If you’ve hit memory issues with large sets of data using the excellent PHPExcel library on your PHP server, here are a couple of tips I found helped a lot on one of my projects when server resources were being stretched. The first good place to start is to increase the…
What is BtvStack.exe and why is Skype asking me to allow it?
You open Skype and get a notification about something called BtvStack.exe with the message “BtvStack.exe wants to use Skype” What the heck right?! This turns out to be a Bluetooth Driver requesting access so that if you for example had a Bluetooth headset, you could use it…
Free Flash Charting with Open Flash Chart
Here’s a good link to an opensource and free Flash Charting package that can run on either static .txt files or dynamic data produced by your backend of choice. This could be an alternative to the PHP based charting mentioned in another post Advanced PHP Charting http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/
PHP Excel integration
If you’ve ever had the headache of having to export Data from your PHP application into Excel or CSV you know what a mission it can be. Here’s a library which makes it easier and even allows you to read and parse the files back into your application which can…
Advanced PHP Charting
Sometimes it isn’t possible to leverage client-side charting possibilities via the use of Flash or javascript frameworks such as Sencha with their beautiful charting capabilites. I once worked on a project whereby I needed to integrate charts into PDF output along with saving archive copies for future comparison in an…
IE Operation Aborted
This is an old error which has beein causing significant developer pain through the years. Here’s what is basically boils down to If there are any Javascript scripts running inside the body tag or inside a table which is directly a child of body, then most of the time this…
Pretty datetime output from PHP and SQL
I often find it a headache to remember how best to be formatting datetime coming into and out of php/sql setups especially when outputting it via JSON to be rendered in javascript-based frontends. This is how I do it. datetime coming out of an SQL DB in the format of…
CSS Rounded Corners
Rounded corners seem to be a bane for designers as there is no way to implement them in a cross browser friendly way. So we are used to implementing complex markup which is brittle and relies on images in the corner divs of a 9 div grid. Since a couple…
Getting images out of a microsoft word file
I once had a client who scanned in hundreds of old photographs directly into Microsoft Word file only to need them in their raw formats for use in another application. Needless to say it wasn’t favourable to redo the hours of scanning to save them as JPEGs or similar and…
Great online orrery
I’ve always wanted to have a real orrery, let alone be able to build one as I think it would be a fascinating excercise to get to grips with how our solar system is linked and how everything relates. We too often forget the bigger picture out there and get…