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As most languages PHP allows many ways to solve a problem. Some are faster then others. Here are a few ways to improve your PHP code. Loop At some point your program will require a loop. And loop is considered as efficiency killer if you have many nested loop (means loop in a loop) as one loop will required to run ‘n’ times and if you have 1 nested loop, this means your program will have to run n2 times. There are many ways we can define a loop in PHP. But how do you know which one is the best way to loop your data? Apparently, using a for loop is better than foreach and while loop if the maximum loop is pre-calculated outside the for loop! ...

I found something very handy today, search and replace on Mysql databases. You can do it on phpmyadmin or make a php script with this. After moving a wordpress site from server I discovered that all image links were broken because they are placed directly inside each post. They were still linking to the old server. Changing it manually would be a nightmare. Luckily MySql is your friend. To search and replace a text string, start up phpMyAdmin, and click on your database name that you want to run the search and replace through. At the top of the window, click on the “SQL” tab. ...

One of the most painful tasks of a web developer/designer is to ensure that his website is compatible with the majority of the popular browsers. Nowadays this includes Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Opera, and the newest Chrome. Well, you can have firefox, IE and Chrome all on the same system, but what about multiple versions? Most people still use IE6 (they should be shame by the way). ...

Blockquotes are an easy way to make your website stand out, by indicating that you are quoting someone you give a more professional approach to you website. You can do this by using <blockquote> Im quoting someone else</blockquote> But it still needs a little touch, so on your css file add this. blockquote { background:transparent url(blockquote.gif) no-repeat scroll 0 0; font-family:Georgia,"Times New Roman",Times,serif; font-size:1em; margin:15px 0; min-height:32px; padding:0 50px; } Save this image : and watch the result. It will turn out something like this: ...

I decided to starting writing a series of tutorials for building an 2d XNA game engine. Keep in mind that while the main focus is 2d nothing prevents us from adding the 3d stuff later but for now we will stick to 2D. It’s not very original but I’ll call this the Bay Engine. If anyone else has a better idea let me know. Requirements: You must have some Object Oriented Programming background to full understand what we will do here. XNA 3.1 Visual C# Express or Professional 2008 This is it for the first part. It just covers the basic structure, next week I’ll talk about objects2d, scene and screens management. ...

I decided to try Google Chrome today and was pleasantly surprised with it’s speed on loading pages. And I started seeing how slow my Firefox was. At first I thought that it might have something to do with the plugins I have, but then again they are very few, just Echofon, Firebug and Xmarks. So after a little digging I came up with a way to speed up Firefox 3, turn out it was all in the options =) ...

07/01/2011 – By popular request updated to XNA 4.0, xna 3.1 code is still there too One of the things I keep finding is people asking how to do a simple camera 2d in XNA. Today I decided to contribute with my own solution. Most of the time the solution given is to have a class camera with a Vector2 position and when drawing the sprite batch to subtract the camera position to the sprite position itself. Although this work from my point of view it’s not elegant and you can’t have neat features like zooming and rotation. So for my tutorial I’ll do all transformations using a Matrix. Start off by creating the basic class Camera2d ...

After trying to manually clone some classes, but making a sort of copy constructor I was always ending up with lot’s of code and worse, if I add another variable to my class I would sometimes forgot to also clone it. Luckily and after a search I discovered that C# has a cool thing, Reflection. So you can do something like this: using System.Reflection; class MyClass { public int a; public float x; MyClass() { // default constructor } MyClass (MyClass my) { FieldInfo[] fields = typeof(MyClass).GetFields(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance); foreach(FieldInfo f in fields) { f.SetValue(this,f.GetValue(oth)); } } } MyClass obj1 = new MyClass(); obj1.a = 1; obj1.x = 2.0f; MyClass obj2 = new MyClass(obj1); // Obj2 will have same values as obj1 and you // can now use them independently. I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you know a better way ...

I’ve found this picture on the internet and also an interesting and funny article regarding Programmers/Designers relation on work. I’ve already talked about designers and how their critique training makes them impossible to work with. Luckily the designer I work with knows me well and knows how to make me want to fix that, but not pointing the obvious, issuing orders… This doesn’t work. Fix it. A good tactic is to have parameters, request help ...

I’m sure every programmer will like this