FreecodeX

Formula to Life = Work + Music

2010-10-04T15:09:09Z

It has been a while since my last post. I have been slacking on my personal blog due to the amount of time I spend on work. My basement is undergoing remodeling by a 3 man team (my dad, my brother, and me), so that has been taking up a good amount of my free time as well, especially since we are getting close to finishing up. I will post some pictures later.

Work has been coming along great, for those that are asking. I have been programming for 9+ years, countless nights and days spent looking for bugs, an insane amount of caffeine consumed, and till this day I have yet to stop learning. Working is like sitting in a Google class for me, when a problem arises, google becomes the answer. Its hard to believe what the Internet has turned into only after a few decades, imagine a century! I have however had a falling out with my design cravings. When I first started working with photoshop it seemed like the coolest program ever. I would read tutorials and do them over and over to memorize all sorts of tools, techniques and effects. However after about 4 years of that I switched from photoshop to a text editor, my inspiration changed from design and photo manipulation to programming and web development. Now don’t get me wrong I still use photoshop frequently, but only when required to get work done. I don’t sit for days making layouts or wallpapers like I used to, I spend that time on 212 Diamond City and family/friends.

I find music to be a very big part of my life as well. It’s hard to imagine what I would do without it on a DAILY basis. Rap and House music are all I need. Rap however has been slacking lately, aside from a handful of rappers that are worth listening to, there isn’t much you can listen to on the radio today. Now house music on the other hand never ceases to disappoint me. It could be a day, two, three before a new great track is released. My house music library is on track to catch up to my ultimate rap collection, and that’s sad. So this is a message to all the Hip Hoppers and Rappers: STEP YO GAME UP!

Here is something interesting for you to think about ’till the next time we meet again.

You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it. -Charles Bixton

Friday Music Drop > Some Hip Hop & Rap in Ya Ear

2010-09-18T05:55:00Z

Will take it back a little with todays hip hop & rap music drop. Rap & Hip Hop has been here for me since ’98 and because my love for the music has been there since day one I will drop some old school songs for you today.

Eminem – The Real Slim Shady

Jay-Z – IZZO (H.O.V.A.)

Outkast – Ms.Jackson

N.O.R.E – Nothin

Cam’Ron – Hey Ma

Nas – Made You Look

Fabolous – Breathe

These were some of the hottest songs when I was growing up, and today they are considered as classic tracks.

3 Ways to keeping your PHP project clean and organized.

2010-09-18T10:53:39Z

The weather sucks today, rain with clouds is definitely not my cup of tea, along with it being pretty chili as well. Granted that I was planning to get some work done today I don’t feel as bad about the weather as those who were planning to go out today

Anyways, lets discuss something interesting like web development today. I have recently been writing a lot of PHP code, designing shopping cart systems and e-commerce stores. One of the most common issues I always run into is how to create readable code! When you are 10,000 lines of code deep and you must go back and recode something, at times I would not be able to recognize what needs to be edited and how it will effect other parts of code. This causes for you to waste time testing functions out, finding out what other parts of code use the function that you will be changing and so on.

Here are a few tips on how I keep my code clean and organized, and therefore save myself a considerable amount of time.

COMMENTS: This is by far the most important part of any development language!
In PHP, and many other languages as well, you have two ways of commenting. For a single line comment you would use a double forward slash

// Single line comment

and for a multi line comment you start with a forward slash followed by an asterisk and end with an asterisk followed by a forward slash

/* Multi line comment
Line 2
Line 3*/

I would generaly use a multi line comment to describe a function and what it does along with the arguments it takes and what it returns. The single line comment I use to leave myself notes about certain parts of code such as if statements, for and while loops, expressions and to leave myself TODO notes of later. Below is an example of a function I have written previously.

	/* item_get_info - get items info from the database
	* $id - items id - (int) - required
	* returns an array with the items information
	*/
	function item_get_info($id)
	{
		//QUERY THE DATABASE FOR ITEM INFO BASED ON THE PASSED ID
		$query = "SELECT ...... ";
		$res = $db->sql_query($query);
		$result = $db->sql_getrows($res);

		//Assign the global variable with the current item information
		$this->item['item_id'] = $id;
		$this->item['item_name'] = $result[0]['item_name'];
		$this->item['item_description'] = $result[0]['item_description'];
		$this->item['item_price'] = $result[0]['item_price'];
		$this->item['item_sale_price'] = $result[0]['item_sale_price'];

                 //return the processed item info
		return $this->item;
	}

Function names: a good name will tell you a lot about the function below. Try to stay away from naming your function with shortcuts of a word thats hard to understand or hard to pronounce for that matter. Also make use of underscore ‘_’ to identify a space.

	//String to Integer
	function strtoint(); // This would be hard to read since I would have to break up the function name in my head

	function str_to_int(); // Already broken up and I would just have to remember that str is short for a string and int for integer

So dont try to make the function name as short as possible to save yourself a few bytes on the file size. Those few extra bytes will save you a headache in the future, I promise you.

File structure: your file structure is another important aspect of keeping your code organized. Don’t try to throw all your functions into a single file. Categorize them and break them up into different files. Certain functions that you will include into almost every script should probably be put away into a certain directory (usually called ‘includes’).

Other functions that get used alot as well but vary on the script should probably be put into single categorized file and included on script to script basis. For example a function that adds an item to a shopping cart and a function that removes and item from a shopping cart should probably go into the same file and get included into the script file that deals with the shopping cart (you can even name the file ‘function_cart.php’ and throw it inside a functions folder).

Anything else such as images, CSS styles, JS scripts should all get their own folder in order to keep your structure organized and easy to look through.
An example of a structure I would use:

	-site
		-functions
			-functions_cart.php
			-functions_items.php

		-includes
			-site_init.php

		+images //Images go here

		index.php

		+styles //CSS styles go here

		+scripts //JS scripts and such

		+templates //Your site template files

If you follow these tips you should not have any problems remembering what file to modify and where to find a certain function within the file and your directory structure. Good luck scriptkiddies ;]

Friday Music Drop > House Music

2010-09-10T20:58:25Z

One of my favorite music genres has to be house music. Since 1998, when I first started listening to house music, I have been gaining interest in house music. Over the past few years my house music library has been slowly getting bigger and better. Today I will share some recent house music that I have been enjoying on daily basis.

1. Chris Montana vs. Denis The Menace – Spanish Hustle (Denis The Menace Club Mix)

2. Dennis Ferrer – Red Room (Original Studio Version)

3. Dj Jeroenski and Jorn ft Alexandra Prince – Set me Free ( Kid Massive Audiodamage Mix)

4. Flash Brothers – Higher (Hard Rock Sofa Remix)

5. Huggy & Dean Newton – Soul Roots (Antranig Remix)

Hope you enjoy the music and don’t forget to share! On a side note i want to give a shout out to my friends over at Artists Intel, working hard to bringing you the “intel” from various artists in different forms of art.

Welcome home

2010-10-12T21:40:11Z

I, Mikhail Vvedenskiy, want to welcome you to Freecodex.net. My personal blog and online portfolio portal. I will be posting more content pretty soon on Jewelry, Music, Videos, Web Design, and Web Development to name a few subjects. In the mean time kick back, relax and find me on Twitter or Facebook.

-Mike