Then I came across Pimple, which is a wonderfully simple solution to the problem.  The only thing about it is that I hate its array-oriented interface.  Something about $container['session_storage'] rubs me the wrong way.  So I decided to implement Pimple in a more object-oriented way, and what I came up with was Zit.

Zit works almost identically to Pimple, but with an object-oriented interface.  I think it’s easier to show than tell, so let’s start with a code example:

// Include and instantiate Zit
require_once '/path/to/lib/Zit/Container.php';
$c = new \Zit\Container();

// Set config parameters
$c->setParam('db_user', 'username');
$c->setParam('db_pass', 'password');
$c->setParam('db_host', 'localhost');
$c->setParam('db_name', 'test');

// Set up objects
$c->set('db', function($c) {
  $db = $c->getDbName();
  $host = $c->getDbHost();
  $user = $c->getDbUser();
  $pass = $c->getDbPass();
  $dsn = sprintf('mysql:dbname=%s;host=%s', $db, $host);
  return new PDO($dsn, $user, $pass);
});
$c->setUser(function($c, $id)) {
    $user = new User($id);
    $user->setDb($c->getDb());
    return $user;
});

// Use container
$user1 = $c->getUser(1);
$sameUser = $c->getUser(1);
$newUser = $c->newUser(1);
$user2 = $c->getUser(2);

Some comments about the code:

• The setParam() method is used for any non-object, so if you want to store scalars or an array, you use this method.
• All object instantiation functions are passed an instance of the Container as their first parameter.  That way all functions have access to other objects and parameters in the container.
• Zit automatically translates underscores to camel case depending on whether you’re using a string or a method to access that object/parameter.
• Zit is quite flexible in its interface.  For example, if you compare line 12 to line 20, you’ll see that you can set objects in a few different ways: set(‘db’, …), setDb(…) or set_db(…) all work exactly the same.  This means you can use Zit however you like (or according to the coding standards of the project you’re working on).
• By default, Zit shares object instances.  $user1 from line 27 is the exact same object as $sameUser on line 28 ($user1 === $sameUser).  If you want to create a new instance of an object, use the “new” methods.  Note: because “new” is a reserved keyword, there is no new() method on the Zit container object.  Instead, this method is called fresh().  This means that new objects can be created with any of the following methods:
• fresh(‘user’, …)
• freshUser(…)
• fresh_user(…)
• newUser(…)
• new_user(…)
• But not: new(‘user’, …)
• Instantiation methods can be passed parameters, which is helpful if you need to pass those parameters on to the object’s constructor, or the the constructor of one of the object’s dependencies.

As you can see, Zit does its very best to provide all the functionality and flexibility that you need without going overboard.  It acts almost exactly like Pimple, except for 3 important distinctions:

1. It has an object-oriented interface rather than an array-oriented one
2. All objects are shared by default
3. Objects can be passed constructor/instantiation parameters

This is the first release of Zit.  The unit tests cover most scenarios, so it should be fairly safe to use, but it hasn’t been used in production yet (I’m using it in two projects that will go into production shortly, though).

Download the latest release

Or, view on GitHub

I came up with a great tee shirt idea.  I’m going to print a few.  You can buy one if you want.

Update: I tried Occam’s Protocol for 10 days with no/negative results (mild fat gain/muscle loss, which could be attributed to measurement variability).  I’ve decided to remove the blog.

First, create a new AppleScript:

tell application "OmniFocus"
set homepageFile to ((path to documents folder as rich text) & "OmniFocus.html")
tell default document
save in homepageFile as "HTML"
end tell
end tell

That will export your OmniFocus document as HTML to ~/Documents/OmniFocus.html (you can tweak the homepageFile variable to change the location).

Next, we want to edit the crontab.  I used CronniX (a decent cron GUI for OS X) to export my OmniFocus document every hour:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/osascript "/Users/yourname/Documents/OmniFocus Exporter.scpt"

Google “crontab tutorial” to learn how to tweak when it runs.

Finally, I set my home page in Firefox to ~/Documents/OmniFocus.html and installed the extension New Tab Homepage so that each time a open a new tab, my homepage loads.  Now whenever I open a new tab I’m presented a nice list of all my tasks.

The modulo operation essentially calculates the remainder of a division.  For example:

5 % 4 = 1

What’s very useful, is that you can take any number, and easily group it into any size group.  For example, if you needed to separate 6 items into 3 groups (OK—obviously you would do this differently, but it’s just for demonstration), you can do the following:

1 % 3 = 1
2 % 3 = 2
3 % 3 = 0
4 % 3 = 1
5 % 3 = 2
6 % 3 = 0

Now your numbers are in group 0, 1, or 2.  This gets much more useful when you think about how almost all RDBMS tables have a numeric primary key value.  Need to split all the users in your system into 10 batches?  Just calculate the user ID % 10 and you have all your users evenly (or, evenly enough) split.

This is a great way to implement sharding.  For example, WordPress 3.0 and higher support multiple sites running on the same codebase. It does this by creating special tables for each site, in the format of PREFIX + ID + TABLE NAME (so a database might look like wp_322_posts).  Well, when you have a thousand sites, each with 10 or more tables, you start running into trouble keeping them all in one database.  That’s where the modulo operator comes into play:

function db_callback($query, &$wpdb) {
	// $wpdb->base_prefix = 'wp_';
	// $wpdb->table = 'wp_322_posts';
	if (preg_match("/^{$wpdb->base_prefix}(\d+)_/i", $wpdb->table, $matches)) {
		// Pretend we have 3 databases
		// Will return 'database0', 'database1' or 'database2'
		return 'database' . ($matches[1] % 3);
	}
}

Another recent way I’ve used the modulo operator is sending out a weekly batch email to a large number of users.  In this case, I had hundreds of thousands of records to read, parse, and then send out an email based on the results.  Rather than do all 600,000 records at once, I split them up into 7 batches, based on day.  Here’s a simplified version of that query:

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM table
        WHERE user_id MOD 7 = ' . date('w');

Then I just set up the script to run daily through my crontab, and each user gets their email once a week, on the same day each week.  Alternately, you could send the message every hour to break it into 168 separate blocks throughout the week:

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM table
        WHERE user_id MOD 168 = ' . ((date('w') * 24) + date('H'));

It’s something that you don’t necessarily use often, but it’s very handy to have in your repertoire.

It makes sense that initialization, filtering the page content, and adding administrative features are at the top of the list.  It’ll be more interesting to see whats a little further down.  I’ll post more as I have time to make sense of the data.

When Safari 5 came out I decided to make the switch.  The new Safari developer tools rival Firebug, Safari now supports extensions, and Firefox has been causing all sorts of problems for me lately (20-second freezes, choppy video, etc).  There were three things that I knew I couldn’t live without…

Those were:

• AdBlock
• Delicious.com Integration
• The Zend Studio Toolbar

The first two were ported to Safari within days (if not hours) of the Safari 5 release.  The third is likely to take a while, so I decided to put together my own version for the time-being.  Right now it’s very much in an “alpha” stage.  It only supports the “debug current page” command, and it hasn’t been tested all that thoroughly.  That said, I plan on developing this over the next few weeks to mirror most of the features available in the current Zend Studio Toolbar for Firefox and MSIE.

I’m also adding some features of my own.  Namely, the toolbar remembers what domains you’ve enabled debugging on, and only shows itself on those domains.  There’s a browser button that you can use to toggle debugging, and in the future I want to add an indicator when the page you’re on supports debugging.

If you develop with Zend Studio and Safari, please check out the current version of the extension.  I could really use some feedback from other folks (particularly those who have other workflows from me).

Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures

And thought, “there’s gotta be an extension for that.”  Well, looks like there isn’t… so I made one:

Enjoy!

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead it looked like:

I’ve developed a (very) simple CSS file that styles links (and <button> elements) to look like native Safari toolbar items.  Download it now.