Author: philip

preview of my fall 2006 classes and professors

I’m a little scared yet still looking forward to a full load of classes this upcoming quarter (16 credits). I did what I could to get highly rated teachers and am happy to report they look good (on paper) so without further ado, here they are:

  • Kelly Craig: Engineering Physics Lab

    Everyone seems to love her as she sounds like a caring teacher who explains Physics in real world understandable terms. I like that.
  • Garrett Gregor: Calculus II
    Everyone loves his teaching style, sense of humor, and active nature in the class but there’s one drawback: Very tough by requiring a lot of work, and difficult tests. In the end this will be good for me (including the weekly quizzes) so in some sick way I’m looking forward to this. Good teachers go a long ways despite how challenging they may be. I’d rather learn a lot with a C, then learn very little with an A. Although currently I’m having a difficult time understanding why/how Calculus works/exists, I have a good feeling something will click this quarter. It better! I’ve set aside two hours a day outside of class for Calculus II, are you jealous?!
  • Izad Khormaee [home]: Intro to Electrical/Computer Engineering
    He’s the one teacher I’m familiar with because he’s my student advisor. He seems to want all students to understand the topics, and seems to always be in his office willing to speak to students… so that’s good. Sounds like the course is challenging, but, I’m interested in the topic.
  • Robert MacKay [home]: Engineering Physics, and also Physics Calculations
    Some mixed reviews here but in the end he looks promising. It would seem I need to really pay attention to the lectures, and do the homework, and put in a lot of hours. Yep, sounds like Engineering Physics!

So, in a couple weeks this party will start and I look forward to read this blog entry after the quarter is over. And to my friends: Don’t expect me to hang out much this quarter, or year, as I’ll me living in the library and various caves spread throughout the area.

Update: I added Trigonometry! Although this means 21 credits in the end it should be worth it. Really understanding Trigonometry is a good idea especially when eventually taking a ton of Engineering related classes… like Calculus! Same teacher. He really is an awesome teacher so if you want to learn, desire a teacher that really cares about you succeeding, is somewhat demanding of you spending proper amounts of time, and is a great and available teacher… Garrett Gregor is recommended. (At least so far, it’s only been one week :-)

A mostly unknown perhaps useless but sorta neat PHP coding trick

Yesterday while documenting that PHP 6 deprecates $string{42} in favor of $string[42] I stumbled upon a comment within the PHP Manual XML sources, and here it is in its entirety:

<!-- maybe it's better to leave this out?? 
// this works, but i disencourage its use, since this is NOT 
// involving functions, rather than mere variables, arrays and objects.
$beer = 'Heineken';
echo "I'd like to have another {${ strrev('reeb') }}, hips";
 -->

The thought of a function being called from within a string (without eval()) seems a little odd, doesn’t it? Well, the above code in fact works. Not sure how useful it is but likely someone will find a creative use or two. The internals team generally feels that the behavior isn’t worth documenting as it’s simply an ugly and poor coding style BUT, maybe you’ll see it (the “{${ func() }}” syntax) on a PHP exam somewhere so now you know… :-)

History: This information was added within a patch titled “Added jeroen’s updates” by Damien Seguy apparently for Jeroen van Wolffelaar on the date Thu May 10 18:01:04 2001 UTC.

Update (April 20, 2007): A few days ago Jani demonstrated a simpler example for these variable functions:

$exec = ‘shell_exec’;

$cmd = ‘ls -l’;

echo “This is embedded exec: {$exec($cmd)}”;

happy 30 something birthday to me

Yesterday was a special day as it represented the time I was born. For the most part it was a typical day except during the evening people were over so we created and ate pizza, drank beer and wine, and hung out. Thanks to everyone who came over (and called) including Curt and James for the food, and Jill for the candled birthday cup cakes. I also appreciate Heather and Jill for letting me sit in between them for much of the evening because girls smell nice.

What I love and dislike about Thievery Corporation


I went to a concert yesterday and had an incredible time. If you’ve not heard of “Thievery Corporation” it’s unfortunate but on the bright side you still have time to learn and enjoy their music. Highly recommended. I have many good things to say about them so will instead focus on the negative because that might mean a shorter blog post.

My problem with Thievery Corporation is the inability to assign their songs fewer then four (out of five) stars in iTunes. Because of this when playing “My Top Rated” songs they play more then their share and it’s never good (and risky) to listen to a band too much. So my way around this is I’ve not rated all their songs, so zero stars for some, but I’m having second thoughts because this option just doesn’t feel right. It’s a type of struggle all listeners (you?) of Thievery Corporation likely run into. What to do? All suggestions welcome! I don’t want to risk getting tired of them but at the same time want to listen as often as possible. Please help!

Thank you Curtis for introducing me to this music.