of Silk CMS, the content management system I am developing. Since there is some interest in the project I decided to announce that the google code project page has been activated and that I have committed the project to svn. I don’t want to go too much into the design philosophy here since I am planning a large article on CMS design in general however I wanted to start posting about my progress as it gets closer to a production-ready state. Thanks everyone for being patient. I actually created the google project page some time last year when I had been able to work on it and then there was a huge stint of client projects that bombarded me at eroi so I had to move the project to the back burner for a time. Suffice to say, I never had any intention of letting this project become vaporware and I can guarantee that it will not since I can certainly leverage it pretty effectively at my job.
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Remotely Managing Wordpress with PHP
Posted on April 8th, 2010 No commentsWordpress is the ubiquitious platform these days although I hope to change this with the inevitable release of Silk CMS in the next month or so. In my line of work, I tend to have to install many, many copies of wordpress all over the place. Wordpress makes a great platform for deploying niche sets especially and comes with hundreds of plugins that make creating these sites dirt simple. Anyone who has managed niche sites can attest that it becomes quite unwieldy to manage hundreds of websites. It helps to standardize on a common infrastructure for all of them (ie, themes, plugins, etc) however each site needs to be slightly customized to a particular niche. Plugin settings need to be tweaked, headers changed, sublines updated, etc. Uploading wordpress to each host and manually unzipping it and re-uploading everything that is non-stock is one way to go about it but it’s tedious and time consuming. If you happen to host on a hosting service that offers fantastico your job is a little easier but not by much.
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Get Geo Coordinates from Google Maps in PHP
Posted on February 5th, 2010 No commentsGoogle maps offers a rich api for getting a lot of information as you are probably already aware. I’ve written a few locators in the last couple of years involving the use of google maps and doing radial searches based on zip codes. The difficult part for me was getting the geo coordinates of the queried zip code to use as a reference point for doing the radial search. I ended up writing a nice simple class to encapsulate converting zip codes into geo-coordinates.
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Why HipHop is Hype and Facebook Looks Foolish
Posted on February 4th, 2010 1 commentThe twitterverse has been in a flurry of hype over Facebook’s latest abortion: HipHop. For those who don’t know, HipHop is Facebook’s answer to scalability problems on their platform. Since everyone and their dog (literally) is on facebook, their platform responds to millions of requests each day, meaning they need serious hardware and software that can handle this brutal, unrelenting onslaught every second of every day. Facebook is written in Php which is suitable language for most applications on the web however when you push it as hard as facebook has, it starts to split at the seems like any runtime that was not designed with enterprise in mind. You can extend its life with the use of load balancers, smart caching, and good development practices but sooner or later it will fail you.
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Double or Triple Your Ipod’s Capacity With High Efficiency AAC
Posted on February 3rd, 2010 No commentsI got my first ipod two months ago and in fact it was my first mp3 player ever. Shocking for hard core geek right? Well I bought my wife her own ipod a number of years ago but was never able to really afford a second one so I became victim of ‘what cd do i want to bring with me today?’. Over time many of my cds became scratched and dirty from piling up in the center console of my car and I longed for my own portable music device that I could carry around my entire music collection without worry. When the device of my destiny arrived in the mail from my parents for my birthday you can imagine my excitement to immediately cram as much crap on it as I could. I was having a blast until…. I ran out of space. I had only gotten maybe a third of what I really wanted on there but it was all that 8 gigabytes could stand. To put this into perspective I have a 500Gb usb hard drive which houses my archived collection so you can imagine cherry picking that down to 8Gb is an excercise in futility.
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jQuery.imageLoader 1.0 Released
Posted on February 3rd, 2010 9 commentsA while ago I wrote an article on how to dynamically load images using jquery. This has turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I got a lot of feedback on it. As a follow-up I decided to package it up as a real-life jquery plugin and release it into the [...]
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Dynamically Manage Models with Zend_CodeGenerator
Posted on January 19th, 2010 2 commentsThe holidays have passed and at last I’ve gotten enough of my obligations out of the way to begin to innovate on some new code as well as play with some of the new offerings in the latest versions of the Zend Framework. I’ve been most interested in particular with Zend_CodeGenerator since I have spent a lot of time in the last year writing boilerplate code for various projects. I find that the bulk of my time is spent prototyping models so I figured it would not be hard to build a model scaffolding script not unlike the ‘rake’ command in ruby on rails and similar commandline tools offered by the many application platforms out there. Rather than killing my wrists pounding out models, their various attributes and associated mutators/accessors, I decided that my time would be more efficiently spent describing my models using a short hand format (preferably xml) and then having a script translate that into actual classes and files. The Doctrine ORM allows you do this very thing translating YAML into Doctrine Models. This was very interesting to me but I chose to take it a step further and have it build all of my Domain Model infrastructure while it was at it (This includes the models, the gateway classes, and the DAO classes).
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Development, Doctrine, PHP, Zend Framework Doctrine, models, php, scaffolding, scripts, xml, Zend FrameworkRelated Topics
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