Last month I attended Hack Manchester – a 24 coding event as part of the Manchester Science Festival, held at MOSI. Having only arranged to team up with Mike, we ended up joining two guys Shaf introduced us to, his colleagues from the BBC, by the names of Jack and Tom. The four of us formed a team,...
This weekend I attended the fifth (my third) PHPNW annual conference. As a member of the local PHPNW user group and community, I volunteer as a helper which involves getting delegates registered, getting the speakers to the right place and making sure everything's running smoothly. Starting on the...
This trick was inspired by Brian Suda who I saw speak at Whisky Web. Take a string, any string. Hash it using MD5. Substring the hash to get a 6-digit hex code. Take a look at what colour that hex code represents. A really simple, really cool way of generating seemingly random colours, that can...
I've just been to Whisky Web, a language-agnostic web conference in Edinburgh organised by a group of local tech guys. It's the first one they've run and it just came from the idea they had to get a bunch of web folk together for a fun conference and social gathering. Held in the heart of the...
The ternary operator is a shorthand way of writing an if/else statement where a particular action occurs in both cases, but the value associated with that action depends on the condition stated. For example, the traditional if/else construct (C/Java/JavScript syntax): if (a > b) { result =...
This post is one of a series of articles adapted from my university dissertation on data visualisation — see the rest of the series. Tag clouds are a great way of dynamically visualising the author-defined keyword content of a blog or news feed. I created a system which would store tags linked to...
This post is one of a series of articles adapted from my university dissertation on data visualisation — see the rest of the series. Around the time I started this project I became an avid Rubik's Cube solver. I practised lots and used to record my solve times using an Android app on my smartphone....
This post is one of a series of articles adapted from my university dissertation on data visualisation — see the rest of the series. I navigated to the list of my Facebook friends (facebook.com/friends.php) and removed the default filtering (usually shows recently active friends) so that the list...
This post is one of a series of articles adapted from my university dissertation on data visualisation — see the rest of the series. There are many ways to generate visualisations using any of the languages I have talked about so far, even some in combination with each other. Sometimes the method...
