D-talk

There is much talk going on about it, name based hosting should score more negative in google then dedicated hosted websites. The opinions are spread, both sides have good arguments but the side that says "it's mostly bogus" I agree with. Your site CAN have a more negative ranking then a dedicated one if the IP you host on get's shitlisted. Meaning... Continue reading "SEO - shared hosting or dedicated hosting"

Searching is a slow and expensive process, you might say "But google finds it fast!". Then I say yes, you get a (arguable) correct result pretty fast. But then you are missing my point... Searching is slow by definition, because you have to search for something. Knowing something is much faster, now this might sound very obvious but keeping it the back of your mind that searching is slow might optimize your programming optimize process.

Continue reading "Searching is slow!"

A few days ago I got back from Norway, beautiful country! But boring as hell (Went to Rana and the artic circle and some sightseeing). So if you go, bring your camera and leave your kids at home! Special thanks to my dear friend Kathrin who was our hostes, tourguide and the best company we could wish for! A few sight-seeing photo's:

Tomorrow I'll be leaving to visit a friend in Norway. Looking forward to meet her for a long time (last time it was in April/June or something) and we had good fun then! So gl and cya when I get back!

Today I've encountered the jpeg format and the conversion between CMYK and RGB.

I'm working with ImageMagick and the struggle to view 'corrupted images' at least that is what Firefox and Internet Explorer try to tell us. But in fact they just can't read CMYK. And I don't blame them, they have no business reading it anyway, they should stick to RGB.

The command turned out to be quite simple:

convert myCMYKimage.jpg \
    -colorspace rgb \
    ...

The colors however aren't all that great, in fact if you plan on using it seriously they plain s*ck, but all in all I blame that on the user who uploads it, not the 'failing' of the browsers or IM in this part.

IM supports much more advanced way in converting to RGB, using color profiles, etc. But this script is used in a public upload system and I'm not planning to fix something the user should have taken care of!

 

Thanks to ##imagemagick on freenode IRC who helped me with this.

A while ago I've had a discussion about the optimal way to determine a string length in PHP. The obvious way is to use strlen()

However to check the length of a minimal requirement it's actually not that optimal to use strlen. The following is actually much faster (roughly 5 times)

Continue reading "String length vs isset to check string length's"

A while ago I read somewhere about the (what I thought was a neat feature of PHP5) auto-references in PHP5. Bottom line is that it's best to not self-define referencing because the engine outsmarts you! Sara Golemon wrote a nice entry in her log here: http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/51-Youre-being-lied-to..html. Might not be entirely true (since there is a difference), but until I read deeper into this matter I'll take these informative words as is. More internal information can be found here: http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1024 Where Sara takes us into the internals of References in her tutorial "Extension Writing Part III: Resources".

Postbank ( a dutch 'bank' ) always had and for some till has a bad name. But they are trying hard to improve it! Now they thought of something new, the buddy! It's an MSN contact that you can request information from, like your last transactions and the amount of money you have atm. No very critical information or commands can be showed/issued so fairly safe, and in my opinion.. just cool!