Webninja.org

Finally back in the swing

I’ve spent the night getting my things back in order. Being able to develop at home has been a must and it’s been something that I haven’t been able to do in quite a while. Call it burn out from work, call it just feeling a lack of wanting to be social. It feels good to be moving again.

Over the weekend I picked up my latest Apple device, this time I went with the base model Mac mini. Overall I’m impressed with the way it handles everything except video games. Thankfully I wasn’t delusional enough the believe that it would play games fine although I won’t be lying to say I had a small hope.

I’m hoping to use the mini for storing photos, learning a bit of video editing, doing my web and application development on, and in general being a workhorse. I’d like to delegate gaming and heavier lifting to the PC I built last November but we’ll see.

Here’s my intend list of core applications:

Development: Panic’s Coda. I’ve played with it some on my laptop, but just have a hard time working with it wherever I tend to be. I really think I just need to get used to it with a full screen monitor. Remote FTP editing plus a host of other features I have yet to use. Overall I’ve been impressed enough where I’ll be purchasing after the demo. For CSS design I’ll most likely be using cssEdit. In the past it’s always been good to me, why abandon it now? Hoepfully things wont stop there. I picked up Programming in Objective-C 2.0 as well. It’s time to learn a new language.

Social Media: Per previous posts it should be no surprise I’m going to be going with Blogo and Tweetie. Both are recent additions to my social media arsenal but are very excellent applications which give my desktop that web 2.0 feel.

Entertainment: Boxee really makes me want to buy another Mac mini. It’s great on my AppleTV, however it’s absolutely amazing running on the Mac mini. Along with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, it makes for a quick easy hookup on my TV and gives me the ability to watch any of my media with little effort. Just need to get some of my friends hooked on it now so I can spy and see what they’re watching

The main problem is now that I’ve picked up a new mini, I want a new MacBook. I’ll fight the urge for now though.

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It’s here!

Woot.com doesn’t always have stuff I want. In fact, typically it’s only a couple times per year I see something I’m interested in. Last week for the low price of $75, I saw the Flip Ultra. I’ve played around with Brandon’s flip and have wanted one for a while but didn’t really want to spend the $150 on it for fear of it sitting in my laptop bag doing nothing.

Guess we’ll see what happens with this one. Hopefully it turns out to be more than a $75 paperweight. It doesn’t weigh much even with batteries so it probably won’t be a good one.

As a byproduct, who knows maybe I’ll even start posting videos here.

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Time to give writing here another shot

I’m giving the OSX app Blogo a try right now. More and more I find myself replacing web sites with applications that integrate with websites. Ironically I remember wanting to do this years ago for Livejournal knowing the web can only do so much. Overall I like the application so far and I’m tempted to buy it at the $20 price point in hopes I’ll start writing more.

On the twitter side of things, i highly recommend Tweetie. Enough where I sent the $11 to help support the project. I’ve been a Tweetie convert on my iPhone for the past month or so and really am enjoying it on OSX. I’m still using twhirl on my PC though. It’s odd that I find so much innovation in OSX software in terms of UI and simplicity. Hopefully Windows developers are taking note.

Speaking of the web only doing so much, if you’re a PHP developer and cringe at the though of working with javascript, I highly recommend sitting down with jQuery. We’re in the process of replacing Mootools with it and I love it. As soon as I finally get around to updating our code structure to support dynamically loading the correct plugins, life will be a breeze with it. I’ll try to get some actual decent demos up sometime soon.

Other than that, life is back to working long work days, I’m pretty sure these will never end. It builds character right? Or is it that it puts hair on my chest? The world may never know…

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PHP Objects and Sessions

We stumbled across an interesting issue at work today with the Zend Framework and objects.  We’re working on a filter for a series of reports that carries over from page to page and in the process of development, decided it would be best to move this from page to page within an object.

The error we were receiving while doing so however was “The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object.”  Doing a bit of reading up on php.net, it turns out that php serializes an object, then when the session is started, it unserializes the object.  You won’t actually find out there’s a problem until you call a method that is supposed to reside within the object.

The work around for this problem is loading the class into memory before starting your session.  In our situation, we’re running the Zend Framework which start’s the session on it’s own and it seems unsensible to modify the Zend libraries but we still had a problem with an incomplete object.  Thus on my path to finding a way to work around this problem, I created class.cow.php.

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A moment of clarity…

I always seem to hit these moments of clarity. Where I’m currently at in life, and usually know where I will take my life from that point. The odd part is I’m at a point of clarity and don’t know where I should go. I live my life largely by logic, and the direction I feel myself wanting to go doesn’t match the logic. Two plus two makes five right? This is another one of those things that even though I’ll probably keep my thoughts to myself, I feel like I need to write about it. Odd isn’t it? In a way the whole purpose of webninja was for me to have a place to be a mental dump. Somewhere I could write about anything I wanted, be it music, code, design, my personal life, cars, etc.

This is a problem because I feel as though I’ve lost focus with the site. In a way I’ve decided I wanted to keep webninja to code oriented things but the personal life bleeds through. The thing of it is, if I write about cars, I know the majority of the people reading this wont care. If I write about code, the car audience won’t care. Music? Well I enjoy both hip hop and electronic and those genres don’t generally cross.

The funny thing is, I took a look at my stats and really I don’t have an audience. A few tech friends visit, but I don’t really advertise the site either. So I’ve decided I’m going to take a new approach and just write about whatever is on my mind. If I think something is cool, I want to try to write about it.

Although to get back to the original point, I still can’t write about everything I’d want to. If I’m frustrated about something with friends, I can’t exactly write about it here. Eventually I’d like to think most of my friends find this site at one point or another, it’s just a matter of if they come back. I’m guess the latter is true due to lack of updates. So I guess I should change that.

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somethings are funny just to me

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i’ve found it!

I was on a training session last week with a company for data cleansing software we purchased from the company he works for. I love the chance to have a discussion with other tech people, specifically ones that have their head on their shoulders. With Brandon’s departure, I find myself having less of these conversations at work. Over the years, I’ve come across few but usually have excellent discussions about other programs. Vincent from Spillman introduced me to Beryl (now Compiz Fusion), and just recently, Rick from matchIT suggested a program that will probably change this website specifically.

In my last post, i made mention of wanting a utility that does it all for me. lets me take a screenshot, crop it, add a border, then upload it to my ftp. The Jing Project has completely met all of my expectations when it comes to this solution. Jing comes from TechSmith, the company that created the popular screen capture program SnagIt. It’s a great application but comes with a $49.95 price tag that makes it not worth it to me, let alone the average consumer. Instead, Jing is totally free. I assumed there had to be a catch somewhere, but my up front assumption is TechSmith is considering ways to make an application free for the home user, and get away with something such as advertising when images are linked to. At the moment, there’s none of that either.

I’m getting ahead of myself though so I’ll start first my explaining how it works. You have 2 options, an annoying (to me at least) sun orbital at the top of your primary screen, or you can set a hot key. Personally, I’m using Control-PrintScreen. Upon hitting the key combination, the screen is grayed out and you draw a box over the area. I would have loved to show a screen shot of this, but print screen wouldn’t dump this to clipboard. After you pick the area, you decide image or video (which creates an swf file). Next you get this screen:

Now you may have noticed the FTP highlighted. With Jing you have the option to create a free account at Screencast.com with 2 gigs of storage, or dump it to your flickr account, ftp, or straight file. Since I’ll be using it for ftp I predefined my login info, where I wanted my screenshots to go, etc. Then you have multiple choices. The first icon uploads the file and copies the direct link to your clipboard. The second copies an embed link (think <img> tag, which you can also change for example if you wanted to us bbcode [img] tags) The third saves to disk, and the last option puts it in your clipboard. Along with this you can perform small changes such as creating a text label, highlighting areas of the screen shot, or even creating a frame (like the above screen shot)

So in other words, I’ve not simplified posting screenshots tenfold. I wish I could find applications like this every day.

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It’s funny to watch the peaks and valleys

I go from not posting at all, to posting a ton.  Then drop off again consistantly.  I suppose my stats would spike more if I continually updated.  I think part of the problem is I want to take the time to effectively write whatever I post here, but sometimes that holds me back.  You know, life gets busy, etc.  I’d be interested to look at my past history of the last 5 years of webninja and see what my posting frequency is based on month.  Perhaps I post more in the winter?  This seems like a common theme for people I know.  We’ll post every now and then in spurts.  Maybe I’ll change that eventually, who knows.

I think part of the issue is ease of use.  I’d love to post images more but that requires opening up photoshop, tweaking any images I want, saving it, then uploading it to an ftp.  It’d be nice to have a screen capture application that has borders, does cropping, resizing, and saves directly to ftp.

I’ve been experimenting with better ways to organize my digital life and get things done faster.  For example one application, Launchy.  It’s much like QuickSilver but on PC.  Thus far it’s pretty useful.  In short it indexes certain things like applications, and directories you configure it to, then those are accessible by pulling up it’s search screen with the windows key and space (also definable).

Then once you find what you’re looking for, hit enter and its loading.  You can also add certain triggers, for example you could create one that would allow you to type yt dramatic squirrel and having it automatically search youtube for a dramatic squirrel.

Anyways, beyond that, I have a bunch of really exciting coding projects I’ve been working on which I’ll be sharing here soon hopefully and with Brandon leaving, I’ll need someone to share them with.

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Can you smell the summer air?

Well it’s about that time of year again. I’ll be taking the doors off of the Jeep in no time and hopefully getting the Focus running again. New tires, a bit more boost, it should be fun. Along with this will be more grilling. I really want to try to grill lots of chicken this summer and try to shy away some from red meat. Want and will are 2 different things though and I love steaks and burgers. I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll be managing the summer but I’m up to the challenge.

We’re going to be doing another trial run of the PodCast soon, we’re still working out some things such as topics, focus, etc. Oh and probably a name eventually. Along with that, I’m hoping to start doing more writing akin to my previous post about PowerSet. I’ve been trying some offline blogging utilities, currently I’m writing this post in ecto on my way over to Sean’s house. If you happen to be familiar with a decent offline utility, please let me know. Some day I’d like to move to the bay area and this could be a good start at getting my foot into the door out there.

On another note, I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately. On the new layout I have my twitter updates on the sidebar however until I get around to that, you can see what I’m up to at www.twitter.com/trahma. I’ve been using the Twinkle iPhone application as well so quite frequently you’ll see pictures attached to my tweets.

And with that, I’m pulling up to Sean’s house, time to steal his WiFi and post this.

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Google really rules my life.

I think I’ve made mention before just how much Google has changed my life. So many times during the day a quick command-K or ctrl-K gets me any of the data I’m looking for. It’s odd to see myself search Google versus other users, it seems as if my brain has learned which keywords work best for my query, without me needing to think.

Unfortunately, lots of the world isn’t like me. Most people don’t think in queries, and which words are most likely to be indexed. Enter, Powerset, a company that is working on developing a search engine targeted towards parsing the human language. While I can applaud them for trying, I have to admit I was skeptical if they can knock google down. It’s time to do a comparison.

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