Highcharts PHP Library

What is highcharts-php

highcharts-php is a PHP library to interact with the Highcharts JS charting library.

What is Highcharts

Reading from the official documentation, “Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application”.

The Highcharts JS libraries are available at: www.highcharts.com and they are free for non commercial use. For commercial usage, please refers to the license and pricing section of their website.

Are the Highcharts and highcharts-php projects related?

Again, the highcharts-php project has nothing to do with the Highcharts projects. The authors are different and the two projects don’t share any single line of code.

Why highcharts-php

The reason behind the highcharts-php project is to offer a useful tool to PHP developers to automatically generate Highcharts JS code starting from some PHP data.

The highcharts-php library is available for free download, as usual, at my software page:

http://aloiroberto.wordpress.com/software/

PHP Mode for Emacs – Flymake

I always find flymake extremely useful when editing code in Emacs.

In this period, I’m working a bit with PHP and I’ve immediately thought that enabling flymake for Emacs was indeed a good idea.

Well, someone has apparently already thought about it, so everything you need to know about it is explained here.

I tried it on my machine and it worked like a charm. Combined with some PHP documentation integrated in Emacs, I’m now starting to have a complete and powerful development environment for PHP.

I’m now wondering if there’s any way to get this a step forward. First of all, I’m trying to identify errors different from the parsing ones. What I would really love, for example, is to have Emacs showing me all the unused variables in a PHP file. If you have any idea on how to achieve this, don’t be shy and share your thoughts with me, as a post comment or, if you prefer, as a private e-mail or through twitter.

One year of Roberto Aloi

I registered this blog almost one year ago (even if I started adding posts to it in a more constant way just in August).

Now that one year is passed, it’s time to view at the statistics. I passed from 0 to 2.270 visits per month. It’s not a lot, but it is still something. Currently, I have more than 100 unique visits per day to the blog.

I hope you find the blog and its posts interesting.

This blog has got a QR code!

I finally generated a QR barcode for this blog.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please have a look to this. Otherwise, feel free to copy and spread it

How to block people from inviting you to Facebook events

Never had a friend or someone continuously inviting you to parties and all that kind of events having place in the opposite part of the world and in which you’re not interested at all?

Did you kindly ask to these guys and to their friends not to invite you anymore and they didn’t listen to you?

Well, it is possible to prevent them from sending you event invitations, without the need of blocking them.

Simply access your Facebook account and:

• Click on Settings -> Application Settings
• Under Events, click on Edit Settings
• On the bottom, select Customize under privacy
• Add the names of your spammer friends to the exception list

Now enjoy your Facebook account without spammers.

Hope this helps.

How to integrate Firefox and Emacs

Sometimes, when you edit a textarea on a web page (for example, to write a new post on your blog), you would really like to use an external text editor for that.

I personally love Emacs, I’m addicted to its shortcuts and key bindings and I would love to use it, for example, for searching and replacing or for applying macros on the text of a textarea.

Well, it seems someone already thought about this. A Firefox plugin to bind an external editor to your browser is available here. In the following lines, I’ll refer to a Linux environment, but the same procedure, by applying some variants, is possible on Mac, too.

Once installed the plugin and restarted Firefox, you might want to edit some preferences.

First of all, specify the following command to be executed:

/usr/bin/emacsclient

The reason we don’t simply trigger the emacs command, but we use emacsclient instead is that, if we have an Emacs session open, we would like to attach to that one, so we could easily move between Emacs buffers (thanks to Magnus for this suggestion).

Before this can actually work, though, we need to start a daemon on Emacs. To do so, just open Emacs and do the following:

• M-x customize-option
• Variable name: server-mode
• Click on toggle
• Save for future sessions
• Finish

Optionally (and I would strongly advise you to do so), you can bind the trigger of the external editor to a shortcut. I personally use the following:

Alt + E

But this is obviously up to you.

That’s it. You can enjoy editing your text areas in Emacs and make your productivity fly high.

Gmail Tips by Google

Google has just released a series of really interesting tips for Gmail. Some of them look extremely cool:

Are you already using the full power of Gmail?

The 2010 Google’s Easter Egg

In the past month, people were wondering about the reason behind a strange hidden feature of the Google search engine.

In fact, when clicking on the I’m feeling lucky button without inserting anything in the search box, a countdown to the new year’s eve was shown.

Obviously, people were expecting some great surprise from Google for the new year, but…

… Yes. This seems to be it.

If you now apply the same trick, you just see Google greeting you. Sooooo sad.

Screencast: Joomla Flickr How To

Here’s explained how to download, install and configure the latest version of my Joomla! Flickr component.

The birth of Nasza Klasa