John Hunt

Just a handy one for the IE6 png support:
for i in `ls`; do x=`basename $i .png`; convert $i $x.gif; done

Recently I’ve been using Skype a lot to speak to friends and family in the UK and Australia. It’s pretty good for the following reasons:

• There’s no need to configure your firewall
• Everyone else seems to have Skype already
• It’s pretty good quality wise.
• The webcam function is really good, especially in full screen

Yes, it’s not ideal - it’s a proprietary network and the software is closed source, but on the other hand it just works. And now that the linux beta version supports video calling, I think it’s the best there is.

However, Skype (the company) shouldn’t be praised too much for their new linux beta - why didn’t we get it when the Windows version was released? Why should open source community suffer? Did Skype not realise it’s another potential market for SkypeIn/Out? So frustrating, but that’s how it is in the world of linux I guess!

This morning we called my sister in the UK. The call quality was great as was the full screen video quality. You always know something is good when it’s shocking! My only little gripe was that we couldn’t view my sisters webcam when ours was on. I guess that’s just a bug in the beta (2.0.17 I think) and could well have been something to do with my webcam itself.

Get the latest release of the Beta here.

Google recently announced it’s new open source Android platform for mobile devices. As a programmer and designer, it sounds fairly cool, and as an end user it sounds fairly cool too!! I think I’ll be getting one of these Android devices as soon as they’re released as it seems like mobile computing has finally landed!

There’s a few interesting videos on the aforementioned site too.

Bit off-topic, but I’ve added links to the top of the site to access our travel blog and travel gallery as Laura (my partner) and I are going traveling.

Check it out!

The latest and greatest version of the free, open source GNU/Linux operating system Ubuntu has been released just minutes ago. If you’re tiring of Windows, or simply want to have a look at what all the fuss is about, give it a whirl.

Find out more at www.ubuntu.com. You can even run it from the CD, so there’s no need to erase your Windows XP install.

My girlfriend and I both have iPods. I have a 2nd gen shuffle, she has a 2nd gen nano. Both were working fine on my Edgy install, however, the 2nd gen nano wasn’t being ‘found’ by Gnome, and therefore not appearing in Banshee (which is what I really wanted).

There is a workaround, it’s a replacement for Gnome’s HAL. Simply follow the instructions here for results:
http://www.tigert.com/archives/2007/01/09/ipod-and-ubuntu-edgy/

Finally, a decent flash player for linux! Woohoo! I’m not sure whether it will be much of an improvement on the beta (that didn’t crash once for me), but all the same, it was about time a long time ago. Check it out:

Penguin SWF

After wasting many hours messing around with VoIP solutions, I’ve finally decided that Tesco Internet Phone is the way to go. There’s a few good reasons why I think this, it’s easy for anyone to obtain and install. This was one of the main factors in my decision. With Tesco Internet phone, you don’t have to open ports on your router, it comes with a USB handset, so no need to get one of those, and you can just pop down to tesco and pick one up for really cheap (£15 I think) WITH a £5 calling credit thing.

Anyway, on to setting it up on linux. You’ll need to install kiax or some other IAX capable client. Unfortunately, Ekiga CVS still doesn’t support IAX (as far as I can see) so you’ll be stuck with a qt or kde client.

You’ll probably have to set up on a windows machine unfortunately, but basically, the main thing you’ll need to know is the Tesco IP server address, which is:
vrv.lon.uk.voicestream.net.au
Use your phone number as login and the password you set up. Then under Kiax’s settings you should be able to choose /dev/dsp1 to use the handset. There’s a few little quirks. The hash key doesn’t work, as don’t the volume controls, although there’s probably a way of getting these to work. More later!

I recently stumbled upon a really interesting site called Quickones which has a series of screencasts on how to use various things in Ubuntu (among other distributions).

For example, there’s a short guide on how to get flash to work on Ubuntu. Alan Pope delivers a very well paced and easy to follow screen cast. These screencasts are highly recommended to newcomers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

This was written haphazardly in a forum, please take it as-is (or as a rant of some kind)!
Ok, so before I started using cake I went in to the #cakephp channel on freenode and asked:

“yes, but what about when my application gets really complicated?”
“don’t worry, it’s totally flexible”
“I love cake”
“etc..”

I was still skeptical, but we had a small project coming up at work and a fair bit of time to do it in. Cake fit the bill perfectly. A success!

We’re just coming to the end of a project say, 2 or 3 times the magnitude of that first one. I’ve now had time to form some real solid opinion about CakePHP.

CakePHP has some good points and bad points. One of the nice things about cake is it throws you into the MVC (Model/View/Controller) pattern way of thinking, and without having to learn ruby or something weird like that. The code I’ve been working on has been a lot easier to code because of this nice seperation..although in some cases it has taken slightly longer.

For example, a simple login form can take slightly longer to make as you have to create an login action member to your controller (a function), and then the view (template) and then the model (I’ll get on to that) rather than one quick bodge.

Having said that, I really like it so that gets thumbs up!

Now for why it isn’t quite as good as people say (or at least why I think it’s a bit shit). Models.

So instead of just doing $data = mysql_fetch_assoc($query, $handle) or whatever, you use cake’s ‘model’ abstraction layer, so you’d do something like $this->Model->fetch($data) or something..I don’t remember exactly.

There are a few problems with this:

First and foremost, you need to learn quite a lot, and it’s poorly documented for when you have many to many relationships etc..
CakePHP is poorly documented anyway!
It’s silly, because like a lot of these ‘bright’ ideas, it ends up being wayy more complex than just throwing in a simple (or complex) query.

Yes, for quite simple projects, you (me) could probably get away with using Cake’s modeling bit. However, for complex stuff, you’ll find you’re using $this->Model->query();

That brings me on to why I might continue to use cake in the future…

It’s nicely flexible, next time, I won’t bother trying to use any of Cake’s modeling features to get my data. I’ll just use normal queries..we found we were doing that by the end of the project anyway. I think for beginners, Cake’s modeling language *might* be easier to learn than SQL, but I know SQL and that works well for me…and you don’t have to be messy with it either.

Second thing I really like about cake is that a lot of stuff can be done for you by it’s helper library, for example, $html->dropdown() (or something to that effect) adds a drop down list from an array in your view.

What would be really cool is a cakephp without all the chaff of the model stuff…some kind of cakephp for people who know and love SQL perhaps?

Well, that’s my take on it. If you’re thinking about using it, first I’d suggest you think very hard. Cake is still in it’s infancy, and you’ll find quite a bit isn’t documented at all (I had to speaker to the developer to get some answers). Secondly, it might be easier/better..especially if it’s a one person project to write your own framework based around all this. I’m talking about a very ‘lite’ framework, perhaps just a few files, no more than 200 lines of code?

I’ve had a bit of experience writing my own framework, first one I tried sucked, second one worked really well and I’m now in the process of making a third simply for knocking up sites really quickly. How often do you find yourself coding the same things?

Happy baking!