Thursday, 23rd October 2003
Knoppix
So, I finally tried Knoppix today. I’d heard a lot about it and was ready to be impressed, but it still took me by surprise. If you haven’t heard of Knoppix, it’s a full Linux distribution on a CD that is designed to boot straight from the CD, without you needing to install anything and without you having to worry about it modifying the contents of your hard drive.
[... 588 words]Pair Programming
I’ve spent a few hours over the last two days pair programming with Adrian. We’re working on a pretty huge project at the moment, and we’ve just started work on the coding phase, overlapping the design phase. I had tried pair programming a few times before with some success, but this time in particular the benefits of the approach were crystal clear. In total, we’ve defined 4 database tables, a number of functions and a simple class. Working separately we would almost certainly have created more lines of code. However...
[... 373 words]Progressive page updates
Now this is cool: The joy of flush() shows how PHP’s flush() function can be used to send data to the browser before a page has finished rendering. Check out Ben’s demo page to see the trick in action.