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Happy New Year and Updates

Rick Ogden — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:35:49 +0000

With it being the festive season, I have not done a huge amount of interest recently. I’m hoping to have a few things for you soon. Currently I have been experimenting with Drupal, having never used it (properly) before, this is a real learning curve.

Also I am working on getting suPHP to work with userdir, to allow users of a server to have their own webspace in a secure fashion. I will be blogging about this when it is done.

However, I have found a few things that may be of interest:
Things you probably didn’t know about PHP – Some really interesting and neat things you can do with PHP.

PHP Object Generator – Generates class structures and objects, so you don’t have to

PHPNW Talk Reminder – Tuesday

Rick Ogden — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:37:45 +0000

Just to remind you all that I will be doing a talk this coming Tuesday at PHPNW, 7pm Revolution, Deansgate Locks, Manchester. It is an introduction to object oriented programming in PHP. If you are interested please come along!

Here is the upcoming link

Breadth Vs Depth

Rick Ogden — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:18:50 +0000

Something that I’ve recently been thinking about a lot is what should be taught at Universities, particularly in my area (Computer Science). What has been bugging me is trying to think about the balance between coverage and detail. Is there a bias as in you should focus more on one and not the other, or should they be covered in equal amounts.

A great way of applying this is using development concepts. Do you teach students many programming languages, giving them experience of many different syntaxes, and methodologies of programming. Or do you concentrate on fewer languages, but going into more detail about what you can do with them.

Personally, I’m inclined to go with the latter (to a point). Concentrate your efforts and get them able to apply their current knowledge to other areas, which they have not been taught. However, this has problems. Could the jeopardise the students in the future, make them feel restricted from branching into the unknown? Could it also mean that they don’t look as good to an employer?

Although I’ve used programming as an analogy (as it’s something I’m familiar with), this balance can be applied to any learning situation.

Comments please.

Welcome

Rick Ogden — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:30:36 +0000

Welcome to my new website. There is not much on it at the moment, but that will change over time.

This site is going to include tutorials, presentations, scripts and other things which I have written, and also information about what I am doing (in music and technology). Please bear with me while I finish this site, and get it up and running.

However, for now, I am off to phpnw09 conference in Manchester. To those of you going, see you there!