PHP Developer - June 29th, 2006
The OC Food Review blog has posted part one of a two part series covering the creation of a location-based search engine. They’re currently implementing it into their site and wanted to share the knowledge.
Conceptually, location based searching is pretty straight-forward: find out where you are, find out how far you’re willing to travel, and compare your location against the locations of all your choices. If the distance between where you are and what you’re interested in is less than what you’re willing to travel, add it to your results list. Simple, right? Right.
He talks more about the concepts behind the search and one of the keys to the entire process - geocoding. They opted to go with the Yahoo! Maps API to grab this information. There’s some sample REST urls and the output of the results after they’ve been unserialized.
They’ve even created their own class to make things even simpler. It does require that you have cURL installed with your PHP5 installation, but outside of that, there are no other dependencies.
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PHP Developer - June 29th, 2006
If you’ve been programming for any length of time, you know the “joy” of working with someone else’s code. When taking over a project, the first inclination I’ve seen with most programmers is to go in and format everything to what they’d like (or duplicate functionality). This is where the problem comes in, the trend that Michael Kimsal talks about in his new blog post - something he wonders about being an “antipattern”.
I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name. I’m currently maintaining some code, and it’s quite a jumble. One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic in other areas of the code. However, what never happened was the clean up of the old code, so now there’s two places where the same set of data is retrieved in different ways.
He proposes the name “Multi Master Data” for the situation - two different sources, living in the same code, doing the same thing. Of course, he also mentions a situation where this type of problem can cause real issues, especially when trying to track down a bug (a bang your head on the desk moment).
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Dev Shed - June 29th, 2006
If you need to administer MySQL this article gets you off to a good start. In this section we discuss localization and international usage as well as the MySQL log files. The sixth of a multi-part series it is excerpted from chapter four of the book em MySQL Administrator s Guide em written by Paul Dubois Sams ISBN 672326345 ….
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