dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

Most Web sites are designed within a template or two. That is, the layout, typography and basic design of every page is fundamentally the same for most, if not all, pages.

Also, most Web pages tend to need the same resources. If you have a database-driven site, many pages need to use the same connection; other objects, such as user-made classes, functions and the like, often need to be used by many pages.

Templates are nothing new. Adobe has even built a dedicated Web authoring application, Contribute, that lets non-designers update content in templates made in Dreamweaver. Most open-source Web applications, such as Zen Cart, WordPress and phpBB, all allow you to “skin” their applications.

Thanks to the power of PHP, we can accomplish these goals on our own custom Web designs with abstraction and modularization. I’ll explain how I use both, in a typical PHP Web application, to streamline coding and provide, as much as possible, the ability to edit something once and have that change appear globally.

Continue reading ‘Better Managing Your PHP Application Via Modularization And Abstraction’ »

I have been working in VBA for Microsoft Office 2007 lately. And if you haven’t used it yet, I can tell you there have been significant changes in macro / VBA security versus Office 2003.

Basically, getting a VBA macro / module that hasn’t been digitally signed to run in Word 2007, Excel 2007 or Access 2007 requires the end user to go through a fairly complicated process — if his network’s group policies even allow unsigned macros to run — with many scary warnings against running unsigned code thrown in for good measure.

So I really needed to get a code-signing cert. And after looking around on the Web for places to get one, I settled on Comodo, via Tucows.

Tucows will sell a Comodo certificate for $75 per year, or $195 for three years — which, while not cheap, is less than half the cost some certificate authorities charge for a one-year cert, and a significant discount over Comodo’s published prices.

There’s not a lot on the Web about the experience and process of getting a certificate from Comodo, so I thought I would share some advice.

Continue reading ‘My Experience Getting A Code Signing Certificate From Comodo’ »

I have launched a new Web site to demo ASP.NET scripts. It is http://www.dhvrm.com.

I decided to create the site after reviewing my last couple of ASP.NET entries on this site and discovering that they have some serious errors. I’ll be updating each with new posts as time allows.

For the moment, there isn’t much to see at dhvrm.com, and my schedulewon’t't allow me to do too much more with it for the next few weeks.

But I will correct my ASP.NET scripts and try to create new demos for older posts that don’t have them in the near future. Stay tuned.

I’ve decided that it’s time to pay more attention to the open-source projects I have created and will create. I’m also considering joining some other software projects.

As a result, I need to revisit my licensing.

Previously, my software was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 license. That license is really intended for authors, musicians and teachers, but I found its strong requirements for attribution and sharing of derivative works met my needs.

However, most open-source projects use a GNU license, most notably the GNU General Public License. As such, I believe it’s best to change my software licensing over to the GNU GPL.

I do this reluctantly. I am an ardent supporter of open-source software. I believe it’s my duty to give back to the developer community. But I believe I am due credit as a work’s author, and that my right to ultimately retain the benefits of copyright should be clear.

The GNU GPL technically defends my authorship and allows me to retain ultimate copyright, but it does so in a far weaker way than the Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike license.

I am in the process of changing all posts to reflect my new licensing.

For additional information about my licensing terms, visit the Copyright / Attribution page.

Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

How to map a keyword to a category?
I have a bunch of general categories, such as: Games, Modeling, Business, Finance, etc.

My question is, how can I take a keyword such as “Xbox 360″ and automatically map it to a category such as “Games”? This is an easy example, and I did figure out ways to do this, but if I take a harder example such as “Tyra Banks”, I am unable to map it to a category of mine such as “Modeling” or “Tv Shows”.

I have been thinking of this for a very long time, and I can’t come up with a concrete solution. I have also searched the web and found nothing that would provide this service.

Any ideas?

Basically, computers develop semantic understanding the same way we people do, only far less efficiently: Repetition of example. (In computer science, semantics are called ontology.)

The reason we are far more efficient is that we more easily create connections between things, and more quickly process those connections, than computers can manage.

For example, suppose I give you three categories: colloid, coagulant, polymer. Now, place “chocolate milk” into the proper category.

Continue reading ‘Describing ‘Red’ To A Blind Man: The Dilemma Of Ontology’ »