blog.no-panic.at

Plazes rolled out it’s new version yesterday for all it’s users. The update sports a great new UI and some new features, of which I particularly enjoy the groups function.

One downside was the automatic update of the Plazer, which is the program that sends your current location to the site. The new version kept crashing for me and many other Mac users as I found out in the “Mac” group. They fixed the bug now but unfortunately the old version crashes before it even gets to the point of auto update. So you have to download it manually if you want to continue an uninterrupted Plazes experience.

• Download Plazer Version 3.0.5

The new Plazer now even features Growl support, which is great because now you’ll get a notification whenever one of your friends chages plaze

Log4Twitter is very similar to an idea Herbert an me had a couple of years ago, to use a Jabber messaging framework to get distributed logging and alerts from several servers/applications.
It is a Java class that allows you to “log” to Twitter. This would easily allow you to set up an application that sends messages to a private Twitter Account that you can subscribe to. Retrieving those messages should then be possible by IM or even SMS, seems like a perfect set up for me.

Using Log4Twitter is as easy as the following:

Setting Classpath
Add log4twitter-1.0.jar to your application’s classpath.
Note that log4twitter-1.0.jar has to be loaded by the same classloader that will load the logging framework.

Setting Logger
Edit your logging framework’s configuration to enable Log4Twitter.
The fully qualified class name of log4twitter is “log4twitter.FRAMEWORK_NAME.TwitterAppender”.

See the Log4Twitter page for some examples.

Now who’s got the time to code a Linux syslogd replacement or supplement, so I can receive important log messages via Twitter?

• Solmetra Maps
  A handy PHP wrapper for Google Maps
  (tags: geo geonames googlemaps php api coding development web geocode)

• CSS Collections
  a list of collections available for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  (tags: css design web reference)

An excellent article on what JavaScript should be (is) in our current state of the web.

JavaScript: The lingua franca of the web

Lately I’m totally amazed by the beauty that is CakePHP. It’s one of those hyped »rapid webdevelopment frameworks« …and boy, it really enables you to work fast!
At least compared to what I was used to previously in my PHP development.

• endless procedural code
• crafting DB queries by hand
• no MVC
• no ORM
• composing my own “frameworks” to encapsulate DB and HTML output
• simple OO code with no real application structure

…well, you get the spin.

Basically, it meant ugly, unmaintainable code that needed hours of work before there was something to see for the client (or myself) not even talking about being finished.

During the last four days I got myself to sit down and dive into the CakePHP Manual and learn the framework. It was really enlightening and suddenly PHP coding is fun again
I was able to put together the whole structure of a new app, I’m working on, just by cleverly planning the DB layout and mapping this structure to the models. From there it was just a few simple commands on the shell to let Cake generate the controllers and views. After deleting the ones I didn’t need, I could immediately start tweaking the business logic and fine tune the views. It’s a really good feeling seeing how fast the development is progressing.

Yesterday I took a quick glimpse at Ruby On Rails, just to see where it all came from. The CakePHP developers claimed to have built their framework like RoR but, oh my god - it is just exactly like RoR. The concept of convention over configuration is perfectly migrated from Ruby to PHP.
I kinda like that, because it means if I know Cake I can quickly and very easily learn Ruby On Rails, just by learning a bit of different Ruby syntax, all the other concepts are already in my head

I’m excited to see where it goes from here, it really looks like my productive output could get a serious boost from now on!