iridani.com

I’m starting on a new project that I hope to see off the ground in a few days. the big sqaure will be a webcomic of sorts. If a webcomic could be crossed with a Digg or Reddit that is.

The gist of it is: I can’t draw, but I’ve got tons of ideas. Serial and otherwise. So, each week I’ll post an idea and an empty square. Anyone can draw what I’ve asked and submit it. Upon acceptance, the image will join any others gathered. Every visitor can then vote on which is the best depiction of my description. When I post the next square’s description, the winner of the previous week is set as the comic and will appear in the archive appropriately. All others will still be stored and available for perusal. Every piece of art remains owner by the artist, yadda yadda yadda.

I hope it will cause many different interpretations of what I describe. If not, it’ll divert my attention for awhile.

Expect an announcement and promotion once I finish creating the back-end to run it. Should be an easy dev project for an old horse like me.

What was the single most important thing I learned today? Always bring your condom! Er, I mean, your keyboard condom¹.

First official day of the conference and my new MacBook survived three spills, two coffee and one water and lived to tell the tale.

Man these php devs just don’t like Macs!

Once again, my job has me writing mutli-threaded PHP¹ scripts that use PHP’s CURL² library to connect to remote servers. (I’m calling an API here!)  Without going into too much detail, the networking specifics changed between me and the api server, adding a new, or newly reconfigured, invisible proxy to the data path.

This proxy is running Lighttpd, while light in name, is starting to throw around it’s weight and get in my way.

Warning! We are going to get technical!

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, maybe some of these are more annoyances than quirks:

• Springboard Application Placement Upon Update

• Developer Hardware

I’m going to attempt to not spam this site with a bunch of non-development work stuff. I’ve other blogs for that… But in keeping with the vein of this website¹, I’ve recently been pointed to a very cool website who’s basic premise is too simple to have not been thought of before now…

We’ve all seen web clipboards and code repositories before², and even I am guilty³ of wanting to get in on the action. But all of these sites are simple repositories.

Marc-André Cournoyer⁴ has a fresh take on the idea. His refactormycode.com⁵ site isn’t just a web clipboard, but rather it is a place to put your code up for community scrutiny.

The idea is that you can post a code snippet and ask for help to see if anyone can help you sort out a problem. This isn’t a wholesale help board for new programmers, but for people who are having problems envisioning code design changes, code cleanup problems, and even those who want the tightest code possible and are seeking improvement.

The website even has an API⁶ for those who want to dig into the site that much more… (Maybe I’ll add a widget here for my refactorings…)

Good job Marc. Nicely executed.

I’ve released¹ (finally) a version of what I consider a ’starter’ Wordpress² plugin.

This little
baby
is a
simple text replacement thingy.This little baby is a simple text replacement thingy. The nice thing is that is easily demonstrates a clean plugin that won’t trip over other plugins, creates proper administration pages utilizing AJAX and uses 2.5’s shortcodes.

It’s not production level code as there isn’t any real data validation on the admin form (altho if someone has gotten that far, you are toast anyway…), and it doesn’t check to make sure that it is being called from the admin pages either.

Beyond that, it is easy to read as an example for starting your own Wordpress plugin.

Enjoy.

EDIT: Looks like I’ve done something horribly wrong and the readme.txt file isn’t being parsed correctly… Thus the download isn’t working. Will update when this is fixed.

EDIT: (June 17, ‘08) It is fixed. I just ran the plugin auto-updater and it worked perfectly from this copy of Wordpress. Go download!