Yesterday I was in a discussion with one of the people on my course and we went into talking about Object Oriented coding and Frameworks. It has been on my mind for a while about how inefficient me coding in a procedural method is. When I got home I dived onto Amazon and decided to update my development library to be.
I ordered 2 books (I would love to order more but student loans don’t stretch that far) both PHP based as it’s the language I am most proficient in.
+ PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, Practice
+Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators (Expert’s Voice)
They both have very good reviews and one person on my course has the Objects, Patterns and Practice book.
My current to do list contains:
+ Learn to use the Cake PHP framework
+ Become proficient in Java Script and the Document Object Model
+ Add an AJAX powered interface over the foundations of this website
+ Finish the LGBT website when they get their funding through for their hosting
+ Finally take a look at the Microsoft Web Technologies such as the .NET Framework.
I know it’s a big list and within all of that I have a huge workload from university assignments.
Currently my moral of my University course is low as I don’t feel like I’m learning anything new and that the course is a hindrance to my progression in the technologies within the web. But I am just here to prove that
web technology students do produce quality work. As there is a feeling within the course school that web technology is a second rate course (Media Technology with a bit of PHP as some people have said).
It has recently been in the news that Apple boss Steve Jobs has requested that all the worlds largest record companies agree to sell their music online without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
I’m sure you’ve come across the problems which I have which is incompatibility. All of a sudden you find you can’t put your music onto your other computer or music playing device.
Apples iTunes which is arguably the best legal music downloading system on the internet has this problem but from reading the news over the past few weeks it has been bought to my attention that it isn’t Apple which is giving us this problem. It is the money hungry record labels which won’t let Apple sell their music without DRM.
We should be able to use our music which we pay for the license to listen to on any medium we see fit without some piece of code saying “no you can’t do that”.
I can’t use any of the music I download off iTunes on anything other than my Laptop or PC because I don’t have an iPod and my other music players don’t support the DRM Apple is forced to put onto the music before they can sell it online.
Although there is a way around this but it is not a method I would like to use on a large amount of tracks. It’s as simple as opening up a program such as Adobe Audition and setting your computers audio input device to Wave and click record. I know its a lot of effort but there is no other way to listen to the music on my phone which is my MP3 playing device.
There is no way they are ever going to stop copyright as people will always find a way around the protection which is put on.
But and it’s a bit BUT what they will end up doing is driving all their valued, law abiding customers onto illegal means of downloading just so they can use the music they download in the manner they want to.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6337275.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6344929.stm
I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth. My laptop has been in the repair center for a while (3 weeks and 1 day to be exact). Putting my online life into a bit of a mess with not having Outlook to organize all my email accounts for me. I set my personal email to an IMAP so I could check for important emails but some will have got through as seen as spam.
My last blog was on the spam artist the lowest of all of gods creatures to ever walk this earth. I have just downloaded all my emails from each of my accounts and have a nice healthy collection of around 60% spam (about 900 spam and 200 legitimate emails). So I have just spent the duration of a full to flat laptop battery (Which isn’t much on a Toshiba Tecra A4) replying to emails and sorting out all the junk which managed to sneak through the spam filter.
Right. After the explanation for my absence time for my blog.
I have recently been working with relational databases for a university project which is disappointingly only got a 2.1 for. I wrote an ordering system for solid fuels company (I did a similar project for my A levels but never got it to work in Access which is an awful program). It contained 3 tables and pulled information from all of them allowing the user to add, edit, delete and view all orders, customers and fuels.
At first the use of relational tables was very daunting. I tried to get away without going too far out of my comfort zone but soon found myself grabbing my cyber board and surfing the web for the SQL syntax for JOINs.
I didn’t realize how many different types of JOIN they were and they all do pretty much the same thing but in a slightly different way. Making sense of all of them was going to take a bit longer than the 2 days I left myself to write a fully working ordering system for a solid fuels company. I ended up using INNER JOIN as it only retrieved the data from the right which was related to the content on the right.
W3Schools saved me from my lack of knowledge on tables.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp
This post may seem random but this assignment made me realize how important relational tables actually are.