Brenton Alker's Deprecated Behaviour

Data Mapper Pattern in PHP

Brenton Alker — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:58:14 +0000

I have been trying to get together a post on the Data Mapper pattern since I started experimenting with it in a personal project. It seems to me to be a fantastic answer to the decoupling of in-memory data objects and the data store. I still don’t have all the answers, but Rob Allen’s recent [...]

Telecommute Experience (Part 2)

Brenton Alker — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:34:01 +0000

I have been telecommuting for a bit over a month now, and things have settled quite well. We have set up an office, away from the entertainment area (except the foosball table, that’s in the office :)). This has been good to keep some separation between those trying to get work done and the rest of [...]

Telecommute Experience (Part 1)

Brenton Alker — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:27:59 +0000

I’ve just started telecommuting, and not wanting to take it slowly, I’ve jumped straight into an international arrangement; living in Canada and working in Brisbane, Australia. This is my story… After almost 3 years with my current employer, I decided I needed to get out of the office. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with [...]

Basic branching with git

Brenton Alker — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:48:22 +0000

With 3 long-running tasks concurrently on my plate, I finally got around to learning branching in git, and it’s easy! Until this week, I had managed to get by without learning to branch. I have looked previously but got a little lost. I often temporarily stored my work using “git-stash” to work on multiple things at [...]

New VPS Hosting

Brenton Alker — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:38:16 +0000

If you’re reading this then I have successfully migrated to my new VPS hosting on Slicehost.

trim() Validation

Brenton Alker — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:11:18 +0000

While writing a fairly standard sign-up/log-in system, I got to the point of validating the password to make sure it only contained acceptable characters. Now for me this would usually mean a regular expression. But, since this system wasn’t for me I decided to make the “valid characters” configurable, and generally the people configuring it [...]

An Attempt at Restricted Auto-Login

Brenton Alker — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:33:18 +0000

The system I have been building is a direct marketing system (don’t hate me, it’s opt-in) and to be compliant with their ethics policy it requires “2 click unsubscribe” functionality from all its email campaigns; 1 click on the link in the email, and 1 click on a big “Don’t Ever Send Me Email Again” [...]

My Web 2.0 World

Brenton Alker — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:41:40 +0000

The last month or so I’ve been trying to actually get into the whole “Web 2.0″ (I don’t like the term by the way) world. I know it’s old news, and it’s not like it’s new to me either. I just recently thought about all the web applications that seem to be so popular that [...]

Sixty Second Tech

Brenton Alker — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:48:27 +0000

Sixty Second Tech is a (relatively) new podcast by prominent Zender Cal Evans that promises to be the "Cure to BSS" Sixty Second Tech is the only known cure for â€œBlank Stare Syndromeâ€ (BSS). BSS happens when one of your technical friends starts talking to you and unconsciously slips into geek speak. They donâ€™t realize theyâ€™ve [...]

New Design and a New Domain

Brenton Alker — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:17:26 +0000

Well, I finally bought myself a domain. You can now find me at my new home on the web: blog.tekerson.com (Not that you get a choice in the matter, the old domain redirects). To go along with it, I’ve got a new design (for those of you that actually come back). I think it’s better suited [...]