Brian’s Website

Below are recent images I created from races, in Project Gotham Racing 4 and Forza 2.

Last week we had the opportunity to visit our ol’ church NLCC - www.nlcc-gillingham.org.

NLCC
It was great to visit our old church and say hello to so many familiar faces. Everyone was friendly, the worship (as usual) was great, though they seemed to go on longer than usual. The Pastor Master (well that’s what I call him), gave a really good sermon this week, focused and stuck close to scripture, he managed to come out with some good points. The best one came when he was comparing the news on TV with the scriptures, citing that “the scriptures are more up to date”. It doesn’t take too much thought to recognise the various implications this point generates.

After church at the Ratcliffseesees
We went straight from church to spend the afternoon with our friends the Ratcliffs’. We had a great time. Laura shared how she won earned her Degree in physics (a first), before she goes on to study for a Ph.D. We played board games for most of the afternoon, before leaving earlier than usual to catch the Euro 2008 cup final.

Euro 2008 cup final - Span v Germany
I have to say, the match, particularly the first half was excellent. Spain went on to win 1-0, though Spain were unlucky not to have scored two more. I think the better side one on the day.

Xbox 360, and a hi-def solution
I been wanting to get a high-def TV for a while now, but I feel reluctant to get anything smaller than the TV we have a present, a 42″ Toshiba rear projection. Whilst prices are falling all the time, we can’t afford both the TV and the sofa. The sofa as you may recall from my previous Plog, has been ordered.

I did start to feel getting a 42″ hi-def TV Continue Reading »

If you want to skip the background stuff and cut to the chase, click here.

There are literally thousands of posts around the Internet on this question, and a lot of the time people seem to side with the coding practice they are most comfortable with…. understandably, but is it really an all or nothing scenario? should you code using just one ‘method’ (sorry couldn’t resist), or the other?

Users of Java, Ruby and other such object oriented languages, will quickly rebuff the proceduralists as unprofessional and intentionally or otherwise, make you feel as if you are an ‘illegitimate’ programmer/coder. If you have been coding PHP in a procedural format for many years, you may be beginning to feel you are quickly becoming ‘yesterdays news’, but is this a fair assesment?

PHP of course is a scripting language designed specifically for the www, though of course it is employed on many thousands of Intranets around the world, but it’s primary focus is on the Internet. Going back fifteen years, websites were smaller on the whole, and definately less sophisticated, and websites that used PHP were (through lack of choise in PHP versions prior to PHP4), strictly procedural.

The way people used the Internet back then (and now to a certain extent), meant that procedural PHP was fine, it fitted the bill, so to speak. However with the advent of PHP4 which offered an obeject oriented path of sorts, and the introduction of other object oriented online languages, the online coding world began to change, but with this change, does this mean the ‘old’ procedual way of coding has now become obselete?

Absolutely not. Hundreds of thousands of PHP coders have been and continue to write, excellent code employing the procedural style. The ones that use good programming practices see little reason to go the steep learning curve into object oriented PHP, and rightly so. If the goals of any website being developed can be written well using procedural style, then there is no need to change.

The Bottom line

If you are part of a team, programming is your job, or you want to start a career in web development, and/or the website you are building is a large and complex database driven application, then it is almost certain that object oriented programming will be a fundamental requirement, particularly if skills are broken down into specific ’skill sets’ ie, developer, graphic designer, database logic.

If you work on your own, or are involved in building small websites then procedural programming will be just fine. Don’t forget, procedural code has the added benefit of faster execution times than object oriented code.

For me personally, I let the projects’ requirements determine which approach is required, though I do find a combination of the two is often helpful.

This week has been quite a busy week for me, I’m in the middle of developing 3 websites/web applications. Sally as usual is major busy at her work and will get busier as the political parties gear up for their annual conventions.

We have a Sofa that we bought from IKEA approximately six years ago, and Continue Reading »

Anyone that plays games on any of the next gen gaming consoles, will have heard of the mighty ‘Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare’. It is awesome. Not so much for the ’story mode’, but for it’s huge online game play.

For the most part, the way the game has been setup for online play, is near perfect. My only criticism, is Continue Reading »