One of the ways in which my PHP coding style has evolved is the way in which long statements can be split over several lines. This takes advantage of the free-form nature of PHP, and saves the need to create intermediate variables that are only used once; it also encourages staying within reasonable character margins, […]

I’ve used a small web hosting firm called Sonnet Hosting for about five years, primarily as an email provider. Whilst something like Hotmail might be more reliable, I prefer to pay a small monthly sum to get some control over how my email works. Firstly, I prefer to use email on my own domain names, […]

Some months ago, I purchased the MagicShine MJ-808 front headlight for my bike, and in general I’ve been very pleased with it. The light output is amazing, reportedly 900 lumens worth; I now flood the road with a very usable light, as well as being very visible to oncoming traffic. I did have some problems […]

I should start a new Googlebomb: useless. But first, I should explain. I purchased a £26 rail ticket from London Midland from Birmingham to London back in December, and found that I wasn’t able to go after all. So, I applied for a refund online, prior to the travel date, and received an email that […]

I am currently working on a project proposal that will allow the user to design and build their own Propel database, and to connect it to a database instance. I’d originally intended to use the propel-gen script plus a re-written build.properties file on every call, but I decided that this wasn’t very elegant, and that […]

I’m quite a fan of Propel, having used it with Symfony since the 1.2.x days. That version was relatively slow, as it used its own data access layer; it wasn’t until 1.3 that it switched to the much faster PDO approach. Nevertheless, the ability to create objects and persist them, to look up items without […]