Some general observations (or rants). I write about whatever captures my attention - and also post a few useful tips and PHP scripts for webmasters, too, as I learn from my mistakes, requirements or other people's experiences.

Google’s desktop software set, Google Pack, has been updated to be even more useful. It now includes Norton Security Scan which provides basic but adequate protection, especially when combined with Spyware Doctor (which protects against spyware and adware). Yes - I am a Linux user but I also have a laptop running Windows XP Home and a girlfriend, so some protection is definitely required.

Google Pack has become pretty extensive and perhaps an essential collection of software to install for any PC user now; it saves time by bringing together many great pieces of software. The software included is now:
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"Bight Night Out" is one of The Fun Lovin’ Criminals finest tunes - at least for the boys. This lyrical genius was on their second album, 100% Columbian, released in 1998 which was a few years after their ground breaking début album, Come Find Yourself. The 90s truly was a great era for music. However, I digress - I had always wanted to watch the video to "Big Night Out" and now I have; I found it earlier this evening while searching Youtube.com and yes it was as good as I expected.


Typical Fun Lovin’ Criminals - talented lyrics, great music and an amusing video to go along with it.

Hopefully, a new album will be released shortly (check the difontaine.net forum - it’s just rumour, sadly, so it’s only a hopefully…) and also Clubbing To Death should hit the big screens by the end of the year, a film starring Huey and Frank. The story line sounds interesting (it’s about clubs and gangsters) and it’s an British film, too, so it’s bound to be good.

Recently, Google announced there would be a new system of ad unit management for publishers and now finally it is here - well, not every publisher will see it just yet as it is currently in "roll out" phase. If you have not seen the changes to the new ad management within your Google Adsense account yet, don’t worry as you’re sure to shortly.

What does the new Ad Management system mean for publishers? To start off with, managing the colours, borders and channels is done simply and quickly through your Google Adsense account without having to modify Adsense code on your site. (Although you’ll need to allow changes up to 10 minutes to take effect.) Additionally, there is less code to be placed on pages ergo less chance of messing breaking the code (plus slightly quicker page load times).

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Sadly, my experiment with Bidvertiser failed. I’ve removed it and won’t be bringing Adsense back for now either. Currently, I have other projects I’m working on which are far more important. I like Bidvertiser’s reporting and control over advert appearance, I just think my blog was not the right place for it. For now, I’ll stick with just Kontera as this seems to work well on a blog.

Hopefully, my pages will now be more readable and load quicker for my visitors.

Recently, I need to check for an empty value in an array. While empty() is good for checking a specific value it does not allow the checking of a whole array. I didn’t want to do multiple if statements/empty checks and also empty was not always accurate, i.e. if a variable has a value of 0 (zero) then empty considers it empty - but for my purposes this was not empty. How to solve this problem?

Well, I decide to create my own function. It’s a fairly simple one - returns FALSE if no empty array item is detected, otherwise TRUE if one is. For my purposes, I did not need to know in the check which one specifically is empty as the error message for individual items would always be reported by another function (it was for a HTML form, so the error is displayed next to each field based upon a conditional check for that specific field).

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