Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

After several months of development, I’m proud to announce that the Syllogistic Software team has completed its latest product – the Learn PHP Tutorial Video, found at http://www.LearnPHPTutorial.com/

“That’s great,” you say, “but what is PHP?” Glad you asked! PHP is a web programming language. In fact, it’s a web programming language I’ve been using since version 3 was released in 1998. Hard to believe it’s been around for 10 years now.

Since we use PHP on a daily basis to create dynamic web applications for clients, it was only natural for us to produce a training video to help others do the same.

So have a look at the two free sample chapters we’ve posted, and don’t hesitate to pass our link on to anyone you think might find it useful.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the videos, try out the Support feature on the website. Look forward to hearing what you think!

SPAM email. Everyone hates it. Company and individuals alike have built various systems for dealing with it, but from what I hear, most solutions are sub-optimal.

I currently receive about 365 spam emails per day. 290 in my personal account, and 75 in my work account.

But I hardly ever have to think about this!

That’s because I use hosted Gmail for both my personal and work accounts. Every time a spam email makes it through. I simply check it, and hit the “Report Spam” button. Hundreds of thousands of others do this every day. Then, the Google algorithm goes through and figures out which emails are spam based on this aggregate result.
It ends up being extremely accurate. I’ve only had 2 or 3 false positives* over the past 3 years I’ve used Gmail.

Because of this, I can confidently ignore the spam/junk folder. Gmail saves these messages for 30 days — just in case.

Yet another reason to use hosted Google services…

*A false positive is a legitimate email that gets marked as spam.

I recently came across this article from July in the Financial Post stating that RIM “… blasted Canadian cellphone companies … for their high data rates and for not competing against each other strongly enough.”

This has been a problem in Canada for more then 5 years, and I’m glad to hear that people are starting to make some noise about it.

High-tech companies can’t and won’t develop innovative mobile services in Canada until the current wireless cartel is broken up.

For the longest time, Google Maps’ super-high-resolution images were only available in large city areas, like New York, Toronto, etc. I noticed recently, however, that Kitchener-Waterloo has it now.

I can actually see my car parked at my building. I can also tell that it was taken before May (when the large tree at the bottom right was taken down by a storm) in the summer (all the trees are full and green) and that it was early morning (from the shadows).

I wonder if this has anything to do with Google opening up a larger office in Waterloo soon.

The other day, I was wondering to myself, “What are the most popular web frameworks right now?” Finding accurate numbers is actually pretty hard, so I decided to go to the expert: Google.

Sometimes you can (very unscientifically) determine something’s popularity by simply noting how many references Google has to a particular keyword or phrase, so here are the current results:

Web programming languages:

• ASP.NET: 86 million
• Ruby: 101 million
• PHP: 2.95 billion

Specific web frameworks:

• Symfony: 4.6 million
• CakePHP: 4.8 million
• Ruby on Rails: 5.4 million

I was really surprised that PHP beat ASP.NET by such a wide margin. I was also happy to see that Symfony (my framework of choice) was holding its own against CakePHP and RoR.

It was really surprising to see that Ruby had more references than ASP.NET. Perhaps I’m not searching for the right string. I’d be interested to hear others’ results.