Digital Transition

With launching Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft finally admitted that IE 6 is outdated (which is 8 years old by now).
But now they are actually actively urging to upgrade to a newer version.

There are basically 3 groups that are still running IE6:

1. People who don’t have the technical knowledge to upgrade
2. Systems that don’t use IE 6 and/or aren’t connected to the internet
3. Corporate systems that have an enforced policy to use IE 6 (or heaven forbids older)

To get rid of IE 6 they can be approached in 3 ways respectively:

1. Force an upgrade to a higher version, plain and simple
2. Non-internet-connected systems can be left as they are, as long as it doesn’t cause other security problems. Connected systems that don’t use it, should be forced to upgrade.
3. Corporate systems are a little more difficult because of compatibility issues or licenses, but I think corporations have had time enough to switch to a newer version, so here support for IE can be stopped completely both from Microsoft and implementers.

Finally, In my opinion Windows XP is fastly approaching this point as wel. Windows 7 with disabling a few “fancy” features runs perfectly well on those Windows XP boxes.

Finally I found an answer to my Gmail notifier problem. For security reasons I set my gmail account to only use secure connections. Everything will go over https, this also means checking your mail with the Google notifier.
However this excellent little program, doesn’t support SSL.
After almost a month, I stumbled upon Gmail Notifier 2. I really recommend it.

Just came across an annoying problem when reading and displaying a Polish XML file.
The default character encoding functions don’t work because these characters consist of 2 bytes instead of 1.
So mb_string functions to the rescue. (The mb stands for multi-byte)
Here’s the solution:

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
$tmp_info = mb_ereg_replace('Ó', 'Ó', $tmp_info);
$tmp_info = mb_ereg_replace('Ó', 'ó', $tmp_info);


Note that there are HTML entities for those characters as well (Ó and ó respectively), but those are for HTML only. Since I needed to export to XML, they didn’t work.

A nice list of both HTML and XML entities can be found at W3Schools.

Implode

The PHP function implode is one I use frequently.
When you have an array of strings and want to put them in a string, separated by commas, you can either write a loop like this:

$arr = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five');
$str = '';
foreach($arr as $item)
{
$str .= $item . ',';
}
$str = substr($item, 0, strlen($str) - 1);

or you can use the php function implode like this:

$arr = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five');
$str = implode(',', $arr);

This is super!

__ToString Magic Method

On the other hand, there is the __ToString magic method for PHP classes. It allows you to give a string output for your class. Take this simple HTML paragraph class as example:

class p {
private $content = null;
public function __construct($content) {
$this->content = $content;
}
// Some more code
public function __ToString() {
return '<p>' . htmlentities($this->content) . '</p>';
}
}


The problem

Now when you want to combine both, it won’t work:

$arr = array();
$arr[0] = new p('test 1');
$arr[0] = new p('test 2');
$str = implode("\n", $arr);

This will give you a “Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed.”

1. SRP (The Single Responsibility Principle): A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.
2. OCP (The Open Closed Principle): You should be able to extend a classe’s behavior, without modifying it.
3. LSP (The Liskov Substitution Principle): Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.
4. DIP (The Dependency Inversion Principle): Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.
5. ISP (The Interface Segregation Principle): Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

And 2 extra ‘guidelines‘ that is actually from procedural programming, but still applies to methods:

1. One point of return: The function or method should only return a result at 1 location in the code, at the end of the function/method.
2. Only one functionality: A single function or method should only have 1 functionality. In case it has more than 1, it should be split up.

[Via: ButUncleBob.com]