Technical Blog

This is one of those weird programming terms that I never bothered to learn, but discovered that I had already been using for a long time.

Polymorphism is an object-oriented programming design pattern. When you create an object, you have one or more methods (or functions) that each have a predefined purpose, each being a tidy, reusable black of code that you can use over and over again. The concept of polymorphism allows you to have one reusable block of code, i.e., a function, and have another reusable block of code that implements the same functionality of the other block verbatim, in addition to extending that functionality in some way.

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Smashing!  Brilliant!

Charles Miller points out how Apple's TV ads bear a striking resemblance to the plot of the class Roadrunner vs. Coyote cartoons.

Hi, I'm a Mac... Beep, beep!

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Over the course of the past year I've become a huge fan of Apple's Mac OS X on the server-side.  Learning about and taking advantage of some cocoa programming fu, like CoreImage.

Of course, I'm primarily a PHP programmer, not that I couldn’t hack around in cocoa, I just haven't had much time to learn more about it.

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It actually works! :-)  Well done.  Truly first class CSS support in Microsoft's browser.  Renders complex CSS designs flawlessly out of the box.  I, for one, am elated.

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mod_rewrite is a very useful, and very complicated Apache module that lets you manipulate incoming requests.  Uses for this module vary from redirecting content from one URL to another for the purpose of maintaing SEO and legacy URLs to simply making your URLs more readable and understandable, and not so weighed down with technical luggage, as it were.

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On Mac servers I love the advent of a neat feature called Time Machine.  Time Machine does incremental backups without having to deal with 3rd-party software, or custom shell scripts like the one I'm about to show.  Unfortunately, on the Linux side there's always some degree of elbow grease that's required.  Which isn't to say you couldn't have Time Machine-like backups on Linux, you certainly can, it just takes a more concentrated technical effort, and you don't get the nifty GUI.

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I set out yesterday on an enormous task, to improve the performance of my PHP framework, Hierophant.  I've been working on Hierophant since early 2005.  One area that I never put much focus into was in the area of download and page load performance.  It was always on the todo list, but kept getting pushed back for one reason or another.  So yesterday I set out to patch this gaping hole in my framework's functionality.

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