Hot Dorkage

Well it’s looking like Doctrine is the heavy weight data mapping solution of the lot. Zend Framework was often criticized for having no serious Model methods. Models was just sort of where you put your nuts and bolts database code. Some folks like the structure of the Active Record model that you see in Rails some other PHP frameworks. Sure it makes it dead easy when your tables map pretty straightforwardly onto your objects but makes it harder to have complex objects involving many tables. Zend was working on their own Zend_Entity package to remedy this, but they have abandoned it in favor of integrating Doctrine. The Zend Roadmap for the future calls for tight integration of Doctrine with the framework, so there will probably be some additional automatic linkage, with the view to the framework user’s code being smaller. But both ZF 2.0 and Doctrine 2.? are for PHP5.3, which is some time down the pike for ordinary folks. On the ZF Wiki there is a proposal to integrate current versions, at least to some extent. The symfony camp are hollering that Doctrine automatically “just works” in symfony, and that’s great. But for now you do have to do a little work to integrate it with ZF.
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I have been studying up on Yii framework as a potential alternative to Zend. It has its pluses and minuses. Yii framework comes with jQuery included at the core. It was ridiculously easy to download a jQuery plugin, drop it in as a black box, follow the instructions for the front end, and it just works. I used the star-rating plugin. If you have a rating for a piece of content represented as a number such as 3.642/4 on a scale of 0-4, it is much more Web 2.0 friendly if you represent that graphically. Star-rating uses pimped up radio buttons to represent this number as five fractional stars. It also does the front end of dynamic interactive ratings, and as soon as I get my ajax back-end working on that I’ll post that too. Since the actual code being typed in is illegible in the video, I have included it in this article.

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They couldn’t be too long in coming! The best thing about Twitter is its API. I was told by someone in the know that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes through its API, not through people directly surfing it. Anyway, the new lists are GREAT. They should have been there from the get-go but oh well. Here is Twitter’s widget to track lists. This is my geek list. Since I don’t know any cool automated listing management tools yet, these geeks I put on here by hand. If you want to be on it and you’re not, just ask.

Here’s a little Twitter app for you while we all wait for some serious list apps: This one is called twibbon, and what it does is overlays a little icon over your twitter avatar to show you support something. First I placed the zend framework one, then I created my own for toonlet, of which I am a rabid fan. Then it tweets it and invites all your followers to place one as well. The little widget keeps track of how many supporters it has. You can also do Twibbons for facebook.

I just clipped each individual frame of one of my toonlets and put them in an open office presentation. Then I fired up Berio and ran the slideshow fullscreen while I read the lines. Then I imported the whole thing into IMovie, clipped the beginning and end, compressed it a little and uploaded it to Youtube.

Camtasia is awesome, but pricey. For the likes of me, who doesn’t do video screen capture for a living, the price just isn’t justified. Leopard comes with an app to do capture, but it requires a hookup to a MacOSX server. Out of luck again. Enter Berio. Simple Straightforward, and does the job. You can talk while you’re mousing as well. Downside: Five minute limit.

Free download from http://www.juniortan.com

Paul Fenwick graced us with the following presentation at Barcamp Melbourne. Armed with only the documentation from Facebook’s API he proceded to submit queries to their query engine and it is amazing what he dug up on the volunteers who agreed to let him “hack” their accounts.

Bottom line: Facebook apps are scary because they open your info veins via the back door of applications shared with your “friends.” I don’t know about you but I have quite a few non savvy friends who are nowhere as paranoid as I am. I like using Facebook to keep up to date with my friends, but I don’t want people dredging up stuff on me via my friends’ lack of savvy. So your only hope is to disable *ALL* facebook apps.

Firebug is da bomb for debugging your web front end. Instead of just being able to look at the page source as it was delivered from the server, it lets you see the modified page after Javascript has run it through the ringer, it breaks things down heirarchically to help you focus, and it even lets you edit a page locally.

Now you can do the same to serverside PHP with FirePHP, a Firefox/Firebug add on. Note: You have to have Firebug to use FirePHP. I’m guessing FirePHP piggybacks onto some of its presentation structure.
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I gave a 3 minute “Lightening Talk” on toonlet.com a couple weeks ago at the end of a LUV meeting. I wasn’t sure it was appropriate, because I think of these folks as really brilliant high-powered geek gurus, and toonlet is just a web app that really dumb people can use. It doesn’t even have an API. ( If it did I would have been all over that months ago.) Anyway geeks probably wouldn’t be interested in the technical end of it cuz it’s all point ‘n’click. However, I figured it’s only three minutes. Turns out that, like everyone, geeks like to have fun especially when it involves computers in some way, so they were happy to be made aware of toonlet.com.

Several of the same people were attending bar camp melbourne a few weeks later. I figured I’d just give another lightening talk but a couple of people asked me to give a full 30 minute demo of toonlet.com, so I hastily threw this together at the last minute. Unfortunately bandwidth was a bit of an issue. There were at least 30 laptops noshing on that network with the admonishment to “not be evil” but even with 30 laptops just idling it is not going to be fast for anyone. So I wasn’t able to demo the character creator.

We were lucky to have Avi Miller streaming video for us so that folks could attend bar camp remotely, and eventually everything got archived at Blip.tv

direct link:

You don’t have to look at my talking head, anyway. Any defects in the voice quality can be sourced to me organically, as I was suffering from a fierce head cold.

This XKCD comes at just the right time for me. I’m struggling with an issue with the Captcha in Yii Framework. In case you didn’t know, the captcha is that slightly distorted codeword that you type into a computer program to tell it you’re a human being. Bots supposedly can’t read them…. Of course I don’t really see a problem with chatting with a bot if it’s a good enough one to provide you joy and/or other types of entertainment. XKCD fans tend to be abstract types anyway.

OK, I pledge to post my problem with the Yii captcha and why I have to override it and my solution, because it potentially affects Leopard users.