In a piece rightfully called The Holy Grail, Simon has come up with a method of writing form validation routines in PHP much easier.
At the moment, validating form data is one of the most tedious things a developer can do. It’s a lot of effort for an important, but barely noticeable effect. I think I’ll be following the progress of this project very closely.
It’s only been up for 2 days and someone is already using my Palindrome API. Hooray!
Derek is using it in quite a similar way to the already existing form, but who cares? It’s really just an academic exercise just now anyway. So, go visit the Palindrome Game.
In related news, I’m going to introduce a few new methods soon. Just need to get into the mindset to code again.
Identity (starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta) is stylish, tense, genuinely creepy and, ultimately, stupid.
The basic premise is interesting enough: a bunch of strangers get stranded together at a motel until morning, their numbers lessening as the night unfolds. So far, so slasher flick. But the strangers come to realise that they all have a connection to each other and they might not be their by accident after all. At this point, there is a real sense of sinister going-ons.
And then the words “ancient Indian burial ground” are mentioned. Thankfully, however, that most laughable of plot devices is never capitalised on. Instead, we’re subjected to something far more embarrasing; the sort of surprise only a writer who ran out of interest could come up with. The audience left laughing.
A perfect example of a movie ruined by a twist.
So, it’s happened once more. To turn it into an end of term tradition, some of my friends and I went bowling today. The last time I went bowling, my hand was all but crippled. This time it’s my knee. How that happened is anyones guess.
We played 10 games: each winning three before the big finale. The person who did worst last time absolutely stormed it this time, stealing the last game and ridiculing the rest of our scores.
On the plus side, I managed to get the high-score of the day: a modest 150. It’s probably my personal best.
Anyway, bowling might look like a sport for the lazy, but boy does it hurt if you’re not used to it. Ice-pack this way, please.
A week or so ago, I updated the palindrome code found on this site, but I couldn’t implement everything I wanted to. Now, I have the time to do it. For the past day or two, I’ve been messing around with XMLRPC servers and clients, trying to get a feel for how it all works. It’s really quite simple once you get into it.
So, in this spirit, I have now got an API for the palindrome checker. While it only has one method at the moment, I’m sure if anything else comes to mind, it’ll be trivial to add it in.
More importantly, by having an XMLRPC server running, I’ll be able to add and incorporate support for more web services; such as pingback. While it’s not available yet, it will be soon enough.