Three till Seven

The two keywords yield and super allow you to pass control back and forth between parent and child methods, to weave power between a more general method (in the parent class) and a more specific method (in the child class) with ease and logic. Using yield and super effectively can help you maintain the DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) principle, keeping your code easier to maintain.

Creating images on-the-fly can be a very useful skill. Using PHP’s built-in image generation functions, it’s pretty easy, too. This tutorial will detail how to have the titles of blog entries show up as automatically generated images.

There are several ad sites that you’ll see being used everywhere. They slow down page loading, even on fast connections, because sometimes there’ll be lag and they won’t load immediately and instead of being able to read that interesting news article, you’re stuck waiting for some Flash animation to show up so you can ignore it. A simple way to make those ads 1) not show up and 2) not cause delays in page loading is to edit /etc/hosts. Check out hostsfile.mine.nu for ways of doing this in Windows and Mac.

It’s easy to make accented characters (e.g. é and ü) in Linux. Easier than in Windows, actually, because in Windows you have to remember all those crazy Alt codes, and in Linux, it’s logical combinations of accents and letters.

It’s pretty easy to extract just the audio from a DVD in Linux, using Mplayer, sox, and either Audacity or split.

If you’ve browsed through many personal sites at all, you’ve probably seen some of the following things that make me personally cringe. I don’t understand why they’re so trendy, since they don’t improve a site in the least.

This was taken from an email I sent to Jem and Trinity about beginning in Ubuntu Linux. It might also be useful to see my dated Beginning Linux Commands guide. Any questions about something I do or don’t have on here, as well as your own Linux tips, can be posted as comments.