About
Liz Jamieson is a semi-retired web professional based in Devon. Unlike some who experiment with drugs or sex, Liz has experimented with living entirely outside her comfort zone, in a rural area in the UK’s South West.
She likes to spend time in France or Spain as this provides her with timely if desperately short injections of the bling-laden, glamourous lifestyle she craves.
Liz became enamoured with France when she spent a holiday in the south of the country at the age of 13 and the fascination with France and the French has never left her.
There is a particularly dreadful French pop song with a line in it that goes, “I love the French, I even love the ones I don’t like”. For Liz, and for reasons unknown, this song has resonance.
She was born on a small island 70 miles off the coast of Florida, but moved to Spain at the age of 4 months and grew up in La Línea de la Concepción in Andalusia, close to Gibraltar and in Essex, in the UK thereafter.
She attended school in Essex and enjoyed it – the teachers were excellent and one of them remains a friend to this day. After school she went to 6th Form College and then onto Univeristy. She left university after three wonderful years, with a degree in Computing Science.
Liz loved growing up in Essex, and many Essex inspired ideals remain with her to this day. She has a penchant for fairy lights and hopes to establish as many as possible in her ancient house at some point. If only it were a joke. That last comment not withstanding, Liz believes Essex girls in general, get distorted press.
Liz worked for Digital Equipment in Reading, London, Rotterdam and Geneva before moving to Siracusa in Sicily and spending time there working in the control room of an oil refinery.
Whilst in Sicily she lived in ancient Ortigia, not far from where Archimedes said “Eureka” and jumped out of the bath.
The Sicilians were a quite fascinating crowd and the experience of living and working there for such a long period have left her with unforgettable memories.
Her father was born in London, but his family originate in Devon and Somerset. He spent his adult life living abroad, working in the Caribbean, Spain, the Far East and the Middle East.
Her mother’s family are from Port Antonio on the north coast of Jamaica.
Copy of DSCF0033
DSCF0003
Building Work
Re-rendering of Thatched cottage
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Hi Lizzy, just read your bio. Very interesting! Comments sent via Twitter. Cheers! -Danny
Hi, really nice tuts, and stuff here!
Keep it up
CG
Merci Mon Ami
Didnt realise you were a fellow British Thesiser 
Would love to work together sometime! 
Hi David – Yours designs are really very beautiful.
Hey Liz, I saw your post on DIY Forums about making the theme change with one install via a drop down box. Very good, would love to give that a try sometime. You can check two of my thesis sites at my name link above and at one3rdnerd.org for my creative design. Thanks
i just wondering why specifically said you chose not experiment with drugs or sex, was that a direct implication that other web developers experiment specifically in these areas?
What a great question.
No, it wasn’t a backhanded generalisation. I’ve never had anything to do with recreational drugs nor licentiousness (some might call me boring). The reference was to suggest that coming to live here was as extreme as doing either of those things. And for some other incomers – has even had the same consequences . . .
I realise that what I have said above with regard to variable declaration is misleading so here is an update.
Please note that NOT declaring a variable with error_reporting set to E_ALL will NOT ALWAYS lead to a notice level warning.
For example I declared $data because I prefer to declare variables. The notice level warning will only happen if you DON’T declare a variable, AND then go on to use it in a situation where the system does not know what the variable is.
For example :
class Home extends MY_Controller {
var $freddy;
function Home(){
parent::__construct();
}
function index(){
echo $this->freddy;
}
}
In the above fragment, no notice warning will display. But if you remove the line “var $freddy”, a notice warning displays.
Similarly, outside of classes and objects, in straight inline PHP, the “declaration” of a variable is not addressed by a var, it is addressed by assigning a starting value to a variable.
So,
$myvar1 = "10";
echo($myvar1);
will not result in an error, but removing the $myvar1 = “10″ line, will cause an error.
var is just the way you declare a variable in PHP in a class. However it is possible to NOT declare variables too. You can just say:
$fred=10;
without declaring $fred first with a :
var $fred;
It is not a global declaration – it has the scope of the controller only.
However you will get an error if you don’t declare $fred first IF your error reporting level is set to report all errors no matter how small. Not declaring a variable will give you a notice level warning – i.e a low level warning if you have your error reporting level set to ALL. You do this by saying ,
error_reporting(E_ALL)
Please see this section of the PHP manual for more on setting error_reporting levels.
In the CI fragment you mentioned ,I declared $data because I prefer to declare variables, and because by default in CI, error_reporting is set to report ALL errors. It is normal that once you’ve written your system and it is being used, you should lower the error_reporting level. Reporting full errors onto the screen all the time can give hackers too much information.
In the fragment, $data is used as an array. So I declare it first. The I fill it with anything that the controller knows about that the view will need. For example,
$data['current_date'] = ‘01-Feb-2009′;
$data['name'] = ‘Jane’;
$data['idea'] = “Let’s go to the beach”;
CI is set up so that when you are in the view, you can just refer to anything in $data as $the_thing, so in my example here, if I wanted to use those values in the view I would just say for example $current_date.
CI handles the unpacking of the $data array so in my view I could use the following variables $current_date, $name and $idea.
Does that help?
Hi Liz, just started on the CI, PHP, MYSQL etc. learning experience, and using your blog as a guide.
Can you give me a pointer to an explanation of the “var $data” declaration used in one of your your CI code frags? I assume it has some special significance but I just can’t find it anywhere in the PHP or CI docs.
Is it just a global declaration for CI?
Thanks