Weblog

It may be obvious to some, but this is a mistake I still see being made a lot, and I think it's high time we got over it.

Stop using PHP closing tags. It really is that simple, and here's why.

On this very site, I've recently started using GeSHi, to implement the rather nifty code syntax highlighting you see in posts like this and this.

I had previously been using PHP's built in highlight_string() function, but that function is only of use for highlighting PHP code! As I often seem to need to highlight other languages, it was time to turn to GeSHi.

Since I did, a couple of people have asked about ease of use, implementation and so forth, so this post is my attempt at answering those questions.

In Getting Started with Mono on Linux I mentioned that my next plan was to get Mono integrated with Apache HTTPD by way of mod_mono.

This turned out to be a bit of a wrestling match. The process itself is remarkably simple, but the poor - or at least outdated - documentation combined with a few minor teething problems made it all much harder than it could have been.

I've recently had cause to look into various strategies for integrating PHP and .NET (on which subject, pointers will be most welcome), which led to a brief investigation of Mono. For the uninitiated, Mono is a "a cross platform, open source .NET development framework". In short, it allows you to compile and run .NET code on a Linux server.

Mono is fairly straightforward to install, although the process isn't terribly well documented, so I figured I'd run through the steps here in case it might help somebody. As a bonus, we'll have a look at something called XSP once we're done.

I really hate those "lookback" blog posts that crop up at the end of each year, don't you? Good. That being agreed, here's mine.

Rant alert. You know what really grinds my gears?

It's those epically long license/copyright notice comment blocks with which some developers, particularly those behind open source PHP projects, insist on prepending source code files.

You've all seen this kind of thing. I'm using Wall4PHP to illustrate my point, but they're by no means the only offenders.

I'm just over a quarter of the way through MST121: Using Mathematics, which I started back in September. My impression is that it's starting to get tougher, but it may just be that my mind has been elsewhere.

One concept with which I found myself to be less confident is Sigma Notation. The principle itself is fairly straightforward (it's kind of like a for loop, if you ask me) but getting actual numbers out of the other side was another matter.

The problem was that I was consistently failing to spot the patterns that indicate that you can substitute in other, hopefully simpler, expressions. So I made a little aide memoire to print out. It covers the three four initial, erm, refactorings that have cropped up, and I figured I may as well share it.