Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Passed ZCE-wo-hoo-I am a certified PHP developer now

May 23, 2009 General, Technology

After days of preparation and studying, I at last took the courage the take the Zend exam last Monday (18th May). I have been preparing for this exam for quite some while, even though I have passed in all the mock exams, I was targeting for the ‘Excellent’ grade in order to confidently put myself in a position to take the exam.

About the exam

  • This is exam full of trick questions. So don’t expect direct answers, there is always a trick around.
  • The real exam can be a lot harder that the mock exams offered by php|architect
  • The certification guide will cover a lot of basics of most of the units, but is not all; you will need to buy additional books and materials in order cover the complete exam syllabi.

Materials

I had the following study materials at my disposal, this doesn’t mean that you will need all of them if you are preparing for the exam.

Zend sells the last three things in one package at a discounted price; you might want to check that out.

Benefits

It gives you a good sense of satisfaction and achievement. This to me is the greatest benefit. The preparation that I went through for this exam makes me feel like an expert in php. I don’t have to go back to the php manual for every odd function, now I can tell them by names.

Secondly it gives you recognition among the developers and others. They allow you to use a logo, which looks fancy on your resume (Checkout my CV). They also have your name listed in their yellow pages directory.

You can call yourself a Zend Certified Engineer, except when you are in Ontario, Canada for crazy reasons…. :)

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Commenting code

Dec 6, 2008 Technology

Commenting code has always been a debatable topic, especially if you have people like me in the team who tend to ignore commenting unless and until they think that they themselves may need this comment. But I have seen code files having a comment at almost once every 10 or 5 lines, I m not sure if it is of any practical use other than making the code completely unreadable. I firmly believe in the concept of English text explaining the logic of commenting, but you don’t need to do this to a developer. A developer should be able to understand code in any possible format and not rely in comments, because coding becomes one of the ways of communication for the developer, he has been with it and has to able to talk and understand code.

Never comment code; if it is hard to write, it should be hard to understand as well.

I am not someone who says a complete no to comments, but i have some point of views like these

  • if there is a simple routeA way of doing something and a complex routeB way of doing something, and if your code has routeB, there should be comments to say why not routeA. this may not be right example, but for me comments can be used to explain why a a particular piece of code behaves like this
  • The code itself can be used to make explanations, or the code can be made readable so that comments become unnecessary (e.g)// method to run database query
    public function oprDB_q() { };

    can be replaced by
    public function runDBQuery() { };
  • well ever famous FIXME’s and TODO’s
  • .. well if i find some more reasons, i will put them up.

how to create and password protected zip archive in ubuntu

Dec 3, 2008 Technology

This is the command used to create encrypted zip files(password protected), i was struggling hard for sometime to see if there is a gui option to do this, unfortunately i couldn’t find any. the command will ask you for a new password and a confirm password, once you give it you get the zip file out.

zip -e myzipfile.zip mytextfile.txt

and so it works and i m happy.

Stop Talking and Start Doing – IBM Ads

Nov 20, 2008 Fun, Technology

I was looking at the IBM campaign called “Stop talking and Start doing” found it really interesting, planning to put that i practice, lets see if i can avoid talking more and start “coding”.

It talks about how enterprises can overcome problems with innovation implementation overcoming issues with existing processes.


Try this URL


www.ibm.com/resilience

Configure HTML Files to be parsed as PHP file in Apache

Nov 13, 2008 Technology

This has been one of the most frequently asked questions that php developers ask me, about how to configure Apache to serve files with .html extenstion as php files and let php to parse those files before they are sent to the client.

Solution

The solution is very simple, all you have to do is to add a “AddType” directive either in your .htaccess or httpd.conf of your Apache

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

Save and restart your apache(if you did the changes in httpd.conf ) and your are done !

Now you will eb able to parse .html files as php files.

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