Loads of PHP notices - bad PHP coding practices

I'm suprised no one else has mentioned this. I setup a block in Views and set ddblock to use it. When the view loads I also get loads of PHP notices popping up in drupals message system. Obviously, this is not a huge issue as a production environment wouldn't have such a setting on but it is really annoying whilst developing and I do use PHP srtict and avoid trying to use undefined variables. most of the undefined variables occur when trying to set $configuration_settings. This is also and interesting area because I noticed you're building an array and serializing it before using variable_set. You can do this:

$settings = array(
    'key' => 'value',
    'foo' => 'bar',
);
variable_set('ddblock_block_'. $origin .'_'. $delta .'_cycle_settings', $settings);

It isn't necessary to serialize the information yourself.

It doesn't seem to me that all these lines are needed to set $configuration_settings. Why not set a base array with all the possible keys for the configuration then merge it with $edit:

$settings = ddblock_load_settings($origin, $delta);
$settings += $edit;
variable_set('ddblock_block_'. $origin .'_'. $delta .'_cycle_settings', $settings);

anyway, can we do something about the undefined variables?