Cow Computing

Often time, when working on a website, certain database transactions have to be taken with great care (e.g. payment, account creation…). It’s definitely an advantage to make use of the Atomicity the database provides (e.g. mySQL). But How? Here’s i will show you how to use PDO to wrap a SQL insert statement such that it’s either done or no. (*it’s included with PHP5, and you have to enable the extension inside the php.ini)

<?php

$hostname = 'localhost';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';

try {
$dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=mysql", $username, $password);

// Setting the notification to throw exception when error encountered
$dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);

$dbh->beginTransaction();
$count = $dbh->exec("INSERT INTO user(userID, name) VALUES ('1', 'Steve')");
$dbh->commit();

$dbh = null;
}
catch(PDOException $e)
{
$dbh->rollback();
echo $e->getMessage();
}

?>

As we all know, HTML 5 is on its way, and there’s going to be a huge addition to the current syntax. In this post, i shall share with you about the “nth-child” feature. Often, we would like to create a table or list with alternate row color as follow:

// HTML Snippet
<div id="test-area">
  <ul>
    <li>row 1</li>
    <li class="even-row">row 2</li>
    <li>row 3</li>
    <li class="even-row">row 4</li>
    <li>row 5</li>
    <li class="even-row">row 6</li>
    <li>row 7</li>
    <li class="even-row">row 8</li>
    <li>row 9</li>
    <li class="even-row">row 10</li>
  </ul>
</div>

// CSS Snippet
ul {
  list-style: none;
}

// color the even rows
.even-row {
  background-color: #ccc;
}

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