I've released another version of Carbon, the framework powering this website. It's really a refinement and bugfix release, with the following changes:

• config: Admin password now needs to be manually enabled
• cache: Correctly generate htaccess
• deployment: only replace hostnames in text files
• cache: only write cache when caching is enabled.
• theme: remove older articles link (non functional)
• deployment: new feature - replace hostname from a to b before deploying cached site

Releases are available via github by clicking on tags.

Screencast

To celebrate the new release, I've also recorded another screencast (list of screencasts). In Screencast #4, we create a new post using the admin interface; use the generate site feature to create a full static cache; and finally run the powershell deployment script to deploy to my host over sftp.

All in under 2 minutes!

#carbon

PHP 5.5 will no longer support Windows XP and 2003. Those systems are around a decade old, so PHP is pulling the plug on them.

#link #php

Today’s experience of trying to watch the formula 1 race at Silverstone was a frustration of modern technology and drm issues:

#technology

Today a problem came up where the files on my Samba fileshare did not indicate to my Windows system that they were changed. Software that relies on this information such as TortoiseHG and SimpleLESS would not know that the file had changed. This was especially obvious with SimpleLESS which should take the .less file and process it, but wouldn’t.

#link #linux

Gervase Markham’s writes about the changes to your Facebook profile, where now by default a @facebook address is shown instead of your own email address:

#link #web

By default the Embedded Media Block allows you to embed FLV and MP3 files into your pages. However Mahara 1.5 also supports the following files:

#mahara

I recently set up a local development server running Ubuntu on VMware player. I thought it would be interesting to document the process and instructions so that it will be useful to others, and you can follow along / correct / improve this guide. On completion of this series you will end up with a complete LAMP local development system..

username: __________ password: __________ 

#linux

Silicon Knights boss Denis Dyack talks about used games effect on development budgets:

"I don't think as an industry we can afford $300 million budgets. Some games can, don't get me wrong - for a game like Call of Duty, if they had a $100 million budget, or whatever their budget is, they can afford it. That's not the industry, that's sort of a one-off.

Perhaps there is a point after which it makes little sense to spend more money as you simply cannot recoup it in the market. I'm guessing this limit is probably closer to $0 than $300 million.

source Gamesindustry International.

#games

This sounds like a situation where I hope some rep from Microsoft will intervene and offer the guy his reward.

via I Won The Windows Phone Challenge, But Lost “Just Because”

#windows

This is a online document creation tool that you can work on in realtime with other people with chat. Good for notes and documentation or getting feedback where the other party can make amendments in realtime. (click frog to start)

via Piratepad Beta

#web

IOS tip: I wanted a reminder every workday at a certain time. You can't set these up in Reminder. Nor in Calendar. Only under Clock > Alarms. And these alarms you cannot swipe to dismiss, you have to swipe to unlock the phone then lock it again. Or snooze the alarm from the lock screen. Not nice when driving.

#ios

I'm looking for something a bit unusual. Say you are following the instructions for installing a software package (rl example: http://library.linode.com.../webmin/installing-webmin). Now you find out the instructions are outdated, or incomplete.

How do you keep your notes/additional instructions together with the original? Now you have two problems, your instructions and the original can be updated independently. What happens when the original is updated, or a new version of the software is released?

Wouldn't it be great if you could fork the webpage and update it (or even submit a pull request to the maintainer)?

Is there any practical way of working this way - or will I be stuck with a notetaker / blog / bunch of outdated textfiles?

A lot of questions - maybe one of you has the answer.

#development #web

Speed up your jQuery powered site by moving scripts to the footer.

Turns out that pushing jQuery to the footer is quite easy for the common case. If all we want is a nice $.ready function that we have accessible everywhere we can explicitly define it without jQuery. Then we can pass the functions we capture to jQuery later on after it loads.

The big lesson learned is that we could avoided this whole problem if we started off with my proposed helper.

via Stop paying your jQuery tax.

#development

A valuable lesson for anyone running a website:

After working out a few technical kinks and several botched emails, thanks to missing line breaks, we sent out a final test email to ourselves.  Unfortunately, it went out to every user 

fetchworthy notes • What Happens When You Swear At Your Users.

#web

I stumbled upon this gem by Jerph on Stackoverflow:

Right after the body tag, put a script tag with this javascript:

jQuery('body').addClass('js');

This gives you a style hook for any elements that will look different in some way when Javascript enabled, and it happens immediately.

via css - Hide jQuery Accordion while loading - Stack Overflow.

#development

So I spent a totally unproductive morning figuring out how to override a single field's output in Drupal without rewriting my complete template code for the content type - I want to keep using the $content variable. After many a fruitless attempt luckily Grag Harvey has the answer:

Actually, control over CCK fields can be gained using CCK's own templates.

Consider the situation where your field is called field_test.

Copy content-field.tpl.php to your theme directory and copy it again for the field whose mark-up you wish to alter, naming it content-field-field_test.tpl.php in this case.

Then change the mark-up in the file and it will alter the output of that specific CCK field.

No need to touch node.tpl.php!

Adapted via greg.harvey's answer at node.tpl.php | Drupal API.

#drupal

Sign up to WMD, the somewhat unfortunate acronym chosen for Slightly Mad's World of Mass Development platform, and you're granted access to regularly released builds of the game, which you're then free to pick apart in the official forums. That feedback then gets absorbed by Slightly Mad Studios, a simple loop that means that, when the game is eventually released, it'll be as much a product of the community as it is of the studio.

via Project Cars Preview • Eurogamer.net.

Looks like an interesting development strategy, made famous by Minecraft.

#games

Discovered this javascript MVC framework SpineJS. The ToDo app is extremely impressive. Try and manipulate items as quickly as possible. Tthen close and reopen the browser. Nice.

via Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces.

#development

The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX for the iPad - Valletta Ventures.

The first step in compiling WEB code is to run TANGLE to produce unhelpful Pascal source files. Thoughtfully the TeX build system includes a translator to produce compilable C files. Although WEB was hugely influential as the progenitor of modern source code documentation it is now obsolete, and modern extensions to TeX have been written in C. This is compiled alongside the translated WEB code. It is not hard to imagine the effect this has on the readability of the codebase.

Why programming is not yet as advanced as nature in evolution.

#ios

This post describes a step by step guide on how to combine multiple Subversion repositories whilst keeping individual history (and commit messages).

Dumping

Exporting from pagefeedbacktool repository the /trunk/public folder and integrating that into the services repository under /trunk/public/pagefeedback:

Dump the repository including only /trunk/public as follows:

E:\\Repositories\\pagefeedbacktool>svnadmin dump .| svndumpfilter include --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs trunk/public > ..\\services\\filtered.dump

Loading

However as pathnames are stored as part of the dump (and replacing the path with a texteditor corrupts the dump), we have to include the full path under a different parent directory:

In VisualSVN create a /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public folder structure (try without the final public if import fails) then load the dump as follows:

E:\\Repositories\\services>svnadmin load . --parent-dir "trunk/public/pagefeedback" < filtered.dump

The dump is successful but at the wrong path:

currently: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public
should be: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Post-correction

Open two Windows Explorer windows with both paths side by side, select all the files that should be moved, then RIGHT click drag them to the destination folder and choose SVN Move versioned files here...

Commit from the repository root.

It is now safe to remove the trunk/public folders under /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Commit again.

#development