I sometimes wonder why people feel so compelled to use technical terms when talking about computers, even when they don't know what the terms mean. In my experience, those who know the least about a particular topic use the most complicated vocabulary when discussing it. I considered compiling a list of the popular ones, but since I'm lazy and have a blog, I decided to blog about it instead. Feel free to add to the list.

He mentions the incorrect use of the term "computer" when referring to hardware (overgeneralization), the confusion over very similar technical words (i.e. Orientated and Oriented, Depreciated and Deprecated), the pluralization of company names, and various other issues. Be sure to check out the comments for even more... ]]> Fri, 20 Jan 2006 06:50:51 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4547 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4547 second part in their "An Image is Worth a Thousand Words in PHP" series today - this time working more with the content, characters, and colors.

We are about to pick up where we left off in part one, but first a quick summary of what we have done so far. We began by creating our conversion class and naming it 'img_to_txt'. Inside this class we defined several basic accessory methods, to allow our users a variety of options. Last, we also set up a method for returning the appropriate CSS markup based on the user's browser type.

That's what we've done so far - but there's a lot more to do, so let's get started.

They wrap up the series by showing how to change some of the colors (inlcuding the code for each color) and, finally, how to export it out to an image...]]> Thu, 22 Dec 2005 07:18:50 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4505 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4505 this new article from DevShed today, there's a look at working with the GD libraries in PHP by doing some fun manipulation exercises (I love manipulation, don't you?)

This article, the first of two parts, describes a fun little project that will help you sharpen your image manipulation skills. The completed application takes an image and converts it to a string of text that resembles the original image. Brian Vaughn gets you started.

Sometimes programming is work, but sometimes'¦ it's fun. Today we're going to work on a fun programming project involving image manipulation. This project will require that PHP be installed with the GD library (available at http://www.boutell.com/gd/, or bundled along with PHP 4.3 and later).

In this first part of the series, all they really do is help you get things set up - a working PHP intallation with GD integrated. They provide initial code for the manipulation class, but it doesn't do much of anything yet. I guess that'll have to wait for part two...]]> Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:57:53 -0600