Recent posts
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Have You Heard The Wondrous Message?
October 14, 2023 - 1 minute read
One of my favorite hymns in Spanish is “¿Has oído el mensaje?”. The following is my attempt to create a more polished English translation, with rhyme and rhythm matching the Spanish melody.
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Why @@ is the best attribute syntax for PHP
August 21, 2020 - 5 minute read
The Attributes v2 RFC (accepted on May 4, 2020) added support for native attributes in PHP 8 using the
<<Attr>>syntax borrowed from Hacklang. In June, I authored the Shorter Attribute Syntax RFC to propose using@@Attror#[Attr]to address five shortcomings of the original syntax. -
PolyCast: a library for safe type conversion in PHP
October 25, 2015 - 3 minute read
PHP now supports scalar type declarations, but how can user input be safely converted to the correct type?
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High performance linked list sorting in JavaScript
May 20, 2015 - 3 minute read
This post describes an approach to efficiently sort linked lists from SQL in client-side code. While the below examples are written in JavaScript, you could use the same basic technique in almost any modern language.
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Implementing a linked list in SQL
May 17, 2015 - 3 minute read
Recently I was challenged with enabling users to drag and drop items in a list to sort them in any order, and persisting that order in a SQL database.
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Interstellar starships: feasible or fiction?
December 15, 2013 - 6 minute read
Despite the significant scientific progress that has been made, energy requirements, high costs, and the problem of time still present enormous challenges to the vision of interstellar travel as portrayed in Star Trek and other films.
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Google, ethics, and Internet censorship
July 10, 2013 - 6 minute read
What if the websites and other content we want to access online had to first pass through a filter which determines whether or not the content is favorable to the government, and blocks it if it is deemed critical? Sadly, this scenario is currently a part of life in China.
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Psychology in Interactive Web Design
March 25, 2013 - 7 minute read
You may be surprised to discover that there are actually psychological reasons for what makes an interface good or bad, intuitive or difficult to use. This post will explore three areas of good interface design: proprioception, Gestalt psychology, and performance.
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Responsive Captcha: A small PHP library for preventing spam
December 30, 2012 - 1 minute read
Responsive Captcha is a PHP library which generates simple, random arithmetic and logic questions.
Theodore Brown