Ever since I have been living away from my home country of England, I have noticed myself picking up on what I would consider misuses of the English language. On the most part, they are Americanisms, for which I take great pleasure and amusement in refusing to understand, until the person uses the English pronunciation. …
Check your PHP UTF-8 Checklist
I spent way too long this weekend on a problem that had such a simple solution. I guess this issue may have been a little to do with the fact that I use the CodeIgniter framework, which does so much of the hard work for you. it’s easy to get complaisant. I have been working …
Revisited: Tcpdf – Variable Height Table Rows With MultiCell
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about creating variable height table rows using tcpdf. It was a neat solution and I liked it, which was the reason I blogged about it in the first place. However, it turns out that ‘sharing the love’ is not the only reason to blog about these things. …
Cross Browser Testing – Its All Wrong
It was not long ago that I got all excited when I came across the XenoCode virtualized browsers. This seemed a neat idea. At the time one could download an executable (they seem to only be available in-browser now) and run one of the major browsers without interfering with the operating system or confguration you …
Accurate Ems
Whilst supporting browsers that have no full-page zoom and keeping the accessibility at a maximum, the use of ems in your style sheet is a must. This is not a difficult thing to do and you can still think in terms of pixels, thanks to great tools like the Em Calculator. A word of warning …
The Importance of a Good jQuery Selector
As a technical lead and working in a company that has had rapid expansion in the last six months or so, I have had the job of being a mentor to some of the new employees. I don’t think any of them had used jQuery before and so for every person that arrived, I needed …
Captcha Audio with ASP.NET
The subject of captcha images has been well covered. There are plenty of available resources for creating those warped letters. I created such a control that is a combination of quite a few different ideas and was quite proud of it until not thirty seconds after demonstrating it, someone asked whether it had a ‘play …
Tcpdf – Variable Height Table Rows With MultiCell
This post as been superseded. Please see my new post on the subject. During my use of the excellent tcpdf library for creating pdf documents with php, I came across an interesting problem when creating a pdf featuring a grid of data. Although I could have use an html grid to present the data, I …
CodeIgniter Error CSS Classes
When version 1.7 of CodeIgniter was released, they introduced a new form validation class that vastly simplified things. I particularly liked the new way in which any errors that occurred during form validation were displayed on screen. Where as before, an error message for a field was displayed as follows: <?=$this->validation->myfield_error?><?=$this->validation->myfield_error?> It seemed much neater …
Windows UAC. Get Over It.
The slating of Microsofts UAC has recently been reborn now that the early adopters of Windows 7 have found security flaws in the new version. It reminded me of the outrage that occurred when it was first introduced in Vista and at this late stage, prompts me to point out something that was conveniently overlooked …