ucantblamem

It’s been a very busy month (or two) and a lot has happened both at work and in my personal life. But rather than bother explaining all the boring details, I thought I’d just spew it all in a jumbled-mess of a blog post. Sounds fun right??? :P

• I saw this today and totally agree.
• I leave for California in 4 weeks!
• I have an obsession with Recursion/Tree-structures and Regular-expressions.
• I bought a car - it’s real nice and real black, which makes it really cool…
• One-liners work in Mootools, but not really in SQL (P.S. This code doesn’t actually work the way it was intended to):SELECT IF( name REGEXP ‘^Copy.+$’, REPLACE(REPLACE( name, ‘Copy ‘, CONCAT(’Copy’, ‘ ‘, (REPLACE( name, ‘Copy ‘, ” ) +1) , ”)), REPLACE( name, ‘Copy ‘, ” ) +0, ”), CONCAT( ‘Copy ‘, name )) AS name, tpid FROM mos_ssdir_sector
• This is one of the coolest designs I’ve seen in an while.
• I have cut down my 3 cokes a day to 1 Mountain Dew a day - which I would like to add DOES NOT contain ANY caffeine (I’m looking at you Eliza). :)
• I want this.
• Programming Excel (or Spreadsheet for all those fellow Open Office users) is pretty ugly:=CONCATENATE(UPPER(MID(A2 

  ;SEARCH(” “; A2)+2;1)); LOWER(MID(A2;SEARCH(” “; A2)+3;LEN(A2))))

• I took the support-form off the Order Posts site - it was getting relentless. :S
• I am working on a set of PHP design tools, me thinks you might find them useful…
• Clients will annoy you 24 hours a day when they think you’re working for free. Just something we learnt recently.
• All my friends are buying macs and I haven’t even been preachin to them??? What’s up with that?
• Nandos is starting to take up a large portion of my food-group pyramid.
• I think I’ve forgotten how to design. Which begs the question: Could I ever design to begin with???
• Wavorly and High Flight Society are my two new favourite bands.
• Firebug 1.0 is very buggy and is really starting to annoy me. It even forced me to use Opera for a week - which was a surprisingly pleasant experience. While I’m on the topic of browsers; Every web developer should now have a copy of Safari for windows.
• From now on, I will do whatever I can to avoid the GNU/GPL license - it is of the devil.
• One of the coolest flash applications I’ve seen in a long time; flash-based blogs are the new black.
• I hate driving new cars in busy parking lots.
• I’ll be glad when all of this iPhone hype has been and gone. 5 months ago I was excited about its release, now I’m just mediocre about it… I understand now why Apple normally keep things under such tight wraps until they launch.
• Building a calendar in PHP/MySQL/JavaScript is a lot more difficult than you think it might be.
• 16Gig of space is not sufficient for the Design Assets of a Web Development company. Sys-admin’s: You’ve be warned!
• The Transformers movie had a story line like swiss-cheese and a couple of bad acting/casting issues, but it was still the best movie I’ve seen this year and I loved every second of it!

And that’s a wrap!

If ever there was to be a day when the unmentionable was to hit the fan, it was today. While mindlessly surfing through Digg at lunch, I happened across a link to this post, which if you are unaware is a response to an exceptionally long discussion about the state of Joomla’s license.

Since being forked from Mambo, Joomla! has retained the GPL with the appended “Rider“, which essentially allowed commercial component developers to release add-on’s for Joomla! with whatever license they desired. If you read the discussion on the Joomla! site, you’ll see quite a bit of objection to this premise from some zealous Open Source advocates.

Their argument is that this “Rider” is void according to the GPL, which I believe they are right in claiming (having read the GPL this afternoon), it clearly states that it cannot be modified or added to. In this regard, Joomla! have made a perfectly reasonable move to right their wrongs, however simply moving back to a pure GPL license instead of something more flexible like an Apache, BSD or MIT license has caused uproar and many shed tears in the commercial developer community. (more…)

About a month ago, I finished up some information architecture and usability consulting for an online application. It was a large project that I intended to put a lot of effort into, but the interesting thing was that most of my time was spent justifying my decisions to the client.

The companies’ director was the main contact for this project and is also a psychologist, so considering that all my suggestions made their way into the application, I’m guessing all that apologetics I learnt over the last couple of years works outside of christianity too!

We did iteration after iteration to get every detail right, for the multiple target audiences to get the most out of their experience, but I was largely working based on (solid) theory (as aposed to proven practice). Well this morning I got word that the company had just completed their focus-group evaluations, of the semi-finished product, with outstanding results.

I feel quite lucky to escape through this one relatively unscathed, considering there isn’t a single change to come out of these evaluations. And while every ‘T’ was crossed to begin with, the focus-groups certainly helped to solidify the clients’ confidence in our expertise. Thanks focus-groups! :P