http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog Musings on Software Development, etc Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:06:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was getting along fairly well with my own custom-built, lightweight Erlang web server, until I needed to handle file uploading. At this point, I decided it was time to stop trying to re-invent the wheel (or take the lazy approach—whichever way you choose to look at it), and take ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/12/handling-multipart-uploads-with-mochiweb/ Packt Publishing contacted me recently (it would seem, among many others) to ask if I'd like to review one of their new books: Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook, by Jorge Ramon. I was more than happy to oblige, since the book looked like it would contain some interesting material. The Book's Structure The ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/11/book-review-ext-js-3-0-cookbook/ I occasionally find myself needing to try out short chunks of PHP code. For example, to try out a regular expression, or to see how a built-in function behaves if it's not documented very well. Creating a file, moving it to my web server's document root, loading it up in ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/11/a-java-swing-application-for-testing-php-snippets/ I was required to use CodeIgniter for a project recently. I'm generally not a big fan of the framework, but I have grown to like aspects of it. A lot of people seem to praise the documentation, the mass of examples and the active community. Maybe my hopes were set ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/10/fulltext-search-with-mysql-and-codeigniter/ A significant part of my computing degree was the individual project. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about what I did, and hence provide a home for the project online. I'm not going to provide too many concrete details of the implementation—just outline the concept, talk about some ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/09/lineographic-interpretations-of-images-with-an-etch-a-sketch/ Having read Nat Friedman's blog post about the release of SUSE Studio, I thought I'd take a look at it. I was also interested to find out how easy it is to create an appliance for a simple Erlang application. An Introduction to SUSE Studio I'm very impressed with SUSE Studio. It ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/08/deploying-an-erlang-appliance-with-suse-studio/ Introduction I've been working on a project recently that has a rather messy deployment strategy. This resulted in a minor glitch occurring during a recent deployment to a fairly high-profile site when a database table wasn't updated. Clearly the best solution to this problem would be to come up with a better ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/07/php-script-to-compare-mysql-database-schemas/ This article demonstrates how to use a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate a value for Pi. An example program is given, written in Erlang, which can be run in a parallel environment. As well as the theory behind the method, we will look at how random numbers can be generated ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/07/estimating-pi-with-monte-carlo-methods/ I'll keep the introduction to Ext JS brief, and then give a short primer to using Ext. Skip to the charts section if you're already familiar with Ext. Or skip straight to the end if you just want to see the final demo. Ext JS is yet another JavaScript library. However ... http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/07/stocks-with-ext-js-charts/