Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Working at Indy Hall
August 16, 2007

On Tuesday, work had scheduled an after-work happy hour, so I decided to take this opportunity to venture down into Philly for the day and check out the new digs at Independents Hall. Independents Hall, to describe it in my own words, is a group of independent workers who, rather than working alone individually, have decided to work together in the same space (“coworking”) to achieve that camaraderie that you usually get at a workplace with others but wouldn’t get by yourself at home. It’s a neat idea, and works for people like me who, although I work with other people, I don’t work in the same physical space with them.

After fighting with traffic for far too long (several accidents on the “expressway” led to a two-hour commute in - I don’t know how people do this on a regular basis) I did finally arrive downtown. I parked in a lot for the day near the space, which cost $17, but there was on-street parking to be found for people who wouldn’t be ticketed for their inspired inspection stickers. The walk from the lot to the Indy Hall space was short.

Win an iPod, no Purchase Required
August 10, 2007
Steps to enter the contest
  1. Go to the PacktPub contest site.
  2. Use "Habari" as the CMS name.
  3. Use http://habariproject.org as the site.
  4. Add your name and email.
  5. Submit the form!
Apart from the contest that the Viddler folks have going on where you can win an iPhone by posting a MealToday video, there's another contest where you can win an iPod simply by filling out a simple form.

Packt Publishing - a publisher of fine technical books, several of which I own - is sponsoring a contest between Content Management Systems, where simply nominating a CMS enters you to win an iPod!

As you may know, I am one of many developers who write code for Habari, a project that is almost a year old and about which we’re all very passionate. I would suggest that you nominate Habari for their prize as the “Most Promising Open Source Content Management System”.

It is a category only open to CMSes that have been first released in the last two years, leaving out the more obvious contenders. If Habari wins the prize, we’ll be most happy about the prestige, but the cash prize could really offset server costs, fund 3rd-party security auditing, or otherwise benefit the community.

Of course, it’s a bit skeezy for me to just say “you can win an iPod” to get you to endorse Habari. Perhaps I should give you a few reasons why I think Habari is the most promising open source content management system, and is deserving of the reward?

Uncle Joe's Knot
August 07, 2007

I used to live near a paper mill. Several of them. Some of my family worked there, including my grandfather and my uncle Joe (my grandmother’s sister’s husband). Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe were in the Navy, and they plied their skills at tying knots to their new trade in the private sector.

Perhaps it is not widely imagined how paper is processed by a mill. Actually, all of the paper mills in Downingtown are recycled paper plants. They don’t use cut trees to make paper, just old paper and cardboard. The paper is put into a big vat of chemicals to help break it down and re-form it into pulp, then it’s pressed out through some machinery to be flattened and dried. The resulting paper can be any thickness, and can be used to construct many things, like boxes for board games, french fry containers, or inch-thick concrete pillar molds.

New Features out the Wazoo
August 04, 2007

Have you heard about Habari? If you’re a regular reader here, then of course you have. What you might not know is that Habari development is not dead.

It’s weird how a summer can bring a natural stall to the activities usually relegated to the development spawned by countless hours of hibernating indoors. To outside appearances, it might not look like a lot is going on with Habari. Even though commits continue to trickle in, but it’s not the full-blown force that it was six months ago. I’ll assure you now that the project is still quite alive, and that we’ve even got release news to back that up.

PHP5 Table Model Classes and Framework Failings
July 29, 2007

I’ve been doing a bit of development in PHP frameworks lately, and the way that they handle models in their Model/View/Controller setup has be bothered. The major issue is that the frameworks aren’t using PHP5, and so they can’t take advantage of “true” objects for data retrieval and operation.

One fancy thing we’ve done with Habari is use PHP5’s built-in PDO classes. Apart from giving us access to many database types (MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, SQLite, etc.) simply by changing the connection string, it allows us to tell the engine to store retreived record information not just in a generic class, but in a class that we define.