Image_moo update!

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Yea, I’m still alive – and a few people have been asking about image-moo updates, and as such I’ve now put the latest and greatest up…. Ok not a HUGE amount of changes, but a couple of neat features that I’ve been using to show avatars as encoded image data for an offline HTML 5 app.

I’m really hoping that Spring will show it’s head soon, it’s been a LONG winter here in the UK, 9th April and the temperature has still not hit double digits (c)! In fact only a couple of weeks ago we had snow!

Been a busy first Quarter, lots going on, and at the moment I’ve been rebuilding my company website; This has had a side affect of me having to write a few custom EE plugins to get the site to do what I want (coming soon on devot:ee!) so hopefully this will be done soon, although populating the content will take some time ๐Ÿ™‚

Happy new year

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2012 has been a really good year… Except for how fast it has gone. I really enjoyed the challenges of the past year, and I’m saddened that my old boss left as he and is family are emigrating to Australia (good luck Paul and family!). 2013 is now here, and that will bring with it new challenges and a new boss (welcome Mark) which will be exciting and also scary!

This year I will try and get my code more organised, and get my head fully into git so that I can get a couple more of my projects on GitHub. I already know svn and have a good idea about the workflow and practise of git, but not enough actual experience using it… Ho hum

So hears to looking forward to 2013 and what it may bring… Cheers!

Expression engine

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When I started work at Purple I was introduced to Expression Engine… urg I hated it at the time (even with my CI background), however over the last couple of years my understanding of EE (Expression engine) has grown significantly and we are very close to releasing our latest site (a rewrite of an old site). There are some areas that are still a bit weak (at least IMO, asset management/wysiwyg) but there are a raft of good 3rd party addon that make up for this. In fact I’ve written a couple at home which I will put on Github soon(tm), and probably move Image_moo there as well.

Wow does time fly when your having fun!

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I can’t believe it’s been so long since my last post, been too busy to realise… yea I’m still here, still going ๐Ÿ™‚

For the last couple of years I’ve been using SVN to control my source code, this actually works very well for me, however in a group it become a much harder thing to control especially if there are multiple upgrades going on to the code at the same time. I’m slowly getting my head into GIT at the moment, much harder when you don’t have the time to play. I did try the GitHub Windows GUI tool which is really good until you get a conflict etc. then your left to work it out. Using SVN I’ve always used the TortoiseSVN client for windows which I’ve found excellent, so now I’m trying to get to grips with TortoiseGit. On that note I’ll probably release a few more bits of code onto github… when I get the time!

Interestingly my job now also includes reviewing CV’s and interviewing staff… really makes you take a long look at your own CV and the amount of crap that can be put on them. From my perspective I’m looking for passionate developers who are pro-active on the net like me. This is where I start looking at what you’ve done, a list of websites is no use to me, doesn’t really mean anything. Try and explain what your involvement was in that site, otherwise any issues I find are you fault, even if it was nothing to do with you!

So onto stage 1, a telephone interview… I shouldn’t have to probe for info, you should be selling yourself to me! Do you want the job? If not why bother putting your CV forward at all? Tell me what you’ve done and what excited you the most, what’s the best thing you’ve done, what drives you, where do you want to be in 2 years, what are your dreams and aspirations. Lastly do a quick bit of research, know some of our clients, you should have my name, look me up… you could even be reading this! ๐Ÿ™‚

Stage 2 face to face meeting. #1) Presentation IS everything, first impressions do count, maybe not to me, but to others who may want to talk to you or see you, make sure you look the part. #2) relax ๐Ÿ™‚ harder said than done, but someone who is relaxed will have a much better chance of making me (us) feel like you can “fit-in”. You could be the faster coolest kid in the world, but if you don’t fit in with the current staff, you still won’t get the job!

More to come ๐Ÿ™‚ However please note these are my personal thoughts and methodology of finding the right person for the job.

Image_Moo for non Code Igniter users (Raw PHP image manipulation class)

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The other day i was working on a non Codeigniter site that required some image manipulation… I really wanted to use my library as I know it works, so I set to work to try and change it so that I could use it. Turns out that it was much easier than I had hoped.

1) Remove the “if (!defined(‘BASEPATH’)) exit(‘No direct script access allowed’);” at the top of the script

2) Remove “log_message(‘debug’, “Image Moo Class Initialized”);” in the function Image_moo

Done!

Now you can simply use the image class as normal!

Still alive!

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Yea, I’m still here, still coding, still paying the bills. Ok a bit late, but happy new year to you all ๐Ÿ™‚ Not much to say, I’ve made a couple of minor bug fixes to Image_moo, and have a couple of other things that I may, or may not release based on the experience I’ve had with image_moo.

I’ve been busy though, I now run a much more powerful server ๐Ÿ™‚ and even changed the design of my blog… although it is just picked form a list. As I’m doing more work with expression engine, and I have a freelance version, I should really work on a new business site – just trying to get inspiration at the moment! Quite like the square grid, so we will see ๐Ÿ™‚

Stopforumspam_moo

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If anyone has ever had to do contact forms, or registration forms, even with CAPTCHA in them, you’ll know that you still get stupid emails and registrations. On one of my forums (IPB) it got so bad that I had to install a 3rd party hook to help defend against this, which uses the awesome service from http://www.stopforumspam.com/ In fact it’s been so good that I’ve written a CodeIgniter library to use their API and check email addresses entered in my forms against now. I may post it soon, but as some douche bags like to host other peoples code on GitHub, without contributing anything to them, then offering you a position of admin to your own code… i’m in two minds if I should not just start releasing my plugins as paid!

Sorry!

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My lack of updates recently has been due to the amount of work I’m currently doing ๐Ÿ™ I really wanted to spend some time on Image_moo, and to put up Structure_moo and Facebook_moo scripts I’ve written (Facebook_moo is a CodeIgniter facebook addon, Structure moo will show differences of tables in a database with some code to update them).

A lot has happened since I last posted, I bought an Ipad 2 – oooh, shiney! and now considering an iMac so I can play with some ipad development. I’m still contracting to The Purple Agency as a developer and working on private projects in the evening on my own projects (and client projects).

I recently changed my business phone to an IP phone, so pay far less than I used to, to BT just to have a line in the house, and get a load more functions, rather cool actually. I went with Soho66 who where helpful and so far cheap!

Part of my office

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Just for the sake of it, here is some of the equipment I currently work with on my Tapewise application. Couple of Fibre channel switches, and old STK L40 with 3 lto and 1 sdlt drive in, an IBM 3590, some fibre scsi bridges and various other bits of equipment. On the top is a LTO-4 and an LTO-2 drive and lots of rubbish! I also have a small 250GB NAS backup drive (for local backup, also have offsite SVN and USB disk backups). There is a 24 port 1GB network port in there as well that most the equipment is plugged into, as well as my new IP phone powered by Soho66.

On the side my flattened box from the LOTR sword I bought that is currently on display in our lounge ๐Ÿ™‚ and a few cables (easy to access, you don’t want to see my cupboard!)