I thought my idea for a figlet-based Captcha system was just my own nerdy, sick secret. Now I discover that someone has actually built one. Wow.

Yesterday was the Snakes and Rubies meetup in Chicago, featuring Adrian Holovaty of the Django Project and David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails. By all reports it was an informative and enjoyable event, with about 100 to 200 people attending. I’m looking forward to hearing the audio when it becomes available.

In the meanwhile, thinkhole.org has a good roundup of notes and blog postings, and of course there’s always Technorati.

Here’s another advice post. Luckily, many of you can test out of it, like a college Gen Ed requirement. Here’s the test:

1. What does the following regular expression do? ^http[s]?://([a-z]+\.)?example\.com/$ (Answer below.)

The target audience for this post is people who have heard of regular expressions, but don’t use them. Or who have used them a little, but have the feeling they really should know them better.

You’re right. You should.

Though I’m doing more and more work in Python, I still write a lot of PHP code, especially for quick one-off web automation tasks.

There is plenty of activity on the other end of the scale in the PHP world now: frameworks like Cake, WASP, Solar, TaniPHP, the forthcoming Zend Framework. All this action is very cool, but doesn’t address the one-page script – and the one-page script is still worth doing right.

Many people come into PHP helter-skelter, not realizing that “Wow, it works!” is not the highest level of achievement possible. I don’t offer myself as a PHP guru, but below are some of the conventions (I dare not call them “patterns”) I use that I think are worth passing along.

You can’t possibly consider yourself an expert wielder of HTML and CSS unless you’ve read this excellent history, explication, and analysis of CSS hacks. Even master practitioners of Wilbur need to read it. Especially master practitioners of Wilbur.

I was intrigued by the suggestion that hacks are supposed to look ugly to discourage you from using them. Bit of an ex post facto rationalization, I think!

---

Paul commented on Tue Sep 26 09:21:46 2006: