Tower Of Power

Power went out at work today, infact power was actually out for a good couple of blocks (street lights included).

Not much you can do as a programmer for a web development/design firm with the power out...

So I'm setting up my windows PC at home (hooray compsci classes being an all Microsoft setup, requiring Visual Studio 2005), downloading the MySQL GUI tools, launching them to test when I notice that MySQL Workbench went through a HUGE overhaul. When I say huge I mean "It Actually Works Now And Looks Completely Different" huge.

Which is funny 'cause last time I downloaded the work bench it was horrendously broken alpha software. Version 1.1. Now we are at 5.0 Beta? About 3 months later!?

Crazy. I guess I need to pay more attention?

Though the real question is right now, how does it stack up in a real world situation? Well I had to finish up the database design for some client work so I decided to try working it in MySQL Workbench (rather than my usual staple, the sadly discontinued DBDesigner).

Continue reading ‘MySQL Workbench 5 Beta (Or: WTF?)’ »

Slowly but surely my framework is coming off the ground. I decided to adopt a singleton design pattern for my Cache, Template, and possibly any other engines I might have. Originally my design started as a factory, however it is now somewhat of a hybrid as there is a ::load() function that loads arbitrary classes into our singleton (rather than an instance of the same class like a proper singleton).

I wanted the system pluggable so the developer was not beholden to any particular engine, but I also needed to guarantee access to the Cache and Template objects to the models without having to either add to the $GLOBALS[] array or add to a controller's attribute (and call like $controller->cache->...).

So I adopted a singleton design pattern, because (a) one only needs 1 cache or template object and (b) it just looks plain nice.

Continue reading ‘Singleton-Factory Hybrids FTW’ »

Watching an interesting presentation right now on a new service called AlphaBeta Finder.

It's an interesting approach to user testing, AlphaBeta Finder aggregates users that are willing to test software and allows you to get ahold of testers based on technical requirements.

Maybe we can use it in our workflow at Net Perspective? It would be good to start finding a good pool of users to test our client sites and Horizon.

Of getting office space in downtown Bryan.

Of course that hurts when we're trying to capitalize on student employees, but man, the phat pipes...

That and hosting at the Fibertown datacenter would be amazing, however we'd have to get a full time IT guy...

Excellent talk by R.A.

I loved the industry examples of no JavaScript failovers, and the point he made about the difference between Progressive Refinement and Graceful Degradation  was very good (Progressie Refinement is the design around the content/basic view first, then getting more and more advanced as opposed to designing the advanced first and then throwing in failovers).

Good job Andrew, good talk.

Poor guy, I signed him up for his talk and then told him after the fact.

I'll try and get the slides from him and post them here.

These are the powerpoint slides from the presentation I gave at Bar Camp Texas, 2008. The slides are currently out of date, I'll publish the fixed ones later.

The slides are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

PHP MVC Slides (Powerpoint 2007)

PHP MVC Slides (PDF)

So, crazy me decided to give a talk at BarCamp Texas on MVC design in PHP.

With the prevalence of MVC frameworks becoming more and more ubiquitous in PHP development (CakePHP, Symfony, and the Zend frameworks), I wanted to make sure that (a) the non-developer types were introduced to such styles of PHP development, and (b) introduce those developers with little formal experience (very common in the PHP world) to what MVC actually is and that MVC does NOT require large expansive libraries.

I could do my presentation showing out to setup a basic application with an existing application, however I don't feel that would be beneficial. The idea is knowledge portability, and I feel a good understanding of the basics of OO design will be transferable to any other frameworks, since all the aforementioned frameworks have excellent "getting started" tutorials.

When I finalize my slides, I will post them here for people to take a look at, possibly to berate my retardedness.