I've got a confession to make - I don't do Photoshop very well. In spite of my best intentions, I can't seem to wrap my head around all the stuff expert designers take for granted. I guess I've got the mind of a coder. The fact that I can take a finished graphic and convert it into lovely XHTML and CSS code but would rather be coding PHP, Perl, Ruby, (insert new flavour of the month here) seems to attest to this. Fireworks is another story. This absolutely simple-to-use application is where I spend most of my time when I need to work with graphics. The learning curve is a lot easier and for the 10% ...

The 2008 Formula 1 season has started and the first race was absolutely smashing. For real. Brit Lewis Hamilton qualified at pole position and went ahead to win the race but that's not the best part of this year's first race. In my view, the highlight is the introduction of rules designed to make the races less dependent on electronics aids. The consensus then is "out with technology". Traction control is gone (a system which helps limit rear wheel spin or loss of traction when excessive throttle or steering is applied by the driver). Engine assisted braking is also out (in the simplest terms, a form of anti-lock braking - but not quite). Goodbye Launch Control (a system that allows the driver at the start ...

The Rails vs PHP debate has been on for ages with the standard answer being "You can't compare Rails to PHP - Rails is a framework and PHP is a language. Compare it to CakePHP... or CodeIgniter... or Prado... or Symphony... or...". There are now so many PHP frameworks available it's becoming increasingly difficult choosing one and sticking to it. Rails has been the preferred Ruby framework for a while now and just until recently the other available frameworks were not mainstream. Moving from another language to Ruby invariably meant moving to Rails. Apparently, all that is changing. Doing a search for Ruby frameworks brings up the following: Rails - The grand-daddy Merb Camping Sinatra Ramaze Nitro Vintage Wuby Obviously Ruby's fast catching up ...

CodeIgniter has been my PHP framework of choice for a while now. I've churned out numerous sites based on the framework and even have my own CMS built on CodeIgniter. I have tried out other frameworks (CakePHP, Symphony, Solar) but still came back to CodeIgniter due to its flexibility, extensive documentation and portability. Everything was fine and dandy until I decided to convert one of my (non-critical) internal apps to Rails just to try out the framework. I went from zero Rails experience (bar all the screencasts) to a fully working (small) app in three days. Granted, my knowledge of CodeIgniter came in handy (in the end all MVC frameworks are the same at heart) but Rails has ...

I recently had to build an authentication system into a project and seeing as the restful authentication plugin was getting such buzz, I decided to try it out. The problem was, most of the information I found on the internet was dated and I had to make a couple of changes to get it to work on Rails 2.0. This site and this forum post were really helpful. This post documents the steps I took (or rather, the steps I'll take next time I use it) to get the plugin working. It assumes you already have a rails application running and want to add authentication to it. Install the plug-in Open up a console window and ...

We've been using Springloops for a couple of months now and all I can say is 'Wow!'. Springloops claims to be "a unique source code management tool focused on web development teams. It allows you to code in parallel and share your code safely concentrated on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files". It delivers. Working from home was never this slick and it removed the need to set up our own version control server. Springloops is a hosted service and the amount of storage space and number of projects you get depends on what plan you sign up to. There is even a free account giving you up to 10Mb of storage and 3 projects. However, I ...

That's it! I've given up trying to deploy a Rails app with capistrano from windows. Just spent two days trying to set this up (even tried cygwin) with no luck. The solution? VirtualBox. I have just gone from installing Ubuntu server in a virtual machine to deploying the application in thirty minutes. It's a bit long-winded commiting to subversion from windows and changing to the virtual machine to use capistrano but it works so I'm happy. Why am I still working in windows? I ask myself that all the time but I've got so much stuff installed and set up on my laptop the thought of changing is depressing. Also use Visual Studio Express once in a while ...

While working on a recent project with the excellent Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript libraries, I came across a frustrating error in IE7 (and I’m sure IE6 although I didn’t test it). The page worked beautifully in firefox but came up with “Expected identifier, string or number” on IE. Normal debugging procedures (firebug, web developer toolbar) failed to show where my error was. To its credit, the Microsoft script debugger actually showed me the function with the error but at that time I didn’t see it as an error. After a couple of hours of hair-pulling and googling, I came across this post. Apparently, a comma in my function was the culprit. My problem code ...