I still need a MacBook Pro first and I’m still debating whether or not to wait for the next rev on those before buying one. They’re in the middle of their product cycle, so it’ll be at least another three months before new versions come out. The smart thing to do is to wait.

How does Apple make their products so appealing that it is physically difficult to not buy them? Every day Apple makes the case for why design is so important.

• Crystal Icon Set by Everaldo Coelho
  Over 300 icons released under the Lesser General Public License.
  

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• Flag Icons from famfamfam.com
  247 public domain icons. They are free for any use (attribution appreciated but not required). The flag icons use the ISO3166-1 alpha-2 country codes where appropriate.
  

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• Nuvola Icons by David Vignoni
  These icons are released under the Lesser General Public License.
  

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• Royalty Free Icons by CocoaDev
  This is a smaller set of toolbar icons for general use. No license information is given but the readme.txt file states that they are free for use with a linked credit, similar to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
  

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• The RSS Feed Icon
  Download the standard RSS feed icon in various editable formats.
  

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• Silk Icons from famfamfam.com
  This is a free set of 700 icons released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. That means you can use the icons for anything so long as you link back to famfamfam.
  

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• Tango Icons from freedesktop.org
  These icons are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The download links weren’t on the page, but I found them via Google cache:
  • Tango Icon Theme 0.8.0
  • Tango Icon Theme Extras

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Several of the icon sets were designed as desktop packages, but because the icons are individual PNG files (in most cases), they’re perfect for web design too.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If the above list doesn’t satisfy your craving for icons, then you have to check this out:

Icon Themes on Wikimedia Commons

Edit: Also check out Icon Finder

Please check out the licenses and follow the rules when using these icons. The licenses are legally binding and it’s the right thing to do. The designers have put in enormous amounts of time and, in most cases, just want credit for their work. I think that’s the least they deserve.

Make the Logo Bigger presumably by Burnback.

Song and links courtesy of today’s Compiler Blog.

I’ve been meaning to simplify my work / life by creating some classes that I can use to streamline a lot of the projects that I work on. I found myself with some time this week and finally took a small step in that direction by creating a pagination class.

Up until now I’ve used a function that I wrote way back when for paging. It was clunky, kludgy, and limited. I looked around at what was available online and what I found was, for the most part, clunky, kludgy, and limited.

Starting from my existing code, I laid out some goals for how I wanted my new pagination object to work:

• It had to be very simple to integrate. I wanted to be able to drop it into a file and have it just work.
• The output had to be semantic, valid (X)HTML that would be easy to style with CSS.
• I wanted options for how the links would display.
• It needed to have options to output clean URLs (for when I’m using mod rewrite) or normal URLs with ugly query strings.
• It needed the option of using sessions to store SQL queries since, much of the time, this would be necessary when using clean URLs.
• It had to be drop-dead simple to configure options, such as how many pages to display per page, enabling mod rewrite functionality, enabling the use of session data, etc.

The idea for using sessions and clean URLs came from Ben Jamieson / Thyme Online. I’m also going to credit him with the idea for highly compartmentalizing the code used in the class (he has a highly compartmentalized pagination class of his own with sessions and clean URLs…) even though I remember what his code looked like when I first met him and I think this may be a case of the student becoming the master!

If you’re wondering why I wrote my own class instead of just using his, well, there were a couple of reasons:

• I wanted the practice (I re-read the chapter on OOP in my PHP book before starting).
• I’m an idiot: I was concerned about security and I didn’t realize the session data was only storing a session ID in the client side cookie and not the actual SQL queries. I initially wrote this class to include Alexander Valyalkin’s most excellent md5_ encryption and decryption functions.
• There were some things I wanted to do differently.
• And because I already had my own paging code that I wanted to adapt.

If you already have something in place to handle pagination, a lot of this code will probably look familiar — there aren’t that many ways to skin this particular cat — but hopefully this code is clean enough and reusable enough that some people will find it useful.

A Simple Example

<?php
   include_once('class.pagination.php');
   $sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name";
   $paging = new pagination();
   $result = mysql_query($paging->paginate($sql));
   while ($record = mysql_fetch_assoc())
   {
      // Output records here
   }
   print($paging->getLinks());
   print("<p>".$paging->getCount()."</p>");
?>

The above example is the simplest usage. The class is included, the object is initialized, the SQL code is passed and returned with the LIMIT clause appended (note: it will replace any existing limit clause) and the links are output.

Sample Output

For large sets of data, ten or more pages, first and last links are added to let users quickly jump to the beginning or end of the data set. Otherwise, just the pages and previous/next links are displayed. You can change that by passing an optional variable to the getLinks() function or, if you’re going to output multiple sets of paging links on a page, you can override the default format via the setDisplayOptions() function (see description of this function below for more details).

Available Functions

paginate($sql) - This function initializes several variables and returns a modified SQL statement with a LIMIT clause appended to it.

setDisplayOptions($x) - This function changes how pagination links are output for a given page. It takes a numeric value between 1 and 4:

1. Only show the first and last links for large data sets (ten or more pages). Only show previous link when not on the first page. Only show next link when not on the last page. This is the default setting.
2. Always show first and last links. Always show previous and next links.
3. Never show first and last links but always show previous and next links (the Flickr option).
4. Never show first and last links. Only show previous link when not on the first page. Only show next link when not on the last page.

You can achieve the exact same functionality by passing this variable in the getLinks() function. Both of the following examples output the same thing:

<?php
   // Example one
   $paging->setDisplayOptions(3);
   print($paging->getLinks());

   // Example two
   print($paging->getLinks(3));
?>

setPageSize($x) - Override the default number of items to display per page. The default is 25.

setModRewrite(TRUE) - The default value is FALSE. Override this if you plan to use mod_rewrite to create clean URLs. If you don’t know what this is, leave it alone.

setUseSessions(TRUE) - The default value is FALSE. Override this if you have complex SQL statements that you don’t want to pass via query strings. You’ll probably need to enable this if you’re using clean URLs.

setSessionName($name) - This just exists to prevent any possible conflicts with existing code. The default session name is ‘searchdata‘. If, by any chance, you already use a session variable with that name, you can override the name used by the pagination class.

This function can also be used if you plan to store multiple SQL queries by assigning a unique session name for each query.

getSQL() - What goes up, must come down — or better put: what is input, must be output. You pass a SQL statement to the pagination object; this function returns that SQL statement to you with the LIMIT clause appended to it.

getCount() - This returns the “Displaying from x to y of z” string. It gets its own function so that it is easy to omit if don’t want to display it.

getLinks($x) - This is the meat and potatoes. This function returns the list of links for output. It accepts the same numeric option that setDisplayOptions($x) uses.

Miscellaneous Notes

Regardless of whether you use clean URLs or not, the the current page is determined by the $_GET[’page’] variable. The page variable always needs to be the last part of the query string or path. Examples:

• domain.com/articles/title/5/
• domain.com/article.php?name=title&page=5
• domain.com/search.php?keywords=xyz&sort=desc&page=2

The first example above is using mod_rewrite.

To use sessions, you first have to initialize the session data with:

<?php
session_start();
?>

If you are using cookie-based sessions, you must call session_start() before anything is output to the browser. For more information on how to use session_start(), see the php.net website.

You can view the source code of this page and the associated stylesheet to see how the links are output and how I’ve styled them.

If you have suggestions regarding this class, please leave a comment. Also, this isn’t heavily tested, so if you find a bug (I’m sure there will be some) please let me know about it.

Download this file

Today is Ashton’s one month birthday. He’s changed so much in a month. He’s grown. He’s gained weight. He’s lost hair. And he is curious about the world. Looking back over the last month, it breaks down pretty much like this:

• Week 1: This breathing thing is new. And the food goes in where?
• Week 2: Wait, the food comes out??
• Week 3: How?
• Week 4: Okay, I’m starting to get the hang of me. What’s with the hairy guy?
• Week 5: Hey, he’s kind of funny.

He stares at everything now. He tries to reach out and grab things. He is awake all day, which means he actually sleeps part of each night. Karina is jealous because Ashton wants to play with daddy — he smiles when I talk to him — but I’m just the “play” parent right now. She’s the Bringer of Life. He looks to her for sustenance and comfort. He won’t sleep for me. We don’t nap together. When Ashton is with his daddy, he expects this monkey to dance.

And that’s cool with me.

Baby does the following and only the following: sleeps, pees, poops, feeds, cries. That’s it. You’re on his schedule and not the other way around. I think most people know this beforehand but it is hard to understand the impact it will have on you. Sleep is a luxury. Eating is a necessity, but the quality of the food is a luxury. You eat what you can, when you can.

We’re stuck in the hospital for at least another day. Maybe two. The room is tiny and with my cot folded out there is barely room to move around in it. Sitting on a cot doesn’t provide much back support. We’re both feeling the pain in our lower backs. It’s overcast so there isn’t much light coming through the window. With little interaction with the outside world, the odd hours we’re keeping, and the lack of sunlight, it’s really hard to keep track of the time…or even the day.

When Ashton smiles the whole world lights up, but at two days old, he mostly just stares at me or sleeps. When he sleeps one of us sleeps too. He’s having a lot of problems with gas, so he cries and screams through most of the night. It’s hard to take a turn sleeping when he is screaming. Not because of the noise but he’s suffering and you don’t want him to suffer.

We’ve posted some more pictures to Flickr and we’ll continue to post pictures there as we take them. (The updated iPhoto plugin lets us go from camera to Flickr in two quick steps–which is nice.)

I’ll try to post again later.

It’s been a long day. Karina’s contractions started last night. Around 3:30 AM this morning they reached a point where we could get admitted to the hospital. Things were going well for a little while but then the labor stalled. And stalled. And stalled. The doctor tried to jumpstart things with Potocin but it just wasn’t happening. A little after two the decision was made to do a C-Section.

Little Ashton was born at 3:11 PM CST.

He weighs 7lbs 11oz, is 19.5″ long, and has a 14″ diameter head. With that head the C-section was a foregone conclusion but none of us knew that at the time.

We’ve had a chance to take some photos and you can see those here.

We’re going to try to get a little bit of sleep now.