Author: Josh Sherman
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How to convert a negative number to a positive number with PHP
Converting a number from negative to positive is a pretty simple process using the absolute function abs(): $positive = abs(-123); // = 123 $positive = abs(123); // also = 123 Absolute returns a positive integer or float based on what you feed it. Because it only ever returns a positive…
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My Experience with Wizpert
For those that aren’t familiar, Wizpert is a platform for chatting with people (Skype, Gtalk and their site) that are experts (referred to as “wizperts”) of specific topics. Earlier in the year I was sent a beta invite to become a wizpert in the category of PHP. I’m not a…
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DirectNIC may have been compromised
Didn’t see any news about it this AM but it seems that DirectNIC may have been compromised. My wife just spoke with Bank of America regarding fraudulent activity on her credit card. According to the person she spoke with, DirectNIC had been compromised and there was a ping against her…
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PHP’s HereDoc versus NowDoc
We’ve previously discussed how to assign variables and add in variables and all of that good stuff, but what about if you are dealing with a large block of text? There’s many approaches, most that require you to be mindful of escaping characters like simply using quotes to wrap a…
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Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required
I’m back on a reading kick as of late having knocked out 3 books in the last few weeks (Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising) including the latest from 37signals, Remote: Office Not Required. I’ve been a…
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How to handle daylight savings time in PHP
If you’ve ever dealt with time in PHP you’ve probably been burnt by daylight savings time before (quite possibly yesterday ;). I’ve been there, waking up on the Sunday of the time change with an email about timestamps being an hour off or some other anomaly that ends up being…
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One Year Quitaversary!
Last week (October 30th, 2013) marks the one year anniversary of quitting my day job at CrowdSavings and pursuing my own startup dreams / running my own company. At the time I had only 3 social networks up and running with around 30k active users (SceneKids making up 99% of…
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Split an array into chunks with PHP
Array chunking is a great way to paginate large arrays and as I found out recently, makes it very easy to map a large array from Redis (by way of mget and/or pipelining) back to the original data. Chunking an array is the process of taking an array and splitting…
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Temporary ufw rules or How I learned to stop scripting and love the shell
This post was originally planned to be a social commentary on the potential for riots this coming Novemeber (a/k/a The 2013 Food Stamp Riots a/k/a The Backlash of the Entitlement Society) but that seemed like such a fucking downer. Then the post was supposed to be about a Python script…
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Shuffle an associative array with PHP
PHP makes it really easy to randomize the order of an array with the shuffle() function. If you’ve ever used this function on an associative array you know that the array will be randomized, but the keys will be dropped. It takes a bit more work, but you can randomize…