Peeled Carrots by Stephen Blake

Since the beginning of the year I have started running a bit more seriously after my brothers convinced me to run the Cape Town Two Oceans half marathon with them in April this year.

I also decided to buy a heartrate monitor to help me with my training. So after a bit of research I bought a “Garmin Forerunner 50” heartrate monitor and footpod bundle. It’s been almost a month now since I bought it and I think it’s freaking awesome!!

The heartrate monitor gives you all the data you need to train effectively. One can set target zones for how hard one wants to train and the watch has an alarm which goes off when one is outside the range set. This can get a bit annoying if you are struggling to stay in the zone for the day, but then again you should plan how hard you want to train before hand.

The footpod is also great, it gives speed, distance, cadence and number of steps. It’s surprisingly accurate and when I plotted some of my routes on Google maps, the distance was out by a few hundred meters. It is however really simple to calibrate though, so once you do that it is a lot more accurate.

The most fun part about the whole system though is the software which is available from the Garmin website. Once installed on your pc it uploads data from the watch via a usb receiver (included in the bundle). Then the data is plotted on a graph and one is able to see speed, distance, heartrates, etc. Also it gives total distances for the week, which helps with meeting your weekly mileage goals.

Then, one can upload the data from the desktop application to an online version of it called Garmin connect. The interface is really sweet and its great to be able to view your workouts online.

Bottom line is, that if you’re looking for a basic heartrate monitor and footpod I would defintely recommend getting the “Garmin Forerunner 50“. Now all I need to do is run more

Spotify, is a new digital music application which connects to the internet and provides the users with an absolutely massive music library. It is still in beta, but I have been fortunate enough to have been given a sneak preview into the capabilities of the application.

What does “Spotify” mean?
The name Spotify is a combination the words SPOT and IDENTIFY. Spotify helps you spot and identify the favorites you forgot about, or maybe didn’t even know you had.

The search feature is lightning quick and the range of music which is available is mind blowing. My only concern at the moment is regarding rights issues of the music which is available. I mean they have millions of songs available to stream free of charge, so is it legal? I suppose time will tell…

I just hope that the company releases Spotify soon, because I bet there are loads of music fans out there dying to get a copy of the software.

Before I write my first post I need to clarify something: This is the first post that I am officially writing on peeledcarrots, even though I have a number of previous entries on my blog. All of the previous posts are entries which I have written on our companies blog technovated

To get to the title of my first post - “Life is too short to dance with fat girls”. I heard it yesterday while watching Episode 8 of Californication, a new American mini series, where David Duchovny plays Hank Moody, a famous author with writers block. Hank’s father tells him that while the two of them are having a father to son chat at a bar - I had a good chuckle when I heard him say it

Also, it really appealed to me because its pretty much a synonym for the tag line for my blog “Life’s too short to have to peel carrots.” Cause it’s really true, I mean not literally…well i suppose it is, sorry ladies, but one should really make the most of ones life and live for the moment - Carpe Diem.

Back to the series, I think that it is an absolutely epic series and I would definitely recommend it to anyone…except my mom though, cause it contains some pretty graphic sex scenes and lots of swearing. Sorry mom

It is quite an unusual role for David Duchovny though - I mean the only other thing that springs to mind when one hears his name is X Files and that hardly compares to a smooth talking womanizer who drinks and smokes way too much. But, I think he does an awesome job and I really enjoyed watching the series.

So, if you’re looking for a 12 episode mini series which is pretty scandalous but is really funny then go see “Californication” - its great!!

The team at Technovated has been working very diligently for the past few months to get a new application off the ground. Its called Kindo and we have finally released a private beta which is open to invitees only. If you would like to get onto the beta testers list, then submit your email address via the form on www.kindo.com.

We have also released a new blog on blog.kindo.com, so if you would like to keep up to date with our latest news, then please visit it. Comments are more than welcome

Here are some snippets from two interesting posts on the Kindo blog

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/08/02/some-technical-details/en/

We’re having fun building the Kindo application and used a number of frameworks and components to achieve the finished result.

For the web framework we’re using Seagull which offers excellent integration with Flash through the AMF PHP request handling and easy integration with Ajax and Graphviz. For the Ajax interactions we use jquery exclusively, for Graphviz a heavily extended version of the PEAR lib of the same name. Working with the dot language has been interesting and a good opportunity to experiment with the subtleties of a genealogy graph.

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/09/04/welcome-to-the-beta-release/en/

A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.

Situation

I recently installed the Vanilla forum and set it up so that it would not allow public browsing, because the discussions there are top secret

I then installed the Feedpublisher extension to allow for RSS2 and ATOM feeds.

Problem

I encountered a major problem though, the rss feeds were not accessible because the forum did not allow public browsing. I also saw that on the vanilla community forum, this problem had been rasied, but no-one had offered a solution.
Also, when trying to access the feed through the browser, one gets an authentication pop up box requested a username and password. When one enters the username and password into the respective text fields the following error message is displayed:

A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred
Technical information (for support personel):

The error occurred on or near: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '(u.Password = md5('foobar') or u.Password = 'foobar' )' at line 1


Solution

After quite a bit of playing around and testing, I found a relatively easy solution to the problem – typical a five minute fix for an error that keeps you busy for 2 hours!!!

Step 1


So firstly go to /extensions/Feedpublisher/default.php and make sure that the following section of code looks like this (line 60-73 )

}


Step 2

Then login to the admin section of the forum go to settings > categories > $category edit

Then you need to check the “unauthenticated” option in the “Roles” and hot save. Do this for each and every category, unless you don’t want a specific category to be displayed on the feed.

This method fixed my problem, so I would be interested to find out if anyone else has a better solution. Also let me know id it doesn’t work for you – I hope that’s not the case though.

On Friday 20th July I finally deployed a site which we as a team have been working on for a number of months. Working on the project has been a huge learning curve and has taken way longer than ever expected.

The site which I am talking about is http://bd4d.com, which stands for By Designers 4 Designers is built using the seagull php framework with the new cms module

General comments

Media Temple Installation

During the live installation I encountered a few problems, most of which related to permissions of files on the server:

The main one however were the permissions of the /var/lib/php/session/ folder – it has to be writable

Plugins that I found really useful during development

There were two firefox plug-ins that I found very useful during development of the site:

Colorzilla – gives you # codes for colours on any webpage
IE tab – allows you to open up ie7 tabs within firefox, which is great for cross browser compliant xhtml/css

Thanks to the developers of these two add-ons

Paypal

The site has a payment gateway for listing jobs and events which has transaction processing done by Paypal.

In terms of project mistakes, this was one of the biggest we made. The support that James received from Paypal was extremely poor and the general documentation which they supply is often out of date and incorrect. I am amazed that they have become such a successful company, when it is so difficult to integrate their transaction processing into one’s site.

However after a lot of waiting for accounts to go live, numerous queries, emails, phone calls and a lot of frustration, we did eventually get the transactions working. It is working fine now, but it was definitely not worth all of that hassle.

I would be interested to here about other experiences from developers using Paypal – hopefully you had a better one than we did.

Site Features

Showcase

The section of the site that I am most proud of is the Showcase section, which has flash and movies of some really cool clips which the bd4d guys have done. The section allows comments to be made on each of the movies and I think it looks pretty slick – even if I say so myself
To get the section functioning, I used the following:

A comment manager which Dmitri initially developed and then I adapted that code to be used for the site.

To prevent spam on the site I used captcha package from the php pear library

And I used the following code in the template to hold the movies/flash files:

< object width="550" height="400" >
< param name="movie" value="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" >
< param name="quality" value="high" >
< embed src="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" quality="high" width="{oItem.width}" height="{oItem.height}" autostart="true">< / embed >
< / object >

Events

The Events calendar uses the default seagull events module as a basis, but there where a few enhancements made to fit the requirements of the site. The majority of the development of this section was done by James and I think that he did a pretty good job of it.

The calendar looks pretty slick and works really well, also the backend of the seagull events module provides a lot of flexibility for administrators wanting to manage events.

Job board

The Job board uses custom managers in the default module and as I have mentioned in my section about paypal, it allows members of the site to post jobs for a fee. The transaction processing handles straight paypal payments as well as credit card payments which are verified by paypal.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction this site took way longer than expected and there were a number of hard lessons which the whole team learnt. But at the end of the day, the site looks pretty good and works as expected, so in some way it can be seen as a success.

Favicons have become quite the norm on websites nowadays and I have encountered a few problems with them in the past, since browsers usually cache them and it takes quite awhile for browsers to update when a favicon is changed.

I used to just leave the .ico file in the document root and hoped that the browser would pick it up, but I have recently been told a much better way of ensuring that the correct image is displayed in the URL text field.

Place the file in the images folder and then refer to it in your the head of you html template by using the following code: < link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/x-icon" href="../images/favicon.ico" / > (remove spaces in code)

So, one definitely does learn something new everyday. Hat tip to Ali

Having just completed the Atalink site, I would like to highlight some of my experiences, frustrations and lessons which I have learnt over the past few months.

Background

I developed the site using the Seagull php framework, using the publisher module (which has recently been superseded by the CMS module).

The publisher module requires a bit of hacking to make it run effectively, especially if the site requires content pages which have different layouts. But, overall the site works well and looks pretty good, even if I say so myself ;).

I have still had a number of difficulties, so for those of you who are planning on building a similar site, here are some of the things which I have learnt:

This is especially relevant if you are going to be using some of the following:

• Seagull php Framework
• Installing a site on a Media Temple Server
• Including a dynamic Google Map in a page using the api

Lessons learned

Tips for using the Seagull publisher module:

If you have various site sections which need to have different layouts, the best way of handling this is to create different content types for each different layout which is required.

Then create a different publisher template for that content type and specify the styling which you want for that particular section.

If you have any exceptions, then use a handler like this:

{if:isEqual(29,articleID)}

{end:}
{if:isEqual(30,articleID)}

{end:}
{if:isEqual(34,articleID)}

{end:}

I will endeavour to write a more in depth tutorial for this and put it on the Seagull wiki. Once I have done so, I will update this post.

Server Issues

The first issue which I encountered was trying to do an installation on a staging sub-domain on a Media Temple Dedicated Virtual Server, where php safe mode was turned on. I have written a post which is a guide on how to successfully remove these restrictions.

Browser Issues

As always, I encountered problems with cross browser compatibility. I discovered huge differences between IE6, IE7 and Firefox. The site looks best in Firefox, Safari and in IE6, but there are a few small differences on IE7.

I used this basic conditional block to include an IE hacks file for when a user views the site using IE.

< !--[if IE] >< style type="text/css" >@import “http://www.atalink.com/ themes/atalink/css/hacks/ie.css”;< /style >< ![endif]-- > (Remove spaces)

Google Maps

Although this is not that difficult to implement, I found quite a useful site called:

Google Maps latitude, longitude Popup , which gives you the latitudes and longitude values for a specific location, which you use in the Google supplied javascript

Design

Although a designer may do a really good job and a client signs off a design, one has to be flexible enough to deal with client requests for changing of the layouts. Often the changes requested are quite valid and one should consider each request before just disagreeing.

Content

Again, I have been reminded about how important it is to have content ready and signed off, before beginning with development. It is amazing how much time can be wasted when you are waiting for pieces of content. Details about content should be agreed upon during initial agreements and no matter how difficult it may be, these agreements should be adhered to.

Conclusion

I have enjoyed working on this site and I have learnt a lot, in terms of development and in terms of communicating with clients.