Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
This was the second time my parents were visiting us down in Arizona. The first time had been a few weeks after Thomas was born and we spent most of the time fawning over the newborn and getting things done around the house. We did fit in a quick hike over to the San Tan Regional Park, though it was…
In my previous post about anonymous functions I mentioned that PHP 5.3 brought in some sweet semantic improvements. Namely, the release introduced the __invoke method and Closure class. Everytime you create a new anonymous function you are actually creating an instance of Closure, and when you…
Anonymous functions have enjoyed a long history with PHP. Well, some version of anonymous functions. PHP 4, released in the long-ago of 2000, had several functions that required the passing in of callbacks, including usort, array_map, and array_walk. To use these you could pass in a callable by name…
Afternoon hikes in Phoenix are tricky things. On one hand I'm still working on Eastern time, which means that most days I'm done with work between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. That leaves me with several hours of daylight for a short hike during the work week. However, I'm in a desert. Hiking under the…
Chris and I met Kirsty at a small dirt parking lot off of Bell Road in Scottsdale. It wasn't terribly early, maybe thirty minutes before the sunrise, and the morning light was just starting to lighten the cloudy sky. There was a decent chance of rain today which worried all of us. There are few…
My topo map was an old one, dating back to the '80s. As I slowly walked along Cavalry Trail in the Superstitions I gazed over it. This trail headed southeast within a little valley for about a mile before turning sharp south over Red Hills and looping back west along Needle to Boulder Canyon. There…
No moon lit the dark night sky over the Superstition Wilderness trailhead. I stepped away from the parking lot alone with only a meager headlamp to guide me to Garden Valley. Hiking in the dark had become standard fare for long days in the desert, since both Chris and I were willing to wake up and…
So Twitter stores and returns timezones in a relatively non-standard format. Well, non-standard from what PHP (and most languages) can understand. IANA is a fairly universal format and includes 548 zones, covering most, if not all, regional and political handling of UTC offsets and daylight saving…
When I built the pushup Twitter bot a while back there was at least one gaping feature that I skipped over: timezones. The application has a timezone, which makes sense from a tracking and reporting standpoint, but there was no detection of user timezones. If a user wanted to be reminded to do an…
Noah and I pulled into the well maintained parking lot a bit frazzled. It had been a long drive to get here, longer than he was used to, and the little guy was rearing to get out. We were north of Scottsdale and almost a full hour away from our house. I hoped it would be worth the drive. Today was…