noodleFund

Redirect!

2007-10-31T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hey. If you're listening, go over to http://vazav.com and read there, instead. This blog is DEAD. At least for now.

Rails Magic with Named Routes

2007-08-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

Something I just... never noticed before, I guess: Rails' named routes.


map.board '', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'index'
map.category 'gripes/:category', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'by_category'
map.detail 'gripes/:category/:slug', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'by_slug'

This allows you to do the following:


board_url
category_url :category => 'Wowee'
detail_url :category => 'Wowee', :slug => 'Nifty'

I thought it was pretty cool.

Pownce

2007-07-18T17:36:00.000-07:00

Alright. It's pretty cool. I signed up for a Pro account, but errors in the system have prevented me from actually getting my account. Add me up on Pownce! My username is "sintaks".

Tuplix Launched! (oooOOOooo... screencasts...)

2007-07-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

After much waiting, Tuplix is finally launched. Break out the champagne! (We did.)

But... what is it?

Two years ago, I didn't know either. It was supposed to be this be-all/end-all solution for managing your site's content, so far as I knew. After working with XAVIOUR, TechMeridian's custom-application-development-environment-slash-CMS, for a year, I thought maybe it was supposed to be a replacement... a sort of... XAVIOUR v3. I then left TechMeridian after about a month of confusion and frustration, right when Tuplix development was revving up. I sold my soul, got a job at RightNow Technologies, and spent the next six months there, sulking. I then spent three months freelancing, playing World of Warcraft, and learning Japanese. Good fun.

I was then contacted by TechMeridian, after months of silence, and asked if I was available to help with some client work while Tuplix development continued. A few weeks later, and here we are. Tuplix is a working product, made for real clients (and already being purchased by Big Companies). I'm proud of TechMeridian for the work they've done. Hopefully this will open the door to the Grail of Web Development: being able to drop client work to make your own fun stuff.

So here I am, in the office, blogging when I should maybe be working. I have a screencast compressing, and am almost done with my list, so I don't feel so terrible. Plus I'll be here for like 10 hours today, sans overtime... Oh well. No complaining. That's what myGripe is for!

So what is Tuplix?
Tuplix is content-editing for the masses. When I worked for Zee Creative, we were constantly making these sites with five or six pages, and had to tie them to a DB just so the client could edit those... five or six pages. While it's not the "wrong" use for PHP/MySQL, it's a bit overkill, and led to quick, one-off sites with hard-coded IDs and wasted time.

Tuplix is perfect for these types of sites. One merely creates the site files, then places a specific CSS class in the containers she wants editable. Add them to Tuplix, tell Tuplix which CSS class you used, and like magic, you can make changes to your content. All your files stay on your server (though they make a round-trip to Tuplix servers for Processing, Editing, and Publishing). There are no special codes you have to stick in your site files, no stupid arrangement for separating content out. You could, in fact, design a site not knowing what Tuplix was, and then adapt it to work inside Tuplix in mere minutes.

And that's what TechMeridian is counting on. They're hoping that users with static sites will see Tuplix and ask their designer to make it work. They're hoping that designers will start accepting clients with Tuplix in mind. But then... they're not hoping very hard.

Like I said, TechMeridian is talking with Big Companies about Tuplix, and Big Companies are talking back. Whether this means some kind of liberal licensing agreement or outright purchase is yet unknown. Until there is some solidarity, we're keeping it low-key, relying on word-of-mouth and our own connections to spur users into trying it.

(Pause for an hour while I finish a screencast, take two phone calls, and hunt down some cookies...)

Anyhow... I've lost mental context now. I encourage everyone to try out Tuplix. First off, it's free. Well, there's a free account, anyhow... and it says active as long as you log in every 30 days. If you like it, upgrade. It's month-to-month, with no contracts and no setup fees. If you're a web-shop, and you're looking to save some programming time, contact us about possible co-branding opportunities. Who knows? It could happen.

Paximus Maximus,
Mase

Remembering Why I Love CodeIgniter

2007-06-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

For giggles, I recorded a screencast of a project I recently did at work for a non-profit. The process reminded me why I like CodeIgniter over other PHP frameworks.

This was a very short project. All-told, it took about 6-8 hours to complete. The app itself is a simple Event Calendar application. There are only about five screens (view, add, edit, change password, log in) plus the front end. A gentle sprinkling of Ajax was employed, and I think made the app more usable.

The reasons I prefer CI over others are few:

Installation is simple.
The framework is light.
There is a lot of "helper" code available to you right away.
Everything just works.

What I loved most about these four things is that it enabled a fifth: speedy development. The framework is familiar to me, and easy for others to learn. Because of this, I can crank out lines of code almost non-stop. I rarely have to refer to the documentation (though when I do, the docs are plentiful and neatly organized), and everything works exactly as expected.

There are only a few things I wouldn't mind seeing in the framework, or adding myself:

Automatic layout/partial (a la Rails).
A real ORM.
Different application layout (in the filesystem)

Items 1 and 2 are fairly self-explanatory. Item three may not be. You see, CodeIgniter places your application folder inside of the framework system folder. This means that for every application you want to have, you have to have an instance of the framework for that application. In my mind, I'd rather have the framework library sitting in one place for every application, and have the app-specific code in its folder. This is the way Django, Rails, XAVIOUR, Tuplix, and so many other frameworks do it. It just makes more sense.

If you haven't tried CI, check it out. I think you'll find it to be a breath of fresh air.

Java, the Beast

2007-06-05T11:02:00.001-07:00

That's right. Zoom in on this puppy, and you'll see that the Amazing Java is using 113% of my CPU. See? Giving something your one-hundred-and-ten percent is possible!

Facebook Platform Development Setup

2007-05-27T03:58:00.001-07:00

I've been playing around with the newly released developer features from Facebook. Since it's quite difficult debugging FBML from a remote server, I've come up with the following setup.

I'm using Ruby on Rails to develop a simple Poll application. Since I don't want to have to upload my work every time I'm going to test it, I've decided that during development, I'll run the server locally.

Your Facebook application needs to request information from your server. Since my IP changes once in a while, I registered it with DynDNS, and gave it a hostname. I then set up port-forwarding on port 3000 of my router to head to port 3000 of my laptop.

Now, when Facebook makes a request to http://myurl.homeunix.net:3000/, it goes to my IP, which is served to my laptop. The joy of this is that you can see the debugging output from your server instance, which is very helpful, as Facebook does not really print out debugging information.

Peace out, homies.

Sure. Why not?

2007-05-02T00:12:00.000-07:00

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

OpenLaszlo and PHP

2007-05-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

I successfully integrated OpenLaszlo with Code Igniter tonight. I'm pretty happy. The solution is stupidly simple, yet I had to search for it. Simply run OpenLaszlo, then do a local proxy-request for certain URLS. Now, when I call for http://myserver.com/lzx/somefile.lzx, it throws me http://localhost:8080/lps-4.0.0/lzx/somefile.lzx, which causes the LZX file to be compiled (or drawn from the cache) and served up. In code, I just dump the request to http://myserver.com/lzx/somefile.lzx using file_get_contents (or curl, if you please), so I can maintain my pretty URLs (i.e., no one ever has to request an LZX file directly).

Pretty effing slick. Now, what to do with it?

The part I hate most about web-application development is creating beautiful administrative interfaces. Yes, I like them. Yes, I think they are great. The problem is I suck at it. So if I can pass OpenLaszlo my list of required fields and data URLS and have it generate a usable interface for me, more power to it.

Too bad OpenLaszlo is such a beast to run. Moreover, it's too bad I'm on shared hosting and can't run it. Guess that means I'm limited to playing around on my local machine.

Santa, for Christmas, please buy me five years of dedicated hosting. Or two. I'd even settle for one. Thank you, Santa.

From Scratch: On Hold

2007-03-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

My postings on creating a project in Code Igniter are sort of on hold for the moment, as I'm in the process of doing the exact same thing for php|arch.

Soon!

Also, Jonny (from Eclipse Triad) and I have teamed up to build a small application (affectionately called "Experiment 1"), to be launched within the next month as part of the Web Designer Index's new WDI Labs project. Experiment 1 is short, sweet, and hopefully useful.

Vista vs Ubuntu (Beryl)

2007-03-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

Cocoa: First Screens

2007-02-22T23:53:00.000-08:00

Here's a lil' screenshot of the application nib. No logic behind it yet, but it's coming.

The application uses Core Data, though I've got to do some pre-filtering against it, so I can't just hook it straight to the GUI. Bummer.

For the first time, I'm really understanding the architecture of a well-constructed Cocoa application. It's actually pretty fun.

Maybe I'm just biased (okay, I know I'm biased), but it all seems to lay out better than your typical .NET application. The inheritance-model just makes sense. Delegate objects make sense. Notifications make sense. These things took me days to figure out in .NET 2.0. Here? About twenty minutes.

Or maybe I'm just purposely making .NET difficult so I have an excuse to stay in the Cocoa world.

Hey Readers! I'm sure some of you have experience in either the .NET or Cocoa worlds. What say you? Why do you develop with Cocoa? What have you developed?

One of the things which kind of scares me as I delve into these technologies is the job market. You never hear about people looking for Cocoa developers. While I'd like to believe it's because every Cocoa developer is just so happy with his job that he performs perfectly and never wants to leave, the Rational Me says, "No, it's because there isn't demand."

But then, the Optimist Me says, "Hey now. There are plenty of small Mac-soft shops around." And he's right. Right now, tons of highly-motivated, highly-passionate teams are creating small, specialized applications for the Mac.

Take, for example, Loopware. I'm sure David is tired of me asking him questions and annoying the hell out of him on AIM, but this is a one-man shop who caters to a specialized crowd of equally devoted users.

It's happening everywhere. Textmate is another perfect example. That's probably the coolest part about the 'Net. With millions of users, you only need a percentage of a percentage to stay afloat as a one-man developer.

Crazy.

Cocoa: Diving Right In

2007-02-22T01:45:00.000-08:00

I've decided to make an effort in the area of Cocoa Development. I picked up a few books about six months ago, and even managed to work through the lil' tutorials.

The problem with tutorials, however, is that without the right mindset, you'll end up with a working something with no concept of how you got there. Without personal involvement in the project, it's harder to maintain attention, and therefore retain the information presented to you. I still recommend reading through the tutorials, however, so that you can make a mental index of where to find things later.

My primary resource is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass. Hillegass has been developing for Cocoa since its creation at NeXT, and now does workshops at the Big Nerd Ranch. If I had the cash, I'd fly out there in a heartbeat. For now, I'm content reading his book.

Objective-C is a very nice, clean, and organized language. In my mind, it's (nearly) everything that C++ should have been. The only area that people will probably complain about is garbage collection... because... well... it's manually done. You maintain your own reference counts, and take care of allocating and deallocating memory. Apparently that's set to change in Objective-C 2.0, which should make its appearance soon.

The concept of message-passing, a thing it borrows from Small Talk (apparently) is brilliant, in my opinion. It's the same thing that makes me such a big fan of Ruby. You ask tell an object, "Hey, do you respond to this?" and it will tell you. This feature makes things like the Observer Pattern that much more intuitive. It's even provided out-of-the-box through the NSNotificationCenter. Badass.

Many things on my plate right now. Client work, school work, fun work. If anyone wants to join the Co-Op as a PHP developer, let me know. =)

From Scratch: Part I - Setting Up Your Mac

2007-02-16T17:34:00.000-08:00

I use a Mac for development. It's a beautiful thing. Before you start calling me a Mac-zealot, I'll throw down the disclaimer: This is probably the only time you'll have to worry about me ranting about the Mac. After this, it's platform-neutral.

The process is pretty painless. If you're running a different platform, just make sure you've got the following running on your box:

Apache 1.3 or later
MySQL (or your preferred DB... be forewarned, I'm sticking to MySQL)
PHP5.2.1 or greater

Apache
I'm going to assume that most of you Mac users already have Apache, and that it's version 1.3. That's a fairly safe assumption, as it's what currently ships with the Mac. The only thing you'll probably have to do is enable it.

Go to System Preferences
Go to Sharing
Click "Personal Web Sharing"
Turn that bugger on

*Poof* - Apache 1.3. Gee, Macs are great. Linux, too!

MySQL
Download the Mac OS X version of MySQL 5. Install it. Bam. You rock. I'd suggest having MySQL start startup if you're going to be using this machine for heavy development. It's annoying to have to start it manually all the time. Details in the download.

PHP
If you're running Linux, you might already have PHP5 installed. If not, you can probably snag it using your distro's package manager. Users of Mac OS X can either compile and install it themselves, trying to figure out what flags do what, or they can download the Entropy package. Yeah. Good idea. N-i-c-e and simple.

Testing!
So, how can we tell if it worked? When you enabled Personal Web Sharing, you turned your Sites folder (located in your user directory) into a document root! Throw this file (test.php) into that folder, get rid of the ".txt" extension, and navigate to http://127.0.0.1/~yourusername/test.php

You should be greeted with a page full of sweet variables and settings in tabular form. If not, uh, see me.

Building Ajax-ified Web-Applications with Mac OS X, PHP, Code Igniter, Prototype, and Scriptaculous

2007-02-16T17:11:00.000-08:00

This series will henceforth be known as the "From Scratch" collection. Today's writing (as well as unofficial title) is "From Scratch: Overview."

With all the hoopla over Rails, Django, and (Insert Other Popular Framework Here), people are starting to become curious about how they, too, can start building neat web-applications. Many of our web-hackers, however, are too busy to sit down and learn a proper language to facilitate this. "We were raised on PHP," they say, "And we're sticking to it!" Fair enough.

People are always comparing X vs Y. Looking over my logs, I see a lot of the traffic generated to my old blog had queries like "PHP vs Django" or "Code Igniter Ruby". The problem with these queries is they're mixing lingo.

Code Igniter is a framework written in PHP.
Django is a framework written in Python.
Rails is a framework written in Ruby.

If you happen to be one of those poor souls who has been flamed for mixing up the terminology, have no fear. They're flaming to compensate for something. Like running Windows.

Moving on.

Everyone seems to have their favorite framework, language. They usually have good reason. Ruby is a beautiful language. Django is an amazing framework. PHP runs everywhere. Everywhere.

So, I'm focusing on PHP, both because it's still everywhere, and because I have the most experience with that particular language. Yes, it's verbose and ugly and there are no namespaces and sometimes I want to cry and... hey, it works.

This collection will cover the following:

Setting up your Mac OS X box with PHP and MySQL
Creating a local, virtual domain for development
Setting up Code Igniter on your virtual domain (pretty URLs included)
Hello, World! Hello, Papa Ajax!
Techniques for Ajax-based development
How to conquer the world in three easy steps

Of course, we'll also run into the usual fare: data modeling, MVC-separation, and things which I do because I think they're right.

Here we go...

A Challenge, A Task

2007-02-14T00:46:00.000-08:00

For those of you who hate having to enter a five-letter sequence of characters to post your blog comments:

If a form is as the bottom of a page, wouldn't a user have to scroll down to submit that form? If a field has no focus, doesn't the user have to either click that field or tab over to it? If a form has fields hidden from view in a browser, will it not be blank?

Why doesn't someone create a system that uses metrics of human-browsing behavior to determine of a post is spam or not? If 99% of 10,000 visitors had to scroll down, give focus to the fields, and entered values only in text fields that are visible (i.e., don't have an extra div cleverly hiding them from human-view), then it's safe to assume those 99% are human. If, on the other hand, a request is made, a response is posted, but there is no intermediate activity (scrolling, focus, gradual field-value change, pauses, etc), and fields which shouldn't be visible are filled out, isn't it safe to assume that the post should be marked as spam?

I'm just saying... Someone should make this thing. Yes, it involves several components, but it'd be damn cool.

Thoughts?

Play MP4 on your LG VX9800

2007-02-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

It apparently works out of the box. If you try copying an MP4 to your mini-SD card by putting it in the my-flix folder, it will show the clip, but say it's unavailable. Lies.

Steps:

Convert your favorite movie to MPEG-4.
Create a folder called "media" in the root of your mini-SD card.
Copy your movie to this folder.
Insert the card into your phone.
Make sure you're on the phone's "Desktop"
Press "OK" (Menu).
Press 0 (that's a zero).
Press 0 six more times.
Scroll down to "Get It Now Settings" (or press 9).
Scroll down to "Get It Now" (or press G).
Scroll over to Media Player.
Hit "Play File".
Select the folder called "fs:/card0/media".
Select your movie file.
Press 2 to start playing your file. You can find additional key settings under "Help".

That's right. Those tricksters put a hidden Get It Now application on your phone that plays MPEG-4! It might even play other files! I'm not sure what a Sequence is, but it plays those, too. It also Pesudo-Streams, whatever that is. You can even turn on KDDI HTTP EXTENSIONS (again, no idea, but it's all-capped in the Settings menu, so I have faithfully recreated it here).

Hens forth (if you don't get "hens forth", you should watch Amelie), you can skip to Step 6. There are also a whole bunch of other menus to play with... just don't break anything.

Happy Hacking!

The Obligatory First Post

2007-02-06T18:05:00.000-08:00

So I was sitting at home, probably feeling bad for myself (or whatever else I do on Tuesday nights), when I started to think about this whole "Web X.0" thing.

Those of you who have heard the proper version of the term and are equally tired of it, praise ye. For those of you who have no idea what that means, follow the white rabbit.

No, I'm not going to sit here and rant about "the new bubble", or "the social web." There are plenty of those sites sitting around. In fact, I kind of like some of the things labeled "Web 2.0" - I'm just not particularly fond of the container we're trying to fit it all in. People are already starting to talk about Web 3.0 - the bright and shiny web of tomorrow. The problem is, people are assigning version numbers to something which is characterized as being largely versionless. (On a side note, a quick Google-search shows that James Kobielus apparently agrees with me. Notice my proper use of the phrase "a quick Google-search", as opposed to "a quick google". Someone should send me a T-shirt. Hint hint.)

So What Do I Have To Offer You?

As I said, I was sitting at home (feeling sorry), thinking about the "new web", when I realized, "Hey! I kinda know a lot about all this new stuff! In fact, I've been tracking the greatness for the past six years! Maybe I should write some of this stuff down!!!!!!!!!!!!"

So here I am.

On what authority, you ask? Well, typically I like to downplay my experience, mostly because I believe it to be true. In the back of my mind, however, I'm basically a pompous ass just waiting to tell you how I can make something better. In my mind, I'm like that old boxing coach - even though I can't fight, I'm more than willing to make you fight better. Something like that.

So, my new readership, what would you have me write on? Bear in mind my area of expertise lies in web site and application development. Should I write on my humble beginnings? Early development? The learning process?

P-p-p-post it in the comments!