Here’s a quick GOTCHA that may save at least one developer some time. Recently whilst working with some XML to import music into an mp3 download site I came across an issue accessing the values of specific nodes through the simplexml object that I created. The value always threw up zero.

The issue lies in node names containing hyphens, thus:

$object->album-title     returns     0

The answer is to wrap the object property (node name) containing the hyphen in curly braces.

$object->{’album-title’}     returns     “London Calling”

Here’s hoping that helps someone.

This is a software update loop that has been annoying me for a while now when Thunderbird tries to update itself on Windows. Well, before you go removing any files or removing Thunderbird and starting from scratch, try this somewhat abstract method. I’ll bet more times than not it works:

1. Ctr+Alt+Delete and open your Process manager.
2. End the process “Quickcam.exe”.
3. Restart Thunderbird, install the update and sleep peacefully.

We’ve launched another client project over at Zumo Internet and this one is pretty exciting. We worked with 2 other media companies to provide a new survey application for the Orange UK’s business site.

For our part we used jQuery, PHP and MySQL to write a custom built petition that triggers every n^th visitor.

It’s a tiny part of a huge site, but nevertheless we are pretty chuffed to have been involved.