January 31st, 2009 | Published in miscellaneous
Moved accommodation down in the smoke from sofa surfing at a friends house, how he put u with me for 16 months I don’t know but most grateful to him for it. So now in a Mon to Fri with occasional weekends within 5 minutes walk of the office in Battersea. Really cool for to and from work as can leave late and still be in “home” quickly with no waiting.
Too a bit to get settled but getting used to it now.
January 3rd, 2009 | Published in miscellaneous
…… xmas, again. Actually not to bad. Didn’t go far, Sheffield a couple of times but other than Christmas day had low level family interaction and that helped to reduce the usual festive friction to a minimum.
December 30th, 2008 | Published in browsers
A gui for entering and viewing http information. It pretty straightforward and the documentation on it is minimal (well non existent) however the video takes you through all the main parts and it really is a no brainer as to how you would use it. I can see me using this this year.
Features:
December 29th, 2008 | Published in miscellaneous
Its a long story but i manage a site called Last Thursday The site was originally formed as something of a breakaway from the Ecademy and it gained quite a head of steam within a fairly closed community. After a while of looking at ways of monetizing it the original founders bowed out and another Ecademy member took over, changed the name to First Monday, spent a lot of money on improvements and then attempted to monetize it but was not successful. At that point the site was going to be closed but a group got together to keep the site going and i took it over to manage and host it.
The site runs Drupal and was originally version 4.7. I then upgrade to 5.2 and over Christmas went to version 6.
The upgrade was pretty straight forward but Drupal did throw a few wobblers at me and the site members which are reminiscent of herding cats also threw their usual sets of wobblers at me.
I have got it stable by now but will need to do some more work on it to really quieten it down.
December 26th, 2008 | Published in work
been working for a while on mac dashboard widgets. quite an eye opener in terms of market and opportunity.
using the mac dashcode tool i built a cheat sheet type widget with all the main vi commands. initially just released it to mac’s download site. however when i updated and got rid of the errors and duplication i also switched analytics on and saw quite a spike in visits. turns out that several other site had picked it up and added it to their sites. one of these helpfully puts the download stats on line for the developer and i could see that about 300+ had been downloaded.
encouraged by this i released three more. sed, awk and grep in the same format. and over christmas i combined sed and awk into one widget to save dashboard space.
At the current moment the downloads from this site are
the last one was something of a surprise as i released i about 18:00 on christmas day and the figure had got to that by 22:00 on boxing day. so quite quick growth.
next i plan to release them as iPhone/iPod applications.
December 26th, 2008 | Published in ajax libraries
A review of some Ajax frameworks at Dr Dobbs.
The following libraies looked at and compared
December 26th, 2008 | Published in miscellaneous
The other day i needed a lightweight http server to run on windows. Its a client machine in a clients workplace and i only have local admin access. However i didn’t want to add the IIS server as it would have been a bit noticeable as would Apache. I liked the option of lighthttpd but it doen’t run on windows (department of no surprises) and i don’t want to load cygwin and port of lighthttpd is flaky.
Anyway i came across shttpd which does a good job. This is now a Google project and has been renamed Mongoose (rolls eyes heavenward) but is still kewl.
December 26th, 2008 | Published in miscellaneous
“php.MVC implements the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, and encourages application design based on the Model 2 paradigm. This design model allows the Web page or other contents (View) to be mostly separated from the internal application code (Controller/Model), making it easier for designers and programmers to focus on their respective areas of expertise.
The framework provides a single entry point Controller. The Controller is responsible for allocating HTTP requests to the appropriate Action handler (Model) based on configuration mappings.
The Model contains the business logic for the application. The Controller then forwards the request to the appropriate View component, which is usually implemented using a combination of HTML with PHP tags in the form of templates. The resulting contents are returned to the client browser, or via another protocol such as SMTP.
php.MVC is a PHP port of Jakarta Struts. It currently supports many features of Struts, including declarative application configuration via the XML digester. For example, mappings from the various Action business logic components to appropriate results pages can be specified declaratively in the XML configuration file.”
December 26th, 2008 | Published in languages & tools
YAML(tm) (rhymes with “camel”) is a straightforward machine parsable data serialization format designed for human readability and interaction with scripting languages such as Perl and Python. YAML is optimized for data serialization, configuration settings, log files, Internet messaging and filtering. YAML(tm) is a balance of the following design goals:
December 26th, 2008 | Published in explanation, or not
i was trying to keep several blogs going on different subjects but it is just too much effort and as no one reads them , ultimately futile. So i am consolidating under howitt.com. this will cover my own personal blogging as well as aranaio, parlence and phpframeworks.
aranaio was/is my company from when i was contracting. i am still doing my own development work to explore different avenues than my full time job give me. most of this is now on mac osx, iPhone and iPod development. small scale works that can be developed and delivered quickly.
parlence is a longer term development that lets you manage the text and translation of a website getting closer to completion but seems to keep morphing.
phpframeworks dates from my period of being besotted with frameworks which lated up to the point of getting a job implementing symfony sites and trying to deliver a large project in codeigniter.