In a lighthearted post for this April Fool's Cal Evans has released some interesting research ("research" here is "searching on GitHub") for the statistics behind the use of profanity in code. (As you'd expect, there's profanity in the post, so don't read if you're offended by that).

The late great George Carlin had many awesome comedy skits. One of them – possibly his most famous – is “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” from the comedy album “Class Clown”. In it he gives his list of seven words that – at the time – were inappropriate for over the air broadcast in the United States.

I thought it would be fun – if for no other reason than clickbait – to run the 7 dirty words against Github to see who is using what, and where. I took screenshots so that you can see each word and which languages use it the most. I also list PHP’s rating for each word out of the top 10 languages.

While I won't go into the list of actual words in this post, it's interesting to see which languages come out on top for certain words. In most cases PHP came in somewhere in the middle with a few exceptions either way.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial talking about finding spelling errors in the input your user provides to your application. They use the powerful pspell functionality that can be compiled into PHP to run the checking.

Every one of us has made a spelling mistake in a Google search: "alternitive music", for example. In doing so, you may have noticed that Google was trying to help you by displaying: "Did you mean alternative music?". If your site has a search function, to indicate misspellings if no or too few results have been found is a very useful feature, especially if the bad English of a visitor can make you miss a sale. Fortunately, PHP's Pspell module allows for checking the spelling of a word and suggesting a replacement from its default dictionary (you can also create a custom dictionary).

He introduces the functionality through a simple function that takes in a string to check, sets up a new dictionary object and runs a pspell_suggest call to get spelling fix suggestions. He talks about the importance of the dictionary and, the modes you can use for checking (speed) and how to add a custom dictionary of your own.

It's not strictly PHP related, but Chris Shiflett has posted this new item on his blog today with a look at some technical vocabulary and grammar.

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...

It's not strictly PHP related, but Chris Shiflett has posted this new item on his blog today with a look at some technical vocabulary and grammar.

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...

Devshed has posted the 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...

Devshed has posted the 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...

In 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...

In 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...