About me
Mike van Riel is a Senior Software Developer at Unet BV, an ISP for the corporate segment based in the Netherlands.
With a passion for industry standards and Quality Assurance he loves nothing more than to discuss methods to improve code and ways to 'Do-It-Better'™ in general.
Aside from the regular talk about PHP and web-based technologies he also occasionally tends to write about his personal life, opinions and hobbies.
phpStorm, a true delight to work with
During my career as a PHP developer (hobbyist and professional) I have tried a multitude of IDEs and tools to write code in.
Every IDE I have found thus far did great things but had their downsides. It is with phpStorm that I can send at least some of those problems to the past
Symfony plugin released!
A few days ago I blogged about the lack of Row Level Access control in symfony. Although I still have too little time I was seduced to try and tackle this problem.
The result is clear! A new plugin was born and it is available for all to enjoy at http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfPropelRowLevelAccessBehaviorPlugin.
It is very easy to use, [...]
Row level ACL on symfony
Even though sfGuardPlugin is a great ACL plug-in; it unfortunately cannot handle Row Level Access. In most of my personal projects I require such a level of control and the solutions chosen always feel a bit ..hackish..
Using Symfony’s Lime in phpUnderControl
Do you know phpUnderControl?
Do you know and use Lime?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to the questions above then you will likely have tried to integrate Lime into phpUnderControl. So have I..
What I discovered was that there are 3 ways in which this problem can be solved.
Use Lime’s xUnit output mechanism, only available in Symfony [...]
Changed theming to use Crossbrand
I have not blogged in a while due to personal circumstances, like having started on a new job which keeps intensifying, but also because I was unsatisfied with the way my sites handle templating.
Let me explain, I have a shared webhosting account and run multiple domains and subdomains. Some (actually most) of them require the [...]
A new design!
It was long overdue but I have finally managed to finish the new design for the Naenius.com website. My intention is to use this design in all subparts of this website, as well as the new parts I am concocting in my brain.
With the implementation I did notice a few artifacts. For one, I did [...]
An introduction to Scrum
Whilst attempting to enrich my knowledge about Agile methodologies and Scrum in specific I found the site Learning Scrum. This site turned out to be a jewel and it contained a video of a Google Tech Talk by one of the Godfathers of Scrum, Ken Schwaber.
In this talk he explains the history and purpose of [...]
Validating an e-mail address according to RFC 2822
E-mail addresses are bitches!
There, now that is said I can tell why.
Should you ever have time on your hands you should read RFC 2822, it provides an interesting (though somewhat dull) background into e-mail messaging. Alas one can also see why it is so hard to validate an e-mail address, it is an extremely flexible [...]
Generating passwords in PHP
There are those things you encounter again and again and again. Generating passwords is one of those. My experience is that whenever an application needs to be created which deals with user account creation, it is best to let my application create a password for the user.
Why? Simply, I am lazy.
Good developers and users alike [...]
PHPWomen Article contest has closed
The PHPWomen contest has closed. As I had said earlier I have also participated in the contest. I restrained from posting the articles on my blog because it feels unfair to the community at PHPWomen.
In hindsight it would have been convenient if I posted a new blog item whenever I posted a new article. But [...]