Fernando Zamora

Austin Code Camp 2012 will take place on June 9th this year at the St. Edwards Professional Education Center in Austin TX.  Code camp is an all day event full of great training and valuable information.  One great thing about code camp is that it's free -  the best part is the value is in the content.  You can find more information at the official site http://austincodecamp2012.com .  Code camp is an awesome conference that has always provided a lot of valuable information to the developer community and to me personally. I am proud to announce that I will be presenting this year at Code Camp.   If you haven't already signed up to attend I gotta ask "what are you waiting for?!!"  Go visit the website and vote for the presentations that you are most interested in.

I started reading the book Beginning PHP 5.3 Wrox by Matt Doyle a few days ago,  I've read quite a bit, so far I'm up to page 160 on chapter 7.  I'm a bit excited by what I've learned so far.  So far I've learned about the following things. Data Types Arrays String Manipulation Functions Callbacks I was even able to implement a master page-like functionality using PHP. I've been amazed at how easy it has been pickup the PHP language.  It sort of reminds me of the C language because of certain things like it's Printf functions as well as the implementation of local static variables.  I don't know the full history of PHP but I can see the influence that C has had on it as a language.  Its C-like implementation has helped me tremendously in picking up the language.  The one thing that is a little different than anything I've ever seen is its implementation of arrays and associative arrays.  They are a bit more flexible than most of your out-of-t

I've recently started playing with PHP.  PHP has some great resources and for the most part it was easy to install on my windows box with WAMP (Windows Apache MySql PHP).  I initially ran into an issue because I could not access myPHPAdmin. Instead I got the following error:  #1045 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO) Apparently this indicates that I am not using a password.  For me it meant that my password was not set in MySql and also that the configuration file had no password set. I did some searching throughout the web and found several solutions that probably work but the one that worked for me was this one http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?846777-1045-Access-denied-for-user-root-localhost-%28using-password-NO%29 It appears that I already had installed mySql prior to installing WAMP but had never configured it.  It was just a matter of running it from the command line, setting up the password and then modifyi

Design Considerations for Processing Data in Batch Processes  In my software development journey I've learned many lessons that have caused me and the teams I've worked in much grief and extra effort.  Most of these issues are completely avoidable and avoiding them will extend your life. OK! OK! They won't extend your life but they may help in slowing down rate at which you either lose hair or acquire new gray hair. I want to emphasize that these lessons come from true pain and experience and you should really consider the points I make whenever you are faced with them. I plan to write about these lessons as a series.  I don't know how far the series will go but I can assure you that there will be more to come. In this particular lesson I will provide a few tips about batch processes.  I don't want you to think of batch processes as they are implemented with any specific technology - batch (.bat) files for example.  A batch process is simply a way to process

Apparently mobile blogging is only half-baked. When you see all of my previous posts prior to this one they will appear as jiberish. The reason being is that I was trying out this concept of mobile blogging.  The idea is that you send  the text message "register"  to the number 256447.  That then sends you back a couple of messages with links that help you link that number to your blog.  You can either link it the newly created mobile blog - which you can claim.  Or you can link it to your existing blog. I chose the latter. You then send messages to that number and they post to your blog automatically. The result was cryptic at best.  As you can see in my previous posts, I have several posts even though I only sent one long text.  Also you can see that it's some weird mono spaced font. The advantage of that was supposed to be that you can actually send posts from your mobile.  The other advantage is that since I have an iPhone 4S I could leverage the voice recognition

I remember taking my first programming course while I was serving my second year in the U.S. Army.  I took a course in VAX BASIC at Pikes Peak Community College at Ft. Carson.  Although I think it might have actually been QBasic or some other flavor of BASIC .  All I can remember is that it was very basic introduction to computer programming.  The course consisted of basic data types, control logic, loops and arrays - simple topics to me now, but quite foreign to me at the time.   Back then I took the course more for promotion reasons than anything else - to get promoted in the army, college courses carry a significant amount of weight for promotion points.  I took it because it was available and it would help me reach my promotion goals.   Although this was fun I didn't think that I would ever care for programming computers all day long every day.  No, not me I wanted to be out and about being physically active.  Back then, an office job, just sitting behind a computer eight

I visited an auctioneer website at my brothers request that was working on what seem to be some time of bot auction.  There was this box that was logging messages live and anyone could bid on the item being auction.  This was just like a real live auction, except it was done over the web… A typical log would like like this Auctioneer:  Now bidding for 7.50 Auctioneer: This bid is about to close Auctioneer: This bid is about to close Auctioneer: Now the bidding for 8.00 Auctioneer: This bid is about to close Auctioneer: This bid is about to close Auctioneer: Item sold to bidder #349 for 8.00 That got me thinking about timers in javascript.  Timers, I assume is something that I have to understand in order to continue refreshing the page with everyone’s bids.  It could also be done with async call backs possibly but for my experiment I wanted to try out timers.  I know I also have to understand AJAX and connect it to a back end for fetching.  So I decided to create a