http://paulmcnally.info A LAMP Developer's WebLog Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:49:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Since apple's keynote the other day announcing their new iPad tablet PC I must admit that I am quite taken by it. Performance aside, it 's just beautiful. Attracting me to it like a crow to milk bottle tops. It basically looks like someone zapped an iPhone with an enlargement ray. ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=34 After a year of no academic study, I have once again reached the point where I need to quench my thirst for knowledge. For what is life if it is boring? and attaining new knowledge and new skills is rarely boring. So here I find myself back on that education train ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=33 As a professional web developer, the benefits of using a Linux platform for development have been quite obvious to me for quite some time. Not only is there a vast range of open source tools at your disposal to help you in the development process, such as IDE's and graphics editor's but the ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=31 I started using the smarty template engine today for one of the applications that I develop at work. The application previously used a home-made templating system that was much more primitive in comparison. It was basically a string replacement engine. I had started reading the documentation on the Smarty website a ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=30 My programmer's editor of choice for quite a while now has been Zend Studio 5.5, it has many useful tools like built-in function reference and code completion. It allows you to create your own colour schemes (unlike the new Zend Studio 6) and debug code. As a secondary editor i would ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=29 Working within a development team on applications usually requires some sort of version control. Version control software such as the newer Subversion (SVN), and older Concurrent Versions System (CVS) store a version of the developmental code internally in a "repository" and allow as many people as required to "check out" ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=28 When developers talk about application development they often spout things like "When developing an application it is beneficial to separate business logic from the presentation logic" Which all sounds very technical and intellectual, but what are they going on about when they say things like this? Imagine a simple website. Three pages liked ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=25 Yesterday I went to an interview for a new job. As with many programming/developer jobs after a bit of a chat the interviewer and a lead developer gave me a small test on my PHP knowledge. I was given 3 pieces of paper with some PHP code on them that was ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=24 I took the second MySQL Certification exam on Friday and I am now proud to call myself a "Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer". It always feels good to add another qualification to the list, and reinforces the fact that I am actually a LAMP developer and not just a PHP developer. For ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=23 [ad#ad-2] Released as a beta on the 2nd September, Google's entrance into the User agent market doesn't really come as a surprise. But the oucome may be! Google Chrome, which utilises the WebKit rendering engine, originally created as part of the KDE Konquror browser library, and later part part of apple's Safari ... http://paulmcnally.info/?p=22