As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been tweaking the site a bit. OK, so the tags plugin is still not working, but some other things are working again. For instance, the Recent Music listing in the sidebar, as well as the AudioFlickrScrobbler. And I’ve changed the ‘Author’ info a bit, seperated it into it’s own page where I can give you slightly more information you don’t want or need 😉
Now, to get those tags working again… 😉
I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I nearly forgot to announce that finally, TomTom HOME is now available! The software that, together with my colleagues, I’ve been working on for the past months (I’ve done the server component with some of my colleagues from the PLUS department) is now available as a free download. Check it out. Enjoy 🙂
Everyone of course knows the movie. Not everyone knows the book. This happens a lot of course. I was in the same situation.
I’ve now read the book. It’s nice. It took me quite a while to get into the book. It seems to start very very slow. But once things start happening, the book is very nice. I ended up really enjoying the book. And eventually, you remember your last impression, not your first impression 😉
Privacy has been a problem in the USA for a long time (though for some reasons on some levels the US is more free than other countries). Europe has so far not become the ‘Big Brother’ state that the USA is on a lot of levels. However, we’ve now come one step closer.
In Europe, there is a law that requires telecom- and Internetproviders to keep all logs of traffic by users for a couple of months up until a couple of years. Even though the dutch parliament and the dutch communications industry have protested heavily against this, our minister of justice decided to support this, and has also passed this law here in The Netherlands. Though I don’t really like the idea (let alone think about the cost for this storage, which is gigantic, and will in the end be calculated into the price I pay for Internet and phone usage) it has now become even scarier.
The European parliament has decided that they have no trouble with giving the USA access to this information.
Now, we all know by now that the US government and it’s secret services have absolutely no notion of what the words ‘civil rights’ mean. So these people having access into the information on with whom I have contact over the telephone and what I do over the Internet, even while it’s quite innocent, is scary. Very, very scary.
There was a time where Europe was the balancing good against the evil of the USA. It seems this is not true anymore. Europe is following the USA at it’s every whim these days. I can not feel safe anymore talking to friends of the phone, or communicating with friends over the Internet using chat, e-mail or discussion forums.
I will definitely be contacted the representatives in our dutch parliament about this, asking them to clear this up and to forbid our minister of justice to also support this madness. This is truly unbelievable. Last time I checked, we were not part of the undemocratic USA, lead by it’s mad dictator Bush. But it seems that Europe is looking into the sky where mr Bush claimed to see a dead bird flying, while Bush is taking over Europe. Maybe it’s again time for underground resistance, maybe we should already start organizing to fight the occupational forces which might soon be sent to Europe to ‘liberate’ Europe.
Maybe it’s web2.0, or maybe not. It’s a nice concept though. Zimbio allows users to create a new portal page including links, a forum, a collaborative weblog, and many more features, based on the idea that anyone can add and edit. So basically, a wiki, but with more than just the standard wiki article pages.
I like this idea, I definitely quite like it. It’s well executed, with lots of fancy AJAX calls to keep you on the same page. No reloading required.
The only thing I dislike is the unoriginal design. Zimbio clearly seems to want to ride the AJAX/web2.0 bandwagon. With so many sites with similar designs around, this one will have a hard time to stand out between the rest.
Every year on May 4th, between 8PM and 8:02PM, The Netherlands remembers those who have fallen in war situations and during peace missions. Today was no different. Two minutes of silence was too much, however, for a radio station (I am not sure which one) that was on while visiting my in-laws. At just before 8, they played a statement about freedom and remembering, but instead of the usual 2 minutes of silence, this radio station chose to play Imagine by John Lennon. And even though I have not personally lost anyone in the second world war or after that, and I have not been there to experience the war, I was offended. I truely felt offended that this radio station did not respect the two minutes of silence that most of the country respects (even trains and busses stop for two minutes).
Our government is no better though. Even though every year in the week before May 5th (Liberation Day) they all speak of how it’s important that we remember what happened during the second world war and that it should not happen again, Liberation Day is no national holiday anymore. Only once every 5 years, Liberation Day is a national holiday. Now, isn’t that hypocritical? And now they’re surprised that our youngest generation isn’t really interested anymore in what happened during the war. That they don’t know enough about it anymore.
I, for one, took my two minutes of silence, remembering the second world war and those who have fallen. And tomorrow, I will remember the fact that we are now a free country, and that we should rejoice this freedom because it’s not always been this way.
I’m currently in the process of rewriting an old site from scratch. The only thing that will stay the same (well, the same, it will be extended probably, but the current structure will stay) is the database. I’ve chosen to keep the database the same to at least keep away from a painless database migration process. And the current database is pretty good anyway 🙂
Rewriting can be a drag. The constant feeling of “been there, done that” can be quite annoying. Rewriting can also be an adventure though.
In this case, the current site has a very unstructured, basic (“my code 5 years ago is always horrible”) approach. I’ve chosen to use the Zend Framework as the base for this new site. And working with an existing code base makes your own thinking much more structured. Using a very structured code base written by someone else will make your own code base much more structured. That is the conclusion I’ve come to.
I’ve worked with quite a few frameworks and other systems written by others, but seldom have I encountered such a structured approach to coding as with the Zend Framework. I’ve immediately adapted my code to the Zend Framework coding structure, and so next to the Zend directory is my own FantasyLibrary directory containing my classes. I’m not using any include_once() or require_once() anymore, but only Zend::loadClass(). The only include_once() call I do is to load the Zend base class.
I could go on and on, and maybe in the future I’ll follow up on this, but the important thing in this message is: Using a very structured code base written by someone else will make your own code base much more structured.
While the Zend Framework is still in an early state, I’ve been working on a site based on the Zend Framework. I’m extending the framework with my own logic, and so far I like what I see. Using the PDO database interface, the Zend base class for loading classes and interfaces, Zend_Filter_Input for input filtering, and I’m planning on using Zend_Feed, Zend_Service_Amazon and maybe some others.
So far I’m quite happy with how things work. It’s easy to extend the functionality, it’s easy to use the database classes and using the Zend base class with it’s loadClass, loadInterface and it’s registry functionality are wonderful.
The site I’m working on is by far not finished (it’s the new back-end for FantasyLibrary.net) so by the time I’m finished the Zend Framework has probably progressed a lot, become more stable. Maybe, by working on using the framework, I’ll be able to contribute to it’s testing and maybe find/fix a bug here and there. For now, I’m just really happy with how the Zend Framework works.
Well! This evening I made my first commit to the Zend Framework subversion repository. I had already checked out the dutch translation of the documentation before the weekend, so my first commit immediately added quite a bit of changes into the repository. I hope people will appreciate my work.
At first, I read through the already existing translations, both to get up to speed with the way things are translated, and by the request of the current translators. I fixed some typo’s and changed some of the translations to work better or be more proper dutch. This evening, after committing my first batch, I also started work on translating from the original english documentation. Sometimes it’s very hard to get a good translation for a word, especially for technical terms. It’s very hard to decide whether or not to translate such a term into dutch, or to leave it in english because people will understand that better than a translation. I think so far I managed quite fine. Let’s see what this will bring.
In the meantime, release 0.1.3 of the Zend Framework is also available. I’ve downloaded it to play with it, already. Now I need to find a good balance between translating the documentation, and actually coding with the framework itself.
There have been some changes in my life. After getting my job at TomTom, I had little time left to spend online. With 8-9 hours at work, and a total of 3 hours travelling to and from work, I had little time at home to spend online. And since I have way more hobbies than just phpBB, I decided to quit the phpBB Support Team. This would ensure they would have room for a more active member, and I would not feel the guilt and pressure of not having time to help people overthere.
Recently though, a new opportunity arose to still help a bit in the open source world. The dutch translation team of the Zend Framework documentation were looking for new members. I applied and got accepted. The good thing about this work is, that I can do the translating on the train to and from work.
I’ve had a wonderful time at phpBB and still love the people there. It’s just time for me to move on. Ensure that I can be productive in the tasks I take on.