See those last 4 letters at the end? Yeah got my confirmation from the IET that my application was accepted for Chartered Engineering status. Those 4 letters are the culmination of 29 years (shy of 1 month) of both studying and working as an engineer.

It’s difficult to describe exactly what it all means consicely unless you’re part of the industry to understand what is expected of you and what you expect of other people that hold that same title, but needless to say I’m seriously happy about it and was one of my two goals that I had to achieve this year. This is partly one of the reasons why I’ve taken a step back from my various online endeavours to persue other things that have/had been put on hold for sometimes years.

Now it’s time to start working for that other thing (hopefully I will be able to talk about that in November sometime).

It’s becoming more and more common for blogs to feature certain posts at the top of the page. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to implement this in WordPress. We’ll be using the default theme, Kubrik, as our base theme, but it should be adaptable to most themes with some modification. There’s very little code and featuring posts is simple [...]

I stumbled across Desktopography the other day when reading a post from Smashing Magazine, and I’ve fallen in love with their wallpapers. I’m always looking for inspiration and this site is overflowing with creativity in the form of well-designed wallpapers for my Mac. (yes I use a Mac, doesn’t everyone?)

Check out the site for yourself and tell them Insanarchy sent you.

As you may know, we are looking for motivated, talented and professional guest authors. And we are paying each author $100-300 per post — depending on the quality of the delivered article. If you think that you are one of them contact us — we want you, we need you, we can’t live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team [...]

Version one goes gold! Visitors are landing from every corner of the globe. You know there are likely to be a few teething problems, I mean, this is 1.0.0.0… all those zeroes are meant to allow us a little grace right?

Maybe that dastardly style sheet just won’t cascade elegantly on browser X. An incomplete comment chucks out some broken mark-up. Maybe you should have persisted those database connections after all. Hey, we all overlook things in the excitement of getting our first version running – but how many of these oversights can we happily stomach, and how many might just leave a bitter taste in ours, and more painfully our client’s mouths…

This article walks through the brainstorming stage of planning for what is in this instance, a hypothetical user-centric web application. Although you won’t be left with a complete project – nor a market ready framework, my hope is that each of you, when faced with future workloads, may muse on the better practices described. So, without further ado…Are you sitting comfortably?

Just a quick hint to people with an interest in the development of PHP, but no time for following php-internals. Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC’s for improvements of the language. I’ve rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it’ll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it’ll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

While we’re at it, Steph Fox have dutifully been writing up summaries of php-internals discussions on a weekly basis since the beginning of time. If you just want to get the headlines, it’s an informative read.

Have a nice summer.

Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

Of course, beauty-retouching is a quite deceptive art. The masters of Photoshop create illusions which are hard to tell apart — unless you have both a genuine photo and the final result in Photoshop and can directly compare them. In fact, every day we consume perfectly retouched stars and models online and offline which just look different in the real life [...]

Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art [...]