40 Tips for Optimizing PHP Performance

Reinhold Weber has written 40 Tips for Optimizing PHP performance. Many of them were new to me – e.g. $row[‘id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]. I don’t know how he has measured these numbers, but the tips are good overall! Here are the first 10 tips: If a method can be static, declare it […]

Introduction to Screencasting in Linux – recordMyDesktop

Screencasting is a great way to share information. I use it to show bugs to my team, to record training videos of the project management system I am working on, and even to record demos of project deliveries to clients. I use Jing to record videos from my Mac. But wanted to find something useful […]

How to stop keyboard event propagation – Flex / JavaScript?

In a Flex application we are building, we want to listen to Ctrl+N to create a new file. The browser listens to the keystroke and opens a new window. We do not want it to open a new window. This has been a problematic thing for many. I did a lot of research, trial & […]

Removing Word special characters from text / XML in PHP

Microsoft Word converts certain characters into “smart characters”. Double quotes, dashes (em dash / en dash), bullets and so on. These characters break PHP’s XML handling. (or at least they broke it for me – using simplexml_load_string!). How do you clean them? There is an old post that suggests using ereg_replace on a set of […]