A while ago my wife asked me if it were possible to remove all the DVDs we had on a couple shelves and put them in the loft and ‘somehow’ put them on to the computer so we could watch the movies… naturally my mind went straight to building or buying a media centre/HTPC. After looking around I found some nice small systems, such as the systems by Acer or Zotac. However, they either didn’t come with a blu-ray player, or didn’t have room in the case to add to in the future (such as adding a tv tuner card or similar). So after a long while, I finally decided I may as well just build the darned thing! (OK, so it wasn’t much of a push that I needed to buy lots of computer components and build a new PC…)
Continue reading ‘HTPC build!’
Welcoming to the world my lovely little daughter, Rozalynd. Born on the 17th March and weighing in at 6lb 2oz. Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson the first time and thought more kids and less time to code would be a good thing… 
You see QrCodes popping up every now and again on sites, in publications and the like. I think they can be a very handy way for people with cameras on their phones to get a url or other content on to their phone very easily. (I’m thinking more about those people without iPhones or full keyboards, of course!)
If you’ve never seen a QrCode before, it looks something like this:
Now how cool would it be to be able to generate that automatically for each page on your site and allow people to be able bookmark that site on their phone? Well, I think it’d be pretty cool! So I came up with a very simple ZF view helper to do it for me.
I have just started to use the Zend_Feed related components in earnest and am really liking the Zend_Feed_Writer (new to ZF 1.10.0). So what I wanted to do was created an RSS feed file is one didn’t exist and then keep updating that file as-and-when new items came in. Seems a really easy and simple thing to do, right? That, unfortunately, has not been my experience.
I have to say that to documentation seems quite lacking on the ZF site (for all the the Feed components, really, not just the Writer). Because of that, what follows may be idiotic and there really is an easy way. If so, I hope that you will post up a comment and let me know because I’d love to learn!
On with what I did…
Continue reading ‘Adding new items to RSS feed – it shouldn’t be this hard!’
If you’re not sure about Zend_Form’s decorators, what they are or how to use them, then Matthew Weier O’Phinney has the webinar for you:
http://www.zend.com/webinar/Framework/webinar-leveraging-zend_form-decorators-20091216.flv
It’s a great introduction to decorators, how to implement them and how to do slightly more complex things with them. Well worth a watch!
A while ago I wrote a post on how to use the Prototype js library to make elements on your page have the same height.
For those too lazy to read that post, it can be summarised something like this:
Continue reading ‘Same height for elements – now with jQuery goodness!’
Just ran a bit of SQL on Oracle and this was the oh-so helpful error message I got back:
Warning: ociexecute() [function.ociexecute]: OCIStmtExecute: ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected BINARY got BINARY
So you’re expecting a binary value and what you got was a binary value, but that’s inconsistent with the binary value you were expecting to be binary?!
So I’ve finally finished the book! OK, I finished it a couple weeks ago but haven’t had a chance to post up a review yet. Of course, I had every intention of finishing it a lot earlier considering I was flying for nine hours to the States and then another few hours on to Mexico – and the journey back again! – but that really was just wishful considering I was travelling with my two year old son. Oh well!
On with the book review…
The book, as the title makes it plainly obvious, is about developing your team in relation to working with PHP. It’s aimed at, well, pretty much anyone who has an interest in developing or working in a team, be it managers who need to set up and manage teams or developers working within a team who want to improve their work flow and procedures, or anyone in between. It does this by giving an overview on several subjects, but doesn’t go as far as to tell you that you must do x, y or z. This is understandable, though, as every team is different and the book acknowledges this.
The other day I had a new book sent to me called PHP Team Development, written by Samisa Abeysinghe and published by Packt Publishing. Unfortunately, it arrived at work when I was on holiday so I haven’t been able to have a look at it yet. :-/ However, I’m back today and have the book in my hands (well, not literally, of course, else typing would be much more difficult), so am looking forward to diving in to it.
Hopefully have a bit of a review posted up here some time soon!
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