SF Personal   Stefano Forenza - Personal Blog

( as I am still working on adapting Wordpress MU to the site I’m developing, this post is work-in-progress and will be updated every now and then. Be sure to check it back in a few days if the argument interests you)

I am always impressed when even large techy organizations like Mozilla adopt popular tools get their stuff done.

Mozilla recently released their new blog, based on Wordpress MU. I would like very much to know if they like it just because I am recently porting the front end of a personal project onto wordpress mu.

How do they deal with security holes (I find wordpress design quite likely to create holes as development progresses)?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I was looking for a way to make an url absolute.

Ok, it’s easy. Guess I should think some good excuse for not being to able to do it in 5 minutes. The sad reality is I ended digging on google (again).

I am posting what I found, for (main, and) your reference. Read the rest of this entry »

Small snippets or full-featured libraries - if you develop in Javascript and don’t have Firefox and Firebug

installed - you’d better get them now.

Firebug is a Firefox extension which brings several top-notch inspection/debugging features. You can inspect DOM, change CSS run-time and so on.

Aside DOM, CSS and Net capabilities Firebug features a very good debugger and some very useful logging capabilities. For example in your scripts you could write:

console.log ( "result is:", var );

and get the javascript variable “var” dumped into Firebug console. Read the rest of this entry »

With the explosion of Rails like Mvc frameworks, URI well-formness whas brought more and more to the attention of web developers.

In php we see often great misuse of HTTP request method, with lots of parameters following the “?”, overuse of POST method and so on. Lack of proper browsers support for PUT/DELETE methods does not help to make situation better. Read the rest of this entry »

A little IM conversation I had with one friend.

• (me) che features vuoi avere per la primissima versione ?

• Felice: non credo che la rilascio pubblica…

• (me) vabbè. che features deve avere ?

• (me) non lo sai, briccone..

• Felice: no..

Translation

• (me): what feature do you plan to include in the very first version ?

• Felice: I guess I won’t make a public release for the alpha.

• (me): ok, but what features do you want in it ?

• (me): you don’t know, right ?

• Felice: right..

Try to always know what you want !

I am slowly beginning to pull online docs and samples for Xdump.

Xdump was one debugging tool I had to develop for the reason that in some situations var_dump() simply is not enough.

Here’s the overview of xdump.

Of course one could say that as good programmer you should never ever findy yourself in such a situation which requires something more powerful than var_dump() or print_r(). I can understand this kind of point-of-view, but I found that real world not always is like that.

Today at work, for example, I had to add some functionality to a zen-cart installation. This is something var_dump simply cannot manage (without driving you crazy, I mean). Read the rest of this entry »

After going through PhpThumb hell, I decided to develop one serious decent caching library for caching dynamically generated images. Read the rest of this entry »

When working with large arrays/objects,with complex references beetween variables or (again) php’s built-in var_dump() e debug_backtrace() shows their limits.

Have you ever tried to var_dump $GLOBALS ?

Even if when I started this lib there were already some classes which provided nice html formatted dump, in the moment I needed one, I couldn’t (my fault) find one. Read the rest of this entry »