This time I’m going to put up a really bold statement. I believe it’s currently possible to fight spam on the web without pictures, javascript or anything else that might compromise usability. Sounds quite impossible and too good to be true, right? Well, it might not be that far fetched as it seems. Please read on and I’ll explain why. more…

I’ve previous been writing about why PHP and Unicode/UTF-8 is a bad combination. Even though UTF-8 in PHP should (for now) be avoided, it is sometimes a necessity to use it. As UTF-8 can be quite problematic for some people to use, I thought I this time should write about how to actually use it properly. In this first part I’ll deal with the basic handling of UTF-8 in PHP using the PHP extensions mbstring and/or iconv.

more…

I’ve previously been talking about premature optimization. Today I thought I should illustrate how ridicules some of the stuff is by busting “echo is faster than print”. There’s a lot of people calming that this is true (1, 2, 3, 4 and a lot of others). Now to be clear, they are somewhat right about this. Echo is really faster than print, which it really should due to the fact that echo don’t return anything while print does. The problem and my point here however, is how much this difference really is. The answer is so tiny that you can forget actually measuring it in a real world application. There’s why: more…

Donald Knuth once wrote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. I have to agree with him on that. One thing I’ve been dying to write about is the massive amount of crappy PHP optimization tips found on the net. Two examples of such is Reinhold Weber’s 40 Tips for optimizing your php code and chazzuka’s 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances. They do both have some good tips here and there, but in general this is just stupid tips, or more precise, premature optimization. There are reasons why such tips are bad. more…

Just as I thought EA couldn’t get any more worse then what we’ve seen with Spore, I read this Norwegian article about EA and it’s alleged new policy. For the non-Norwegian readers, this article basically talks about a post in the EA forum by a EA-employee

Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned.

Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature.

Now this is really crazy! Apparently, if EA don’t like what you do on their forum or anywhere else for that matter, you’ll be locked out of your own games! If this is really true, then I’ve never ever seen such a distasteful treatment of customers in my entire life. True, the victims here are most likely not mom’s angel, but they’ve still got rights, and this isn’t mentioned in the TOS. Not that I’m a lawyer or anything, but I think it’s illegal to steal, and if EA regards piracy as stealing, then this is definitely stealing too! So congrats EA, you just became a thief!

Update:  Thankfully, it turns out that this is just a misunderstanding. EA will NOT ban you from you game.

As we all know, Microsoft is a very innovative company. They proved that by making Windows VistaX, and today they’ve proven it yet again by showing off their new OS, Windows KDE. Just take a look: more…

No, I’m not joking. As of last Saturday, the development team of PHP decided that backslash will be the new namespace separator in PHP, replacing :: which has been used up until now. The reason for this is quite alarming to be honest. A bug. more…

One thing that really annoy me these days is the unrestricted enthusiasm for PHP and Unicode, primarily in the form of UTF-8. These people seem to think that Unicode is some fantastic thing they just have to use even though a single byte charset like ISO-8859-1 is more than sufficient for their need. Don’t get me wrong, Unicode is good and everything, but not when you’re using PHP. Why? Because PHP by itself does not support Unicode. Now I know alot of people will object and say that there is mbstring. If you’re one of them, please read this carefully: mbstring is a Swiss cheese. Now I know alot of people is not using mbstring and basicly is using Unicode (most likely UTF-8) blissfully unaware of it’s dangers. So before I get into why mbstring is a horrible piece of coding, I’d like to explain why you shouldn’t use Unicode without some measures. more…