Category Archives: Technology

Symfony Forms, Entities, and Validation

In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed some of the design pat­terns behind Sym­fony 2’s Form com­po­nent that make it so fast and sta­ble. As requested by Luis Cor­dova from Craft it Online, I have done fur­ther research into how Sym­fony 2 deals with forms, val­i­da­tion, and enti­ties. Much of the infor­ma­tion in this post can …

January 4, 2012 – 7:27 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Symfony Design Patterns

As rec­om­mended by Dr. Andreas Klap­pe­necker, my CSCE 222 pro­fes­sor last semes­ter, I have been read­ing through the Gang of Four’s Design Pat­terns: Ele­ments of Reusable Object-​​​​Oriented Soft­ware book this sum­mer. In agree­ment with Dr. Klap­pe­necker, this is a must-​​​​read for any­one who works with code. I’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten about the Sym­fony 2 PHP frame­work, and …

July 24, 2011 – 8:06 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

Symfony 2 Walkthrough

Sen­sio unveiled the first pre­view releases of the Sym­fony 2 frame­work a while ago (note the cap­i­tal ‘S’). I couldn’t help but think, great, and just after I was get­ting the hang of sym­fony 1.4. At the time I was con­vert­ing from CakePHP to sym­fony in search of more flex­i­ble rout­ing, but even now I …

June 1, 2011 – 11:59 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Programming, Websites | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

LaTeX: More than Math

These first weeks of school have gone by so fast: 16 hours of course­work will def­i­nitely keep any­one busy. Nonethe­less, CSCE 221 “Data Struc­tures and Algo­rithms” and its co-​​​​curricular, CSCE 222 “Dis­crete Struc­tures for Com­put­ing”, have def­i­nitely proven to be the most inter­est­ing classes I have taken thus far: CSCE 222 is a “math” course, but …

January 28, 2011 – 12:55 pm | By Matthew | Posted in College, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

A Very Special Operating System

Mac OS X has received a lot of love from me recently, and, as one of my friends was so kind to point out, there is another oper­at­ing sys­tem that doesn’t get enough credit at times. This oper­at­ing sys­tem is much more com­pat­i­ble with all com­put­ers (even pre­his­toric ones), it has incred­i­ble boot times, it …

December 21, 2010 – 1:51 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Computers | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Mac OS X Hosting Unleashed

I cov­ered Mac OS X web host­ing before when I wrote about installing Medi­aWiki on Mac OS X, but in that tuto­r­ial, I used XAMPP, a pre­con­fig­ured Server Bun­dle, instead of the exist­ing Apache instal­la­tion that all Mac OS X instal­la­tions have by default. At the time, I was some­what unaware of all the soft­ware that comes with Mac OS X. As a cour­tesy to fel­low new­bie Mac-​​based devel­op­ers like myself, I have included a list of bun­dled software.

December 21, 2010 – 9:19 am | By Matthew | Posted in Software, Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

New Direction, New Theme

Typog­ra­phy and ele­gance add a lot to a website’s con­tent. Since adopt­ing Mac OS X, I’ve devel­oped an eye for smooth, mono­chro­matic, min­i­mal­ist themes that really make the focal con­tent stand out. Crav­ing ye olde Webster’s classy feel, I’ve been on the hunt for a more ele­gant theme for quite some time now. I also find …

December 18, 2010 – 10:25 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Websites | Tagged , | Comments (1)

UNIX or Not? Installing MediaWiki on Mac OS X

I’ve been tak­ing notes on my Mac­Book using a local Medi­aWiki instal­la­tion (there’s a pub­lic ver­sion at http://​notes​.kom​put​er​wiz​.net:8000). Here’s a list of the nec­es­sary pack­ages: Apache, MySQL, PHP, ImageMag­ick, LaTeX, Inkscape, Medi­aWiki, OCaml, Make, and G++ Note that I’m run­ning these pack­ages on Mac OS X. Also note that they are GNU Linux pack­ages. (If …

October 11, 2010 – 1:40 am | By Matthew | Posted in Computers, Software, Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

How to Speed Up a Windows Computer

Free Up Space on Your Hard Disk Con­sol­i­date all of your large phở­tos, movies, and music onto a sep­a­rate drive, if pos­si­ble. Find and delete any dupli­cated, out­dated, or unused doc­u­ments from your per­sonal or shared fold­ers. Man­u­ally Archive/​​Compress Old Files I highly rec­om­mend using 7-​​​​Zip. Use the 7-​​​​Zip for­mat (.7z) with the “Ultra” com­pres­sion set­ting: it …

August 29, 2010 – 4:05 pm | By Matthew | Posted in Computers, Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

The Ultimate Hypocrisy

Remem­ber that post in which I described my absolute despise for Apple and all Apple prod­ucts (par­tic­u­larly the Safari web browser)? Well, God has a sense of humor: Not only has Safari become my favorite browser, but I have also adopted a Mac­Book Pro for my mobile com­put­ing needs. I was even using an iPhone …

August 2, 2010 – 10:33 am | By Matthew | Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4)