March 14, 2008

Socket To Me, One More Time

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I’ve been testing receiving data through the socket server I talked about in my last post. If you are testing without a steady stream of incoming data, you may need to generate your own UDP packets to send to your socket server. Here’s a simple script to open [...]

Socket To Me

Sockets are the building blocks of networking connections between computers. Today I want to go though how to create a UDP listener (or socket server) in PHP. I recently had to do this to receive GPS data from some black boxes, and had a hard time finding examples of this type of UDP [...]

February 18, 2008

The Power of Regular Expressions

Regular expressions can be somewhat daunting to the beginning programmer. They really do look scary. But just like the back of your math book, it feels pretty good to look back and realize how far you’ve come. I’m going to give you an example of the power of regular expressions, and this [...]

February 8, 2008

If it ain’t broke, make it better

It’s finally time to rewrite that program that everyone is using. You know it’s been overdue for a while. You have some great ideas that you know will make it better, faster, more secure, right? You’ve been putting it off because you know it’s a big job. But now you have time, [...]

February 7, 2008

Simple steps to using the Google Maps API

I really like maps, and no one does maps better than the Google Maps API. Today I’ll go over a few simple steps to getting started with the Google Maps API.

February 6, 2008

The Tao of Appjet

Today I’m going to review a very awesome new web-based IDE called Appjet. This is for the programmer who wants to write web code without setting up a LAMP stack or configuring a server. Now you shouldn’t use that argument with me, since I really enjoy exploring all aspects of LAMP servers (especially [...]