1. FTP access 2. Linux/Unix/BSD command line access 3. SSH/Telnet/Remote access 4. Samba file access 5. Apache 6. PHP 7. At least 2 monitors 8. MySQL Query Browser (that can access database) 9. Database Listed above is a list of what I believe to be essentials for any decent programming environment. After I reconfigured my home environment to pretty much contain everything listed above, coding has become a lot easier.
Author Archives: Jackson Leung
Ipod Touch
Shortly after I got my iPod Touch I started doing a little research on it. With a few easy steps and a couple of minutes invested, you can convert a 300 hundred dollar music player to a pretty awesome PDA. An iPod Touch empowered with tons of 3rd party applications developed through the slave labor …
iTouch
As a christmas present from work, I got an apple ipod touch! iTouch for short. It’s almost like an iphone, except it’s not a phone. I was super stoked for about 15-30 minutes, but afterwards, I realized that I would most likely never use it solely as a music player. The fragility and relative cost …
Factories
Today, while reading some of my PHP books, I’ve came across a simple and clear definition for what a “factory” is and I decided to share it. A factory is a class or method with the responsibility for generating objects. I’m obviously not writing this post for those who are already well-versed in the ways …
Timeouts
What are timeouts? Besides a form of punishment for misbehaving kids, time outs are a threshold for scripts. When you set a time out, you basically tell the script that if the execution time of the task exceeds a certain amount, do something; normally, error out. The utilization of time outs are important, especially if …
Big Company vs Small Company
There are difference between big companies and small companies, I have noticed. I’ve noticed that a lot of new hires coming from big companies are more oriented towards getting something done, versus getting something done right, and when they make mistakes, they brush it off as if it’s not significant or deny responsibility. I don’t …
PHP Image Library
I had to write some code to generate graphs today and I must say that the image library is awesome! It reminds me of the swing class of Java, but I think it’s awfully neat to have a way to programmatically generate images. Although, I think PHP graphics are great for more “static” like pages, …
Foundation
I think the foundation is possibly the most important part of any type of script. In the script world, the foundation would possibly mean the heart of the system, the driving principle behind the component. I’m currently engaged in a project where we designed certain components around a core principle, and suddenly the core principle …
Communication Among Developers
Developer 1: “I think we need to sort this array by it’s value” Developer 2: “You should write a hash, store the values in the hash, and then sort it” Developer 1: “That’s what I just said…” … Developer 1: “Alright, I’m going to sort this array” Developer 2: “Alright, but before you do that… …
Quotes
Here are some quotes that I really like: “All that is complex is not useful. All that is useful is simple.” — MikhailKalashnikov “It should be as simple as possible, but no simpler” — Albert Einstein “Do the simplist thing that works” — Second XP Principle “You aren’t going to need it” (YAGNI) Principle – …