Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

„CLIPS is a tool for building expert systems. This PHP extension [PHLIPS] provides PHP with a basic interface to a CLIPS environment. Its purpose is to allow deployment of expert systems in PHP.“ Unfortunately the PHP extension doesn’t seem to be developed anymore…

Derek Sivers – 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails: „Ruby is prettier. Rails has nice shortcuts. But no big shortcuts I can’t code-up myself in a day if needed. Looked at from a real practical point of view, I could do anything in PHP, and there were many business…

„Whenever you create an email campaign, do you spend hours testing it in all your different email programs and ISP accounts and spam filters? Or do you just click „send“ and pray to the email gods? We feel your pain. That’s why we created the MailChimp Inbox Inspector…“

Todd Hoff – Log Everything All the Time: „But then I make each process have a command port hosting a simple embedded web server and telnet processor so you can change debug levels and other setting on the fly through the web or telnet interface. This is pretty handy in the field and during development.…

Joel Spolsky – Strategy Letter VI: „The third phase with PCs was Macintosh and Windows. A standard, consistent user interface with features like multiple windows and the Clipboard designed so that applications could work together. The increased usability and power we got out of the new GUIs made personal computing explode. So if history repeats…

cross browser fixed header/footer layout basic method

John Cowan – Third normal form for classes: „If the state can be partitioned into two non-overlapping sub-states such that no methods depend on both of them, then the class should be refactored into two classes with separate states. This also improves encapsulation, as the methods in one class can now be changed without regard…

Shaun Inman – Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM: „File inputs (<input type=“file“ />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.“

Sam Ruby – Dare Takes a Look at CouchDB: „What happens when your application grows so large that you have no choice but to massively employ techniques like sharding? What do you have to give up? What do you need to add back in in order to mitigate the loss of the things you give…

Greg Beaver – The evil that is fear: banning religion from US prisons: „The past 6 years have seen an unprecedented rise in the institutionalization of fear as public policy in the United States. This is of course primarily due to the attacks of 9/11, but not because of the terrorist attacks. The institutionalization of…