Binary Kitchen

For a decade I have been in love with PHP and realised the time has come to say good bye to an old friend. How could this happen? Well, since few months I'm involved in a new big project and have to explore the current technologies. I had to because PHP isn't suitable for this kind of website.

Breaking old habits isn't always easy but...

For those wanting to develop low-cost, hight-quality software, Szabolcs Michel de Gyurky's groundbreaking book The Cognitive Dynamics of Computer Science: Cost-Effective Large Scale Software Development is a must read. He shows how a manager - by using his principles - can create a winning team that delivers a project on time and under budge...

When I was promoted to replace my good departing team leader last year, he recommended me to read this awesome book The Cognitive Dynamics of Computer Science: Cost-Effective Large Scale Software Development from the author Szabolcs Michel de Gyurky. He studied philosophy since High School, fought wars for the U.S. Army, designed + built man...

In the previous months I migrated lots of JavaScript code lines to jQuery. This for six websites and I can tell you, the file size of all these JavaScript files together have shrunk by 52.6% which is pretty impressive! Without doubt, these websites will benefit from a performance boost: Improved loading and response times, less duplication...

And again, stupid spammers are on the raise and smarter than before. Customers are reporting me more spam than ever through their contact forms. I blacklisted many of their IP addresses, implemented a fuzzy logic to detect dirty words and a hidden input field to simulate a fancy birthdate but none of these methods worked.

So I really be...

Domain name owners, beware of evil scammers these days. Currently a campaign of spam coming from China is on the raise. Their trap is to persuade domain name owners to buy more domain names. This can happen to everyone, even to professional IT guys like you and me. That strange email from a Larry Lee of a Hong Kong was adressed to me and pu...

"Why are secure pages in SSL mode redirected to non-secure pages?" a client of mine asked. This is a big security risk. Imagine completing a bank transaction, being redirected to another transaction page and you don't notice that the browser isn't in the SSL mode anymore. This can happen if the code be...

Under some circumstances, resetting the stylesheet for reducing browser inconsistencies may be a good idea. Me personally, I rarely reset a stylesheet for the websites I develop. Not because loading time increases. Who cares about additional gzipped 0.5kB these days? I rarely reset because it's dangerous and this example shows it.

For o...

Dear clients, now you know why I've been less productive these days. It took me days and weeks to find a lovely place to live and work in Auckland. Yeah, it's 4c Dunbar Road.  Despite of the whole stress, biking around the city - like crossing the motorway bridge early in the morning - was a lovely experience.

Meanwhile I managed t...

You code for hours but it doesn't work. Then you read the documentation which turns out to be poor. The question you posted in the forum is left unanswered for many weeks. Situations like these can happen to any Web Developer like me and is very frustating. I had such one in the previous weeks regarding Google Analytics' Event Tracking.