For the last six days my mind has been preoccupied with writing two PHP scripts to the extent that, annoyingly, I have been jotting down little notes on bits of paper at work.

“PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly…. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This confuses many people because the first word of the acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called a recursive acronym.” (php.net)

PHP started as a quick Perl hack written by Rasmus Lerdorf in late 1994. It evolved and enjoyed lots of users but it was not until Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans suddenly came along with a new parser in the summer of 1997, leading to PHP 3.0 which defined the syntax and semantics used in both versions 3 and 4. People often ask “why invent yet another language; don’t we have enough of them out there?” Well, PHP was developed as a server-side scripting language, for embedment within HTML, which would be ideal for developing dynamic web-based sites and applications. PHP has come a long way to its current version blah blah blah. (zend.com)

I tried learning PHP back in the dark ages (before the world wide web streamed into my bedroom) and got no where fast other than frustrated and confused. The next time I looked at PHP was when I started this blog and included code on the front page that counted how many days old I am (8781) although I just Google searched for it.

Shortly after that I actually wrote some code which created my database driven wishlist (now in disrepair). The two scripts that I have now largely finished form what I refer to as ‘Rob’s Reference Repository‘ or RRR for short. RRR stylishly displays folders and files employing javascript to dynamically reveal the contents of the folders which can be viewed in more detail making special provisions for text files and certain jpg files. RRR is basically an easily searchable, online repository of reference notes, for use at work (when I eventually graduate), from ISO paper sizes to (scanned in) example calculations.

For a long time I have been planning this and am now relieved it is done but will I ever use it? To refresh my sieve like memory of simple things like the ‘three different types of calculation checking’ would be useful to have click click click but archiving all of these little things requires effort. I suppose there is some sort of balance between effort and usefulness, and hopefully RRR reduces some of the effort.

Now what was I saying? (Ha ha ha) “Recursive acronyms. Aren’t they brilliant?!” - I have been watching too much Fast Show of late…. but anyway, those MIT boys are funny with their recursive acronyms. In fact RRR could stand for ‘RRR: really rocks.’

There are a few minor things that need fixing in RRR, which can wait, and it needs password protecting using PHP security, which I suspect will give me grief as I have not been using the non inline