iamcal.com Since May 2000

Lego-releated post number 3 in a series. Making great ball contraptions is a pretty common Lego thing now, but this 17-module creation is a king among princes.

Gizmodo has some notes - this thing is amazing.

Lego post number 2, in a series. This amazing sci-fi city build in Lego is made of over 200,000 pieces and has an incredible amount of detail. I wish I had this many bricks to play with.

The first of a series of excellent Lego-related links - a study of the price of Lego bricks over time.

There are two answers guaranteed to show up on nearly every PHP question on Stack Overflow - use the mysqli/PDO extension instead of the deprecated mysql one (to avoid SQL injection), and that you can't parse HTML with regular expressions.

With that in mind, my favorite two answers:

• [How PDO is still vulnerable to SQL injection attacks](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/134099/are-pdo-prepared-statements-sufficient-to-prevent-sql-injection/12202218#12202218) by Anthony Ferrara
• [Parsing HTML with regular expressions](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression-pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string/4234491#4234491) by Tom Christiansen

I've posted a bunch of projects to Github in the last few months and haven't linked to them anywhere, so here's a quick roundup of recently notable projects:

• [lib_timezones](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_timezones) - A PHP and JS library to handle user-specified timezones properly, with reasonable client-side auto detection.
• [lib_classsify](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_classify) - A partial PHP port of Github's own [linguist](https://github.com/github/linguist) which can automatically detect the programming language, given a code fragment.
• [js-emoji](https://github.com/iamcal/js-emoji) - A JavaScript library to allow display of Emoji in then browser for OSs without native support (anything that's not OSX 10.8 or iOS 6)
• [lib_autolink](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_autolink) - My old PHP URL-detection and linking library, updated to handle multiple protocols.
• [lib_solr_query](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_solr_query) - A PHP library to turn user-entered complex search queries into valid SOLR query syntax. Supports phrases, booleans, nesting, assertions and more.