One thing that has recently puzzled me with my discoveries of the Yii PHP framework is to do with how authentication rules work. (In particular RBAC)

I have been recently working on a big project for work that is quite complex with quite a few different systems that are all connected to each other. It also supports different devices, like the iPad and the iPhone. For this app it is important to restrict a user to a particular set of assets (that they create) and share these with other users in their company. To implement this, I stared by looking…

I have recently stumbled on some really awesome tools, Code Igniter and Netbeans IDE for PHP development. I’ve used eclipse for Java development through uni and found it really great. After finishing that I found that using eclipse for PHP just was too slow and didn’t have the right tools for the job.

I used dreamweaver for a while but then stumbled on Netbeans and I am really amazed at how it works and so well. …

Vancouver is an amazing city. So alive and vibrant. It has an arty feel to it. Its bigger than Adelaide but the main shopping areas felt emptier and less alive compared to say Rundle Mall in Adelaide.

I spent most of my time in Granville St in the Samesun backpackers hostel. It was a great stopover point until my journey up to Whistler. Lots of international visitors and people in similar situations, trying to find themselves in this amazing city.

At night time, the street came alive, with party goers heading to clubs and homeless people in search of donations…

I am currently really enjoying working at Bigwig wired in Adelaide doing web development for them. I really enjoy working with a team of designers and then turning the designs into reality and integrating them into CMS’ for clients.

I have very quickly accelerated my knowledge of css, and JavaScript (mainly jQuery) in a small time as there is a big variety in the types of clients and websites that we work on, its definitely a skill to use the latest development techniques but to also keep in mind how it will look in the older browsers like IE7 (we…

I am currently working on a website that requires some scrollable elements on it. The design specification is to do away with the scroll bars to allow for a better more simplistic design. Now I remember this being done in the past in flash, but I wasn’t going to be using flash. So naturally I went out to find a jQuery solution. In most cases doing a google search or stackoverflow search finds some code that needs some tweaking and then away we go, but this time I couldn’t find anything! …

Recently while working on a particular project we had some strange errors that came up. In the usual php like way, the error messages where not very helpful and didn’t allude to what the actual problem was. Have you seen an error like this before?

**Headers Already Sent on line 392

**

Invalid argument supplied for foreach()…

Well, this handy functionality that I discovered in php made my life easier.

var_dump(debug_backtrace()); die;

I placed this right before the code that was complaining, and it allowed me to see where this function was being called from. I was then quickly able to fix the problem and be on my merry way.

Originally published at kieranandrews.com.au.

I recently attended startup weekend in Adelaide. I was really excited because it would be a good opportunity to build something and test my new skills I had learn recently programming ruby (and using rails).

The weekend started on Friday night where attendees had the chance to pitch their ideas in a quick 1 minute pitch. There where some exciting ones. The ones that stood out for me was a pitch about a rating system for health care professionals , a iPhone app to find and rate pubic toilets and a coffee rating app.

I decided to join the team…

I had a bright idea for an improvement for the app I am currently working on. I have a Rails model that has only 2 rows in the database and the data is never changed, it has quite a lot of relationships and is used quite extensively. My idea was to remove the database out of the equasion and create a Model that would be entirely self dependent. Here I will show you my methods of maddness:

def MyModel include ActiveModel::Validations include ActiveModel::Conversion extend ActiveModel::Naming def self.attr_accessor(*vars) @attributes ||= [] @attributes.concat( vars ) super end def self.attributes @attributes end def initialize(attributes={}) attributes && attributes.each do |name, value| send("#{name}=", value) if respond_to? name.to_sym end end def persisted? false end def self.inspect "#<#{ self.to_s} #{ self.attributes.collect{ |e| ":#{ e }" }.join(', ') }>" end end

Originally published at kieranandrews.com.au.