Playing with the tool I wrote for my last blog post, I googled “ascii art” and was very impressed by what they do with the Google logo in the search results… Check it out!
ASCII Art Instruction Generator
April 5th, 2010 1 comment »My sister is making up some activity sheets for school (she is a primary school teacher) and wanted some instructions on how to make ascii art for the children.
So I made an Ascii art instruction generator so the kids can follow each step to make their ascii art.
The generator is here: http://www.paulferrett.com/tools/ascii_gen.php
Update “overflow: hidden” style of the HTML tag error in IE
March 16th, 2010 4 comments »When trying to update the “overflow: hidden” style attribute of either the body or the html tag using JavaScript, unsurprisingly, IE throws an error… However using the magic of prototype I found a very simple way of achieving this that keeps Microsoft happy – even IE6.
» Read more: Update “overflow: hidden” style of the HTML tag error in IE
Validate Australian phone numbers in PHP
January 22nd, 2010 2 comments »Here is a very basic PHP function to validate Australia phone (landline and mobile) numbers.
function validate_phone($number) { $number = preg_replace('/[^\d]/', '', $number); return preg_match('/^(0(2|3|4|7|8))?\d{8}$/', $number) || preg_match('/^1(3|8)00\d{6}$/', $number) || preg_match('/^13\d{4}$/', $number); }
Fixing Selenium typing errors in Firefox
January 20th, 2010 1 comment »I recently updated our Selenium Remote Control (RC) testing tool to v1.0.1 so that we could test our site on Google Chrome (and, somewhat tentatively, IE8). We have been using this tool with varying success for quite some time now, with our tests written in PHP. The update process was generally smooth but one annoying bug persisted – Selenium would no longer type the ‘y’ key in Firefox (2 and 3). As a result many of our tests broke simply because the input typed into a text box did not match what was intended.
Triple J’s Hottest 100 2009 Song List Previews
January 6th, 2010 1 comment »When it comes to voting for Triple J’s Hottest 100 I always struggle to think of the songs I want to vote for. I know the songs if I hear them, but can’t think of the artist or title in most cases. A really useful thing would be a list where I can see all the songs I can vote for, with a preview of each next to it.
I haven’t been able to find anything like this so far on the ‘net, so my friend, Tommy, and I went ahead and made one! This is a list of all songs you can vote for in the 2009 Hottest 100, along with a YouTube video preview of each one.
Check it out here: Hottest 100 Song List with Preview. Hope you like it!
iPhone Development
January 5th, 2010 1 comment »Ok, so I’ve started learning how to make iPhone applications – exciting stuff! » Read more: iPhone Development
Why is the MySQL Blackhole storage engine useful?
December 22nd, 2009 3 comments »When reading about the different MySQL storage engines, I was wondering why on earth anyone would want to use the Blackhole engine. » Read more: Why is the MySQL Blackhole storage engine useful?
Encoding an object in XML with PHP
November 10th, 2009 2 comments »Why is it so hard to deal with XML in PHP? Why can’t there be a simple ‘xml_encode()’ and ‘xml_decode()’ like there is with JSON??
» Read more: Encoding an object in XML with PHP
Installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8
October 3rd, 2009 8 comments »This is a step by step I wrote ages ago whilst installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8. I did the FBOP working in the end, although found little to no use for it – there were parts missing (mainly the fbml form parser) so I couldn’t get it set up to create a local facebook testing environment, which is what I wanted to do. I haven’t developed a Facebook App for a while, so I’m not sure if they’ve made any ground releasing a more complete version of the open platform.
» Read more: Installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8
