Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen,...

PHP doesn’t really support multi-threading per se but there are ways to do “fake” multithreading. Here’s one I saw in the PHPClasses.org newsletter – Multi-thread Simulation.Note that this class is intedend for use on a webserver, as opposed to running PHP scripts from a command line (or similar). Check the end of this post for some alternatives you can try if you’re using PHP as a stand-alone scripting language.Now, I’m going to be lazy and just copy the description of the class from the project page :)This class can emulate the execution of prog...