http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner Occasional articles about our "back burner" projects, and handy technical tips Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:59:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been using this library for years to make my database interface code database-independent, but I am still discovering new useful functions. Case in point: today I was using the handy rs2csv function, which outputs a recordset to a CSV file with a few lines of code ... $fp = fopen($file, ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2010/03/30/adodb-database-abstraction-library-for-php/ Using an .htaccess file to prevent people stealing bandwidth by linking directly to your images from another website is a popular and well-known technique. I needed to do this, but decided to take it a step further with a little added PHP. Most solutions simply display another image (as polite or ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2009/09/29/preventing-hotlinking-of-images/ It gave me migraines till I discovered jQuery. Now I can validate a form with some simple CSS and a couple of lines of jQuery code. And today I had a rather odd requirement to toggle the colour of cells in a table when you click on them. In the ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2009/02/02/who-knew-javascript-could-be-fun/ I've written about date manipulation in PHP before. There are some truly horrible hacks out there. Today I needed to detect whether a given year was a leap year, in order to write future-proof code for a calendar. PHP has got to have a way of doing this. I Googled ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2009/01/29/php-is-it-a-leap-year/ I have been through quite a few different ways of blogging over the years. The personal blog I started back in 2001 originally used the ur-blogging tool GreyMatter, written by photographer Noah Grey -- this was before such idiot-proof tools as Blogger and Typepad came along, so you had to ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/08/21/from-one-blog-to-another/ I wouldn't say I was a gadget freak, but some gadgets do appeal to me. Nor am I a fan of listening to music on the move; I originally got an MP3 player to listen to audio books and podcasts while out walking. My first was a cigarette-lighter sized Creative ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/06/01/mp3-players-for-the-over-40s/ The eee now spends most of its time being used as a convenient way to play music through the stereo. This means it needs to mount the shared directory on the server downstairs that contains all the music. This caused a few problems initially because Amarok doesn't seem to like ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/05/25/amarok-and-network-shares-on-the-eee-pc/ This is one of those things I can never remember how to do when I need to do it. I don't know why, it's really quite simple: SELECT emailaddress, firstname, lastname, COUNT(emailaddress) FROM customers GROUP BY emailaddress HAVING COUNT(emailaddress) > 1 http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/04/15/sql-query-to-find-duplicate-rows/ The goal for students on the intermediate PHP and MySQL course that I'm running for IWA/HWG is to create a working shopping cart. The course starts in only three days, and I decided I'd better walk the walk and prove I could do it. So I have quickly mocked ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/02/29/chocs-to-go-is-here/ Why doesn't SQL Server come with a built-in method for generating SQL dump files so you can easily port your data to another database? Microsoft in its own little walled garden I suppose; while the facilities in Enterprise Manager for exporting to Excel, Access, ODBC, CSV etc. can be very ... http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/2008/01/24/another-handy-sql-server-utility/