Beyond Coding

SitePoint have a fantastic sale until Friday the 13th where you can buy 5 PDF versions of their books for just $29.95 USD. That’s $149.75 worth of value for just $29.95.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, all proceeds of the 5-for-1 sale will go to victims of the recent bushfires in Victoria, Australia! Let’s help the SitePoint guys reach their target of $50,000 for Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009. Those Management & Business books look mighty good to me – but I might grab a PHP, CSS or design book too for good measure.

Help SitePoint raise $50,000 for bushfire victimes – 5 books for only $29.95

The bushfires are still burning and the death toll may go over 300. When you couple this with the pain the survivors are feeling (through loss of friends, loved ones, animals, property…) it’s even more devestating. If you ever thought about buying any of the SitePoint books please take up this opportunity.

Thank you.

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It’s gone! :)

Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to present this new website: beyondcoding.com, with my fellow developer friend Scott Gruer! Together we are working hard towards a better blog as well as some interesting projects.

Scott and I have been working together for more than 2 years now. We share very similar goals and mindsets, we believe our collaboration will not only do ourselves a favour, but ultimately also to produce even more values to the web design and development community.

If you are a regular visitor or subscriber of thislab.com, you’d notice that I haven’t been posting much lately. Rest assured, this new website will pack a lot more content, from coding to beyond coding. :)

If you haven’t already noticed, all the page links as well as RSS feeds are now redirected to this new domain name, but just in case, please update your bookmark!

Oh by the way, a brand new identity and theme are in the works and they will be published in the coming few weeks.

“Our interests are in the future, because we’re going to spend the rest of our lives there.”

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First of all, not all parts of the Zend Framework enforce the class naming convention, at least not upon calling ‘em. For example, view helpers are called directly by the ‘chopped’ class name:

// actual class name:
class Path_To_The_CustomViewHelper {}

// calling it in the view:
$this->CustomViewhelper();

Also, models are both named, and called by their class names without any paths (but yes we have to include them in the include paths).

You would think that in most cases calling the classes by their full names (with paths) should work, right?

Wrong.

(more…)

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Since I fully switched from Windows platform to OS X, I noticed that the spell check in Firefox no longer works. A quick google search revealed that the problem is caused by All-in-One Gestures and persists on both OS X and Linux.

I have been using All-in-One Gestures on Firefox for a very long time (primarily on Windows). Fortunately I only use the two very basic gestures: back and forward, so it’s okay to ditch it and find an alternative.

There are only two alternatives to date: Mouse Gestures and FireGestures. The former has not been updated since 2006 and breaks the spell check at least on my system. So I gave FireGestures 1.0.5 (the current version on the Firefox Extension website) a try, sadly it breaks the spell check too. I then went to the developer’s website and found out that there is a 1.1 dev version, and it has what I have been looking for: [Linux][Mac] Fixed bug: Breaks inline spell checker (Alternative words is not showing).

Downloaded, installed, and sweet, the spell check is back! :)

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Magento 1.0 is out.

Last time I checked (when it was 0.8 beta) I couldn’t install because my host doesn’t have pdo_mysql. Since then I requested pdo_mysql to be compiled and now is a great time to give it another spin. ;)

It should be very interesting because Magento is built on Zend Framework.

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Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is released today. I thought I’d give it a spin, I like the idea of having an automated plugin upgrade system. :)

So far so good, things are pretty smooth. If you’re going to upgrade too, remember to backup all your files! I for instance have accidentally overwritten my theme files, so I had to take them from the backup.

About the new back-end: I don’t really like it. To be honest I prefer the old style any day. The new back-end lacks contrast (too bright actually), making things more difficult to recognise. Also, when posting, some of the options such as the categories are now down the bottom. Why? We do still have a sidebar, why not use it?

The new back-end also has some styling issues: e.g. on a wide screen, everything is squeezed to the left. I say bring back the fluid page width!

2.5 has some highlights though. We now finally have a asset management feature (file management and gallery), it is simple but still better than nothing. The automatic plugin upgrade feature works really well! Just remember to CHMOD your plugin directory (wp-content/plugins) to 777.

I haven’t fully experienced with this new installation yet, but I am not that impressed with it, mainly because the back-end is in my opinion worse than the old one in terms of user experience.

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