PHP

HTMX is a JavaScript library that can be used to issue AJAX requests, create CSS transisions, and set up web sockets using HTML

The power of HTMX is that it can be used without writing any custom JavaScript code. It works by looking for attributes in HTML tags using that information to set up events, user interaction, and send requests to a back end. The system is backend agnostic and so will essentially work with any system that can accept, interpret, and respond to the requests.

I have been meaning to look at HTMX since hearing about as it seemed like a decent system with a good community. Since then it has been included into Drupal 11.2.0 and there are plans to make it the core system for AJAX requests going forward. As a result it has jumped forward in my list of things to look at.

Have you ever noticed the slightly green colouration in the movie The Matrix? The movies are full of different colour pallets, but when inside The Matrix everything gets a slight green colouration.

This is colour pallet is created as a post processing step, using a colour grading algorithm. The original colours of the film are passed through a filter to tweak the colours slightly for the scenes inside the simulation.

In this article we will look at how we can convert a pixel so that it has the green colour grading found in the matrix, and how to use the system on images in PHP.

If you have ever used a paint program then you might have used a flood fill algorithm. This is a mechanism by which an area of an image can be filled with a different colour and is normally depicted by a paint can pouring paint.

The flood fill algorithms used to fill in spaces in images are well known, and have been used for decades in all kinds of systems, not just graphics processing programs.

When researching about drawing parabolic curves in PHP a few sources looked at filling in spaces inside the curve using a flood fill algorithm. I looked a little at the PHP function imagefill(), but I was more interested in the core principles of the flood fill algorithms, and how they worked.

Benford's Law is an interesting heuristic in data analysis. It states that in any large collection of numbers that are created naturally, you should expect to see numbers starting with the number 1 about 30% of the time. The frequency distribution of numbers states that 2 should appear about 17% of the time, down to 9 being seen just 5% of the time.

It's important to understand the term "naturally created" here. Essentially, Benford's Law looks at the tendency of created numbers to span orders of magnitude. This means that numbers from company accounts, invoices, bills, or any other financial record will follow Benford's Law. These systems have numbers that are very small along side numbers that are very large and so comparing them using a logarithmic scale shows that they clump together.

I was thinking recently about the number of ways in which I could restrict access to a page using PHP.

The obvious option is to create a user authentication system, but in some situations that is overkill for what is required. If you just want to prevent users from going directly to a certain page then there are a few options open to you.

In this article we will look at how to protect a page from being directly accessed without using a user authentication system. I will address any pros and cons of each method so if you are looking for a way to protect a page then one of these might be useful to you.

A common web design pattern is to incorporate an image into the design of the page. This creates a tighter integration with the image and the rest of the page.

The main issue in designing a page around the image is that the colours of the page must match the image. Otherwise this creates a dissonance between the image and the styles of the site.

In this article I will look at extracting a colour palette from an image so that it can be used in the design of a web page.

XML is a useful format for configuration, data storage, and transmitting data from one system to another. As a human readable format that can be easily read by machines it quickly gained favor in lots of different systems as a mechanism for data storage.

Many systems transparently make use of XML without the user ever seeing it. The API system SOAP is built around XML data, and it is normally possible to ask API endpoints to respond in either JSON or XML. It is common to see XML files used in configuration of systems as they can be easily edited and parsed when needed.

I was watching a video from NDC by Dylan Beattie the other day on The Story of Typography and a particular section stood out to me.

The talk ranges from the initial start of writing symbols to the formation of typography as an art form and the creation of eInk displays. Well worth a watch if you have some time to spare.

The part that was interesting to me was then discussing early word processors and the ASCII character standard. Early word processors couldn't store the amount of data required to fully render a font, so characters were rendered using a bitmap system.

Pi day was a few weeks ago, but I came across this simple approximation of pi recently and decided to put together an example in PHP since it seemed pretty simple.

This approximation of pi centers around a real world example, but we can simulate this using some code.

Let's say you have a dart board that fits inside a square area so that it is flush with the outside of the square. Then you pick someone who is particularly bad at darts and get them to start throwing darts. Record where the darts hit and after a million or so darts you will have a number of darts that hit the board and a number of darts that hit the background.

A parabolic curve is a type of curve where every point is an equal distance from a focal point. There a number of different way to generate this sort of curve using math, but one of the simplest is to use straight lines to create the illusion of the curve.

The curve is created by diving two axis into equal points and then drawing a line from the first point on one axis to the last point on the opposite axis. Each line of the curve is drawn in the same way, repeating the process of drawing a line between opposite points for every point along the axis.