There are a very few words in the English that can incite rage at the sound of them like the word “cyclist” can, especially in Australia.
The topic of “whether cyclists should pay registration” in Australia has been brought up quite a few times by some people, but is it a good idea?
Misunderstanding When cyclists hear the words “compulsory registration” you can literally hear the veins in the heads of lycra laden cyclists popping out from their foreheads.
Recently whilst working on the reskin of a mammoth web application written in PHP, I encountered a scenario where I needed to wrap elements within a div every four iterations.
The task is simple enough and if you’ve worked with WordPress before especially, you’ll know the aged-old approach is to use a counter and then the modulus operator.
While the modulus and counter approach does work, it is hacky, complicated and messy. You’re probably wondering if there is a better way and there this.
Since NoSQL databases like MongoDB hit the mainstream scene a few years ago, it’s not uncommon to come across numerous Stackoverflow and Quora posts from people asking if or how they should replace a MySQL database with X NoSQL database.
The reality of the situation is you should only make such decisions based on your needs. Blindly picking a database without first assessing whether or not you need too or if it’ll even fit your use-case is a dangerous position to find yourself in.
I’ll give you a hint: it is not to catch terrorists or prevent terrorist organisations communicating and plotting terrorist acts in Australia.
As Tony Abbott pointed out himself Australia’s threat level remains unchanged. The US already knowingly collects metadata via its PRISM program and considering most Australian traffic would be accessing US based websites it does not leave many possible explanations for such a scheme.
What is metadata? Essentially metadata is data about data. Website owners use meta tags for page descriptions, a page title, author tags and more. Essentially it describes the content when read outside of the context of the data it is describing. It’s a higher level description of data.
Move over web 2.0, AJAX, flat design and NoSQL, there is a new buzzword in town that goes by the name of The Internet of Things or as it is commonly known on every tech blog as: IoT.
Wait, what is The Internet of Things? The Internet of Things is essentially buzzword speak for devices and switches that can talk to each other without human intervention. Smart sensors and applications that share data with each other automatically, states are shared and data is used to determine actions and outcomes. Anything with a switch will eventually be connected, it does pose some security concerns, but that is for another time.
The thick plastic sheet currently encasing most Australian start-ups is begging to be pricked with a venture capitalists fork. It’s not secret that investment in the Australian start-up scene is very small, there are a few incubators in 2014 with more on the way, but relatively tiny amounts of capital with unfair terms.
Recently Australia was ranked 13th in Bloomberg’s Global Innovation Index which is a pretty stellar achievement for a country as small as ours.
If you are a user of the versatile Zurb Foundation CSS framework, then you would probably have noticed it is missing one crucial component: a DateTime picker.
No biggie. This plugin here is the only DateTime picker you need that works brilliantly with Foundation. Because it is relatively unopinionated like Zurb itself, you don’t have to undo a crap-tonne of CSS to make it look how you want it too.
An article by Geoff Wozniak titled What ORM’s have taught me: just learn SQL was doing the rounds of Hacker News today and raises some interesting points. Similarly, I have the same feelings towards libraries like jQuery abstracting Javascript to the point where people know the library not the language.
However, I think the advantage of ORM’s far outweigh the disadvantages. I do agree that ORM’s aren’t some cure-all silver bullet that should be used for everything, but there are too many things that ORM’s handle for us like handling basic CRUD operations and handling complex relationships (within reason) which save us time and money.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, then you have heard about the latest health scare to hit the mainstream media since Swine Flu: Ebola virus.
As is always the case, whenever there is an outbreak of anything, the tin-foil wearing conspiracy theorists start proclaiming this is the end of the world, a ploy to take away the rights of Americans, a tactical ploy to start World War 3 and merely a segue into some kind of New World Order/One World Government.
A wonderful feature of Ruby on Rails and also coincidentally in Laravel 4 is mass assignment. Basically you can throw an array of values at your model and insert or update an entry from a form.
In Laravel 3 you had a method called fill which was called on your model object like this: $user = new User; $user->fill($array_values); – in Laravel 4 the method has been replaced with create instead.