marcus welz

I use Phing to deploy my projects, and as they become more complex I expand on my use of Phing tasks. For instance, I have a ZIP archive of zip codes that Phing extracts and then imports into a database when deploying the application.
I maintain two development environments. One on a Linux server, and one […]

More and more companies are starting to embrace the social web. Comcast discovered that communicating and following up with unsatisfied customers through third party web sites (personal blogs, Twitter, etc) can have a positive effect.
Of course, that's a Good Thing™, because as a (due to lack of alternatives, sometimes forced) customer it often seems that […]

It's no secret, I'm a fan of the Zend Framework, which I've been using since version 0.15. A lot of components have been added since then, and many of the initial components have been refactored and enhanced, and have matured. And that includes the Zend_Db_Select component, which has been evolving quite nicely, and even Zend_Db_Table_Abstract […]

This short entry was inspired by a snippet of inefficient code I encountered, which involved iterating over an array with a loop and breaking out of it once enough results were fetched.
Zend_Search_Lucene does not paginate results. It simply returns an array. While it does allow you to specify to only return the first N results […]

I've never used a BlackBerry. Yet, I was tasked with debugging a web site that apparently had some issues with the BlackBerry. This rather outdated site was using frames, which is the first hint that there may be problems. However, according to the BlackBerry Developer's Guide (PDF) frames aren't an issue. They're simply processed and […]