Archive for June, 2007
Day 4 - Incline, Insanity and Inebriation
The morning routine ended up with Matt and I having breakfast in another, proto-kitchen located on the second floor which involved traversing a set of stairs and navigating around some barbarous looking corrugated sheets. The tradition of good coffee and unidentifiable jam continued accompanied by omelette and various fruits.
Alfredo and the mechanic from the previous day were already present when we finished breakfast, evidently ready to take us on our planned trip which today was to be Gran Piedre, a mountain 30 kilometres from Santiago. (more…)
Day 3 - Car, Castle and Closed
After a good nights sleep I woke up around 7am, showered and tidied the room before having breakfast. Our casa, like a lot of buildings within a Cuban city, is very vertical; while only two rooms wide, our casa was four stories high including the balcony and a cornucopia of side corridors and hidden rooms folding in on themselves. Our breakfast was on the first floor kitchen which housed an immense sink and cooker along with sturdy, tiled surfaces. Once breakfast was finished and Matt had showered, we were introduced to a man called Alfredo who looked like his skin had been spray-waxed directly onto his skeleton; angular without being dessicated. Alfredo spoke a wide variety of basic English and informed us that he could organise a trip outside of Santiago for us. (more…)
Silver Air
With news that Adobe had recently released and renamed their “Apollo” project to “AIR”, I decided that it was perhaps time to discover exactly what Adobe was incubating. In terms of software and companies, there are none which I follow with any amount of zeal; if a piece of software delivers on promises of being better than what I currently use then I have no qualms of switching. As such, I hadn’t followed Adobe very closely since their merger with Macromedia, and was only dimly aware of their release of CS3.
It surprised me then that AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime, seemed such a departure from what Adobe had released previously. Essentially it is a virtual machine that allows developers to use HTML, CSS and Javascript or Flash and Flex to develop “Rich Internet Applications” for the desktop. That’s the corporate rhetoric, and it took me the best part of a morning to figure out exactly what AIR was trying to do and the rest of the day wondering Why? (more…)
PHP request routing
Request routing in PHP is when you take away a degree of URL control from your web-server and hand it over to your PHP application. Ordinarily, an http URI points to a file or directory, whereby the file structure of your publicly accessible area dictates the URI’s which are available. When a web server can’t find a file, it throws a 404 and presents an error page. Request routing doesn’t remove the file structure URI’s (if properly configured) but supplements the available URI space with one which can be controlled through PHP.
The benefits for doing this versus the work taken to achieve it weigh heavily on how much you value “nice” URLs in terms of memorability and search engine snuggliness. Request routing allows for arbitrary URLs, however, it adds an overhead to nearly every page request made to your application and also means your PHP system now needs to deal with the 404 error messages that the web server would have otherwise transparently sent. Despite it’s downside and moderately complex methodology, for large or commercial systems, the ability to tightly control the URLs can greatly aid extensibility and maintainability. (more…)
