Mike Whiting's Blog

This is probably the most long-winded blog post I have ever made but that’s what blogs are for, right! I had the idea in the bath this morning and it was probably due to the strong coffee I had drunk, which I bought from an independent coffee bean outlet in Camden, from which I (uncharacteristically for me these days) sampled again, because we’re out of decaffeinated tea at the moment. The idea was for a start-up that takes the shape of a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to bring global stories to the forefront of people’s attention that concern the successful collaboration between corporations and charities (and other not-for-profits) in the fight against the effects of globalisation, global economic instability and environmental issues... phew!

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I got tired of emacs not knowing I was essentially editing javascript files while writing JSON so I started to look into JS2-mode until I realised it was kind of overkill. Then I saw this comment that suggested telling emacs to use the inbuilt syntax handling for javascrpt for json files too!

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As a result of finally having suitable equipment within reach I've started working on a collection of solo adventures in sound under the arbitrary alias of 'Disco Punks'.  Hopefully this might grow into something a bit more cohesive than usual for my solo 'work'.  I'm currently toying with idea of buying an electronic drumkit to make it easier to make stuff on deh computers.

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I've finally got to the point where I want to use custom model classes with the RedBean ORM. I personally think this sure speaks volumes for the technology after already using it for various projects for around a year because, as a result, it's reconfirming it's ability to provide 'schemaless' development compared to other ORM technologies. (See DBIx::Class, Doctrine, ActiveRecord etc). Being a Composer convert I automatically wanted to have my models residing in a 'namespaced location' inside my (Empathy) web apps so that they could be auto loaded for me. Although I appreciate the RedBean creator's views on namespaces in PHP, because I think less is often more, I've simply always been a fan, especially since I started to use Composer and becoming aware of the PSR 0 autoloading standard. So assuming I have some 'Acme' components in my web app I would declare them according to the composer documentation as such:

{
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {"Acme": "src/"}
    }
}

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I'm super glad to see today that the first ever website I made is still online that first went up in 1999. Well, I say it's online but 'being cached' is admittedly the more accurate description. This snapshot from archive.org from 2001 has features that include a JavaScript powered "today's date" compoment that seems to be suffering from some kind of millenium bug (just kidding) and a form-to-email page that has field validation and, wait for it,  pop-up windows!

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I recently decided I wanted to apply the PSR-2 strict coding style to my existing PHP code and classes and as result surprised myself how quickly I was able to adopt it naturally in the new code I was writing once I had some similar configuration set across text editors.

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