skoop.dev

Fantasylibrary.net: Anyone interested?

May 7, 2007

personal, website

One of the first things I did when I started learning PHP was developing a site about the Forgotten Realms series by TSR, Inc (later Wizards of the Coast). Eventually, that site evolved into what is now Fantasylibrary.net, a database of fantasy and sci-fi books. The code is quite old and not everything works anymore. And I’ve not looked at the pending books, authors and publishers for ages.

Over the past period I’ve been considering all the sites that I’ve been working on. FantasyLibrary.net has been a great site to work on, but at this point in time, I’m working on other efforts and FantasyLibrary.net just doesn’t fit in, timewise.

So now I’m looking for someone to take over the site. I would hate to see this site go down. Rather, I’d like to pass it on to someone who can make it evolve even more. Who has the time and energy to manage the data, update the code, and make something of it.

So, if you’re interested, here’s the deal: I’m not out to make big bucks on this. I would appreciate a fair offer for all the effort I’ve put into the code and the database (even though the code is outdated and really needs an update). I will hand over the full site: The code, the database, the domain. Everything. In exchange for a nice offer and the promise that you’re going to take the site to the next level 🙂

Interested? E-mail me at stefan@fantasylibrary.net with an offer and we’ll discuss things.
And then there were enough events

April 25, 2007

conferences, php

Ever since the International PHP Conference moved away from The Netherlands, it’s been quiet here for PHP-minded people. This year though, we’re having a full schedule here in The Netherlands. I love it! Finally we’re having lots of events on PHP. A short list.

On April 14, we had pfCongrez, a gathering of quite a few dutch PHP developers with nice sessions on MySQL.
Tomorrow, April 26, iBuildings is organizing a business seminar. Though focussed on business, it’s still a very nice things. This seminar might mean more penetration of PHP in the big business world
On June 2nd, we at Dutch Open Projects will be organizing a PHP Seminar around the topic of PHP Frameworks. More info on this will follow soon enough 🙂
On June 16th, iBuildings will be organizing a replacement for the International PHP Conference with their Dutch PHP Conference.
And finally somewhere this year Dutch Open Projects will also organize SymfonyCamp. More on this also later.

Awesome! Finally The Netherlands can attempt to have a more tight PHP community.
The free information superhighway

April 21, 2007

world

Knowledge is power, is what they always say. Until now, knowledge has always been a privilege for those with at least enough money to get through education. And even there, I’m sure there’s a lot of people that are way more intelligent and capable of more than they have been educated for.

Slowly, bit by bit, the world of knowledge, of information, is changing. Sites like Wikipedia have been working on this for a very long time already. It’s a community effort, and though not all information is guaranteed to be 100% accurate, the community validation effort does ensure that most information is more or less correct.

Up until now, map data has been “owned” by commercial companies like TeleAtlas and Navteq, who make it their living to gather geographical data and to sell this information to the world. This information costs quite a bit of money. There is a reason, beside the fact that the shareholders want to earn some money, that you pay quite a sum of money for a map for your TomTom.

Meet Open Street Map, another community effort. Open Street Map is a community effort to gather map data similar to that gathered by TeleAtlas and Navteq. Using your GPS device, you make tracks of GPS data. Then, with special software, you have to edit this into actual information about the roads you tracked. Then, you can upload this data onto the OSM servers, and out comes a nice new map using the data you just uploaded.

It takes a bit of time to understand how to work with this, but it’s a matter of just trying and it will work. I’ve already made a very small preliminary map of Woudenberg, and I intend to expand this with as much info as I can gather.

I have the weird idea, that given enough time, all information that is currently being sold by commercial companies, will end up with a community effort that is available for free.
Trekstor I.beat Censo

April 17, 2007

technology, trekstor

I had the luck of getting my hands on this great little mp3 player from Trekstor for a mere 20 euro (yay iBood. It’s got 1 gigabyte of memory on which you can store quite a bit of music. More than enough anyway for my tastes, since I’ll be able to change tracks every day if I want.

This little thing is one of the few mp3 players that openly support Linux. Unfortunately, no ogg support on this one, for that you’ll need slightly more expensive players, but alas, for this price, I’m not gonna whine about that. Connecting the player (just as you’d connect a usb stick) indeed immediately offers a nice mount. Unfortunately, so far, I’ve not been able to get it to work with my amaroK, but that’s probably a matter of trying it out a bit. I’ll probably get it to work sooner or later. For now, a simple copy command is enough to get the player loaded with some music for testing it.

The USB connection is a USB2 connection, so copying over some music is not a problem at all. It’s reasonably fast (as far as USB goes). Soon enough, I have enough music for over an hour of listening, so I unmount it to give it a short test drive.

I copied over some house music to test it out. First thing I notice is that the sound is a bit shallow. Going into the menu, I quickly find the equalizer. One of the settings, Ultra Bass, immediately makes the house sound as it should, so I stick with it.

Since I’m talking about the menu now, let’s dig a bit deeper. The menu is easy to access with a seperate menu button. Navigating the menu with the forward and backward button, and OK-ing with the play button, is easy. Aside from browsing the music in two different ways (tracks or folders), the settings, and the voice recorder, there’s not much to do. The settings are nice. Aside from the equalizer, you can of course set the play mode in several of the usual settings. But, and this one is quite useful, you can also set the contrast and backlight (the latter is the time until the backlight is automatically turned off, useful for battery-saving!). There is also a sleep timer, for if you want to listen to music while going to sleep. Not sure how this would work with the ear plugs 😉 Last option in the main menu is some system statistics, such as free memory.

This whole thing runs on a single AAA battery! Thanks to that and the already quite light design, you’ll barely notice you have this machine with you, except for the nice music you’re hearing.

I’m quite happy to have had the chance to get this one, especially for this price. What a great little machine!
Job openings at Dutch Open Projects!

April 16, 2007

job openings, php
Due to expanding business Dutch Open Projects BV (DOP) has multiple positions for:

Ambitious PHP Developer

As a PHP Developer you are working in a variety of self-steering Project teams. You will take an active part in developing, building and implementing custom built applications for a variety of customers and a diversity of products and services. Customer satisfaction is key in doing our business right the first time and we expect you to have the same mind setting.
Within the application product range we offer for example websites, components and custom built (web based) applications. Also DOP makes use of a full suite of Open Source/Open Standards Software such as CRM, administrative/logistics tools and a full range of web shop applications. All with custom built front-end interfaces, databases en external connections as required. Finally maintenance and expanding of existing (ASP) applications is part of the job description. This is a position in our Leusden-based office.

What are we looking for?
- Intellectual and working capacity on Bachelor level. Demonstrable by completed or nearly completed degree on Bachelor’s level or acquired by traceable (self study/hobby/working) experience;
- You are able to showing some of your (self study/hobby/working) combined PHP/MySQL/(X)HTML/CSS projects;
- You are keen on the Open Source Community. Possibly you are already an active member of Open Source Communities?;
- Candidates with an understanding of one or more of the following techniques: Linux, Kubuntu, Subversion, AJAX, Joomla!, Symfony, PHP5, Zend Studio, Table-less lay-lout and Tux;
- Experience with PostgreSQL or Oracle is a plus;
What do we offer?
- An informal working culture;
- Professional self-steering project teams;
- Development with Zend Studio;
- Possibility of acquiring your Zend (PHP5) certificate;
- Growth and guidance to becoming a genuine PHP Guru;
- Working in a forest environment with our own swimming pool;
- Remunerate according to knowledge and level of experience.
Are you feeling appealed to working in this professional but informal Open Source/Open Standards Organization with a bunch of geek colleagues and interesting products? Please contact us. We will gladly have an appointment with you giving you the possibility to talk to your future team members.

Due to expanding business Dutch Open Projects BV (DOP) has multiple positions for:

Experienced PHP Developer

As an experienced PHP Developer you are working in a variety of self-steering Project teams. You will take an active part in developing, building and implementing custom built applications for a variety of customers and a diversity of products and services. Customer satisfaction is key in doing our business right the first time and we expect you to having the same mind setting. As experienced PHP Developer you are co-responsible for project scope including budget, adhering to deadlines and quality of produced PHP code and functionality. You are able to motivate your junior Developers and give them guidance and are able to answering their queries.
You are accustomed to translate Functional Design to proper solutions and functionality.
Within the application product range we offer for example websites, components and custom built (web based) applications. Also DOP makes use of a full suite of Open Source/Open Standards Software such as CRM, administrative/logistics tools and a full range of web shop applications. All with custom build front-end interfaces, databases en external connections as required. Finally maintenance and expanding of existing (ASP) applications is part of the job description. This is a position in our Leusden-based office.

What are we looking for?
- Intellectual and working capacity on Bachelor or Academic level. Demonstrable by a related Bachelor’s or Academic degree or sound working experience. Your resume shows a clear track-record.
- You are a proven PHP Guru in code, Functional Design, CSS and MySQL;
- You are keen on the Open Source Community. Possibly you are already an active member of Open Source Communities?;
- You have a sound experience with one or more of the following techniques: Linux, Kubuntu, Subversion, AJAX, Joomla!, Symfony, PHP5, Zend Studio, Factory, Singleton, Agile Development, deployment, Table-less lay-lout and Tux;
- Experience with PostgreSQL or Oracle is a plus;
What do we offer?
- An informal working culture;
- Professional self-steering project teams;
- Development with Zend Studio;
- Possibility of acquiring your Zend (PHP5) certificate;
- Guidance and means to your personal development to becoming for example a (Agile) Project leader or Information Analyst.
- Working in a forest environment with our own swimming pool;
- Remunerate according to knowledge and level of experience.
Are you feeling appealed to working in this professional but informal Open Source/Open Standards Organization with a bunch of geek colleagues and interesting products? Please contact us. We will gladly have an appointment with you giving you the possibility to talk to your future team members.
Continuous Integration in PHP

April 10, 2007

ci, continuous integration, php, qa

PHP seems to be maturing lately from a scripting language to (nearly) a real programming language. Part of this process is the slow but certain adaption of development methodologies such as Agile, more and more unit testing, more and more usage of frameworks as opposed to writing everything from scratch every time, and now also Continuous Integration.

Through Sebastian Bergmann’s weblog I found out about a nice project which is currently in Alpha state called Xinc is not CruiseControl, a framework for doing Continuous Integration testing. It is based on PHPUnit and Phing, and supports Subversion. Very, very cool!

Unfortunately, I’ve always found working with PHPUnit a bit tedious. Now that I’m using Symfony, which has built-in support for SimpleTest, I am more likely to be writing actual tests. Maybe I’ll see if I can somehow integrate SimpleTest, or maybe even Symfony, into the Xinc system so that I can use it to do my testing as well.
It’s alive!

April 8, 2007

case study, php, symfony

After months of development, yesterday we launched version 4.0 of Jongeren in Beeld, a webbased application for tracking data for youth workers, police, city officials etc. regarding “problem youth” (though really, it’s simply a data filing system that can be used for other things as well).

Version 3, which was developed before I joined Dutch Open Projects, was based on Mambo (of which the now popular Joomla! is a fork). Using various extensions, functionality as built. But due to the constant functional growth and the not really well organized structure of Mambo base as well as the extensions that were built, the application had become a hell to maintain, especially as a new developer when the original developer had already left and the code was hardly documented. And so, when I started work on this project in november of last year, after a quick assessment of the version 3 code, the decision was made to start from scratch.

After an extensive research of frameworks and content management systems, it was Symfony that ended up being our framework. It was a good choice, I’m still convinced of that. Over the past months we’ve been developing bigtime (we being Peter of Vak 18 who was working as contractor on this project, and myself). With just the two of us, we’ve been able to get this whole thing rewritten in the period of only a few months, with more than enough other tasks also to be done, and with a 6 week holiday of Peter. I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to do.

And so yesterday we’ve deployed the monster. With a complete migration script to migrate the database into several databases, and a nice deployment document written upfront so we could keep track of all the tasks we had to do, we set about deploying the new version. Unfortunately, we ended up fixing a few bugs both in the migration script and in the application itself during the deployment and the post-deployment testing, but we ended up doing the full deployment in about 6 hours, which is a pretty neat accomplishment if you ask me.

It’s been a very tiring experience, and I really don’t plan on working 6 days a week very often, but it’s been rewarding. The new code is so much easier to maintain and also easier to extend. Since we have quite a few plans for the near and far future when it comes to extending the functionality of the application, it’s a good thing to have easily extendable code.
April fools anyone?

April 1, 2007

april fools, music

I really had it with the music industry. Think again. It’s been quite a bit of fun. I mentioned my “problem” to people I know, I posted it in quite a few places, and got many responses. P2Pnet even wrote about it in a newsitem.

Sorry guys, you’d been fooled, you’ve been had, it was a hoax.

There were no lawyers threathening me. I have a good relationship with a few promotion agencies from the USA, who offer me information, the occasional audio stream and the occasional promo cd for review. It works fine, and I’ve had no trouble with them or the big labels, at least from this point of view.

Happy April Fools!
Zend Studio for the whole company

March 30, 2007

ide, php, zend studio

You can say what you want about its competitors, but to me Zend Studio is still THE application for PHP development. Its code highlighting, code completion, wonderful PHPDoc integration, and the great debugging and profiling features when combined with Zend Platform, are simply the best.

Today, we have arranged that all developers of Dutch Open Projects will be using Zend Studio. This is part of my effort to get more structure into our development process. Up until now, everyone was using different tools. Since we have developers using 3 different platforms, using a single tool is hard. Eclipse comes closest for this, but Eclipse, well, let’s not talk about my opinion on that.

Now that all our developers will be using the same tool, it will be way more easy for them to help eachother out. Nothing is more annoying than hopping over to a coworkers workstation to find yourself lost in another editor than the one you’re used to.

Thanks to the friendly folks at iBuildings, that is a thing of the past 🙂
I’ve had it with the music industry

March 26, 2007

world

This world is becoming too weird. For years I’ve been managing Electronic Music World, a free online music magazine promoting both indie and commercial electronic music. Publishing news, reviews and the occasional article.

A few weeks ago, though, I received a letter from a US lawyer representing some of the big labels. Basically, they told me to either stop my service, or to ensure that the content that was “meant for the US market” would only be seen by the “US market”. It can’t get weirder than that, can it? Read the whole story.

I want to keep running my site, and I also want to occasionally post news items with links to digital music streams of new releases on the site. Even of commercial artists. And so I’ll be taking some measures to prevent non-US visitors from seeing my content. My measures? IP filtering. I know it’s far from “secure”, I don’t care. The lawyers have accepted the proposal. They feel it’s a “reasonable technical effort to ensure the content is only viewed by the target audience.” Fine by me.