Hugh Lashbrooke

Phillip Crous is a Cape Town based photographer with exceptional skill. His request was for a photoblog that showcased his photographs with not much need for textual content. With only a logo and colour scheme to go on I did all the design and layout myself (along with some helpful ideas from my fiancée) with some later input from Phillip to make a few changes.

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I recently tried to work out exactly how much I should be getting taxed and how much I will be getting taxed next year. The South African Revenue Service (SARS) doesn’t have the most helpful website and the info to help you work this out is hard to come by if you don’t really know where to look. Once I got hold of this info (from a helpful relative, not SARS itself), I decided to build a little tool to help others with the same problem that I was facing. Thus, the SARS Calculator was born.

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This isn’t an especially techie post, but I think it’s worthwhile mentioning it as I haven’t seen any other posts about it online. I just discovered this totally by accident as I browsing the Android Market, but us lowly South Africans now have access to the premium (paid for) Android apps!

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The need to hide elements in an HTML document is fairly common, especially when dealing with things like drop-down menus, so here’s a run-down of the two best (and only properly semantic) ways to do this using simple CSS properties.

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I know this won’t be a very informative blog, but I’m looking for help and thought it would be easiest to explain myself here. I’m needing to set up my work calendar (Exchange) to automatically sync with my Google Calendar. My current setup is as follows:

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If you’re using a CMS you can simply find a handy plugin that displays your Twitter feed on your site, but if you’re working in a non-CMS framework then it’s more tricky. Here’s a handy piece of code you can use to get your twitter feed as well as any tweets that mention your name. I have also provided a simple function that uses regex to turn any URLs, hash tags or @mentions in your tweets into clickable links.

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Nutch and Solr are two solid tools created by the great folks at Apache that you can use to crawl the web (Nutch) and index your crawled data (Solr). There are obviously far more uses for these tools than just indexing random websites and I won’t go into those in this post, but seeing as though I struggled to find documentation on all of this when I started using them I thought I’d put together a quick starter’s guide to crawling the web with Nutch and using Solr to index and search the data that you have crawled.

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Recently, the almighty Google launched a more secure way of logging in to your account – they call it the 2-step verification process (it’s not just a clever name, the new login process does actually require 2 steps). The whole thing sounds a bit complex when reading Google’s description of it, but it’s really rather simple. Here is a run down of how it works and how it will benefit you.

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I thought it might be useful to occasionally post some basic PHP tips that I wish I had been given when I first started programming. These will feature simple PHP methods that are aimed more at beginners than experienced PHP devs, but they may also serve as handy little reminders for the latter. To start the series I thought I’d give the simplest way to connect to a MySQL database using PHP.

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UPDATE [19 May 2011]: Premium (paid for) Android apps are now available in South Africa.

Because I’m in South Africa, I only have access to the free Android apps and not to the paid ones. While this is a slight drawback, there are in actual fact plenty of free apps in the Android market that I have found invaluable. Here is a simple list of the apps that I have found the most useful.

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