June 29, 2009
When dealing with very large or very small numbers we can opt by writing them under scientific notation.
Scientific notation, also known as standard form or as exponential notation, is a way of writing numbers that accommodates values too large or small to be conveniently written in standard decimal notation. Scientific notation has a number of useful properties and is often favored by scientists, mathematicians and engineers, who work with such numbers.
Scientific Notation @ Wikipedia
So as we – developers – are part-scientists,part-mathematicians and part-engineers, so I guess this is perfect for us!
We have all seen that on high school and it seemed quite strange but it is quite simple indeed:
Equation
The equation is as it follows in a simplified language:
Simplified number x10number of decimal units
The “Simplified number” is the number in a simplified manner.
Examples:
- 1000000 = 1
- 4230000 = 423
And then we just add in the other hand the number of decimal units that were simpled-out.
- 1000000 becomes 1×106
- 4230000 becomes 423×104
Read the full article
June 22, 2009
While working with WordPress we always stuck with the HTTP requests issue caused by plugins that appends external JavaScript or CSS files to our page body thus causing more http requests and downgrading our performance benchmark tests and company job standards.
Content minification is a well-known best-practice for bandwidth reduction (saves client’s money) thus giving better page load time (gives client a good smile). Since it removes all unnecessary code (like comments, extra spaces, tabs etc) and join files together, the total of KBs saved even in bandwidth and browser rendering.
Here we always implemented the Minify PHP5 tool from Steve Clay and Ryan Grove because it always worked like a charm and the results are quite amazing.
In wordpress we got problems implementing this because plugins added their own js and css files at will. WP-Minify from Thaya Kareeson came to save our souls but we got some misbehaving plugins that still adding link and script tags by echoing to the page.
Fortunately, this new version preprocesses the output thus gathering any inline style/script reference and adding it to a temporary file that is included in the minification process.
I got tricked there because voting badges and other stuff uses inline script tags to generate the badge. WP-Minify’s preprocessing fufreaked me up because this script tag depended on the_permalink() function from WordPress thus not generating the correct output on the temporary file created. Before I started freaking out I realized that the plugin’s configuration page had an script (and style) blacklist. Just added the src url (without the querystring) and everything worked like a charm!
Nice job Thaya!