PHP has abundant built in functions. As PHP developers, we may have used many of them. But there are still some useful functions we may not be so familiar with. In this post, we will introduce some of them.levenshtein()Have you ever wondered how to check differences between two works? This function just does what you want. It can tell you how much the difference is between two words.<?php$str1 = "carrot";$str2 = "carrrott";echo levenshtein($str1, $str2); //Outputs 2?>get_defined_vars()This is a very useful function when you wants to debug your codes when there are some issues. It will re...

So many problems in software occur because programmers and designers don't communicate well all the time. Why don't more designers learn to code themselves or have engineers build abstractions better suited to them?People's minds work in different ways, they can process thoughts differently, solve problems in completely different but equally valid ways. It's a mistake to assume everyone should possess the same skill set.  Also not everyone should be a full stack engineer although full stack engineers usually can achieve high productivity and improve efficiency and understand client requir...

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods. Its goal is to protect the intellectual-property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue. However since its proposal, many organizations protest against it as they believed it would threaten free speech and innovation, and enable law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing content posted on a single blog or webpage. These organizations even designed some webp...

The early ages of web era mainly consisted of webpages of text and links. At that time,Netscape was the still dominant of web browser market. As a web developer, you could develop web apps(or better to call web pages) easily with knowledge of HTML only. But with the evolution of web, new technologies came out, we can see more robust web apps around us everywhere. Today as a web developer, the ability to run and configure a web server and edit HTML to create some simple web pages has lost almost all of its value, you need to equip yourself with lots of different technologies such as HTML5,CSS3 ...

Blue color is used in many product designs and logo designs such as Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and our site. Why do companies choose blue color in their design? It's not a coincidence for them to choose blue. One saying is the color blue is associated with trust, efficiency, clarity and simplicity. Beside this reason, are there other reasons?From an interface design standpoint, blue is an incredibly useful color. Among the dark colors designers have in their toolbox, red, orange and green already have strong built-in associations such as error, caution/safety, success. Brown is generally too...

Do you know where are the websites you visit every day hosted online? There are more and more websites hosted on cloud server now as the stability, scalability and cost effective features of cloud. Recently hostcabi released an infographic which shows some statistics about the top 100,000 most visited websites(according to Alexa).The top 100,000 most visited websites have spread their hosting over 6 continents, 102 countries, 621 cities and 1,024 hosting providers SoftLayer(IBM), AWS, GoDaddy and HostGator etc. ...

Today I come across a code snippet which uses JavaScript to check different mobile devices and then loads different CSS files accordingly. As we know that there are mobile devices with different screen sizes, it's always troublesome for web developers to develop cross browser and cross device compatible codes. Hope this one can help those who develop web apps on mobile devices.// Check whether it's a mobile device// wukong.name 20130716if(/AppleWebKit.*Mobile/i.test(navigator.userAgent) || (MIDP|SymbianOS|NOKIA|SAMSUNG|LG|NEC|TCL|Alcatel|BIRD|DBTEL|Dopod|PHILIPS|HAIER|LENOVO|MOT-|Nokia|SonyEri...

A logo is the simplest thing a user can remember about a product or a company. A good logo design will leave deep impression to customers. Each logo tries to convey either their product information or company vision to customers, this information may be easily understood with a glance or it contains some hidden messages which need us to figure out. Today we share some logos which contain some hidden messages.1. FedexThe arrow between E and X means Fedex will deliver the product to the right person.2. AmazonThe arrow from A to Z, it simply points from A to Z implying the wide variety of items a...