This one has to go in “Humour”, no doubt about it. Made me grin. hehe.
Proinnsias is on the upgrade cycle once more. Pity Mr Project can’t import MS Project files..
Author Archives: Donncha
The Dictionary of Cork Slang
Adam, this dictionary is excellent! Your uncle did a great job! A must read for Corkonians!
Linux drivers for Conexant Chipsets
Yaay! Linux drivers for my modem have been released for Red Hat 9 and other distributions! Should be online tonight! Thanks Ruairi!
OpenOffice
The ILUG is a great resource and often it’s great having such a varied and technical group of people on the ILUG. Caolan works on Open Office/Star Office and it looks like my OO problems may be fixed in the 1.1 release!
I love his explanation why bullet points were a bit screwy when exporting to Word format. hehe.
Using VNC For Your Main Desktop
Justin Mason looks at using VNC for his desktop. His machine is too noisy so what better way to get a quiet PC?
I used to use VNC but it was too slow. I think you’d probably need a switched network with decent network cards and switches. I have decent network cards, but only a hub.
Template Engines
Here’s an interesting article, Template Engines from the author of bTemplate.
In short, the point of template engines should be to separate your business logic from your presentation logic, not separate your PHP code from your HTML code.
That’s the short definition of what a template should do. I think it should also:
- Provide application and server security. It could be argued that PHP safe_mode provides a level of security against third-party code.
- Make it simple to maintain the template.
In my experience, Smarty syntax is clearer in a html template. Mixing php and html grates on my brain but obviously it’s a subjective matter that many people are happy with.
Nevertheless, if you’re sitting on the fence about using templates, read the above article. See what the author does in his examples, and make up your own mind if they’re useful or not. You might find yourself using Smarty afterwards anyway!
Blogshares tips
Tim has some excellent tips for all you blogshare traders. Make sure you sell your stock before May 1st!
b2 plugin support
On the b2 forums there are plenty of hacks and enhancements to b2. While there are guidelines to writing hacks they’re informal, and many hacks rely on changing existing code.
I’m using the Smarty plugins support to provide a consistent and documented way of writing plugins.
I created a simple “googleit” function already. It’s integrated into the post.tpl template of this blog and provides the “Search” link you see below.
Using Smarty plugins is easy. You create your function, call it a predictable name (smarty_function_name() where name is “googleit” for example), put it into a file and drop that file into the plugins directory.
The usual advantage of using Smarty caching applies here too. Once it’s cached the plugin isn’t loaded again until it’s called so you can drop as many plugins as you like into the plugin directory without suffering any speed loss!
Smarty Plugins – SmartyWiki
Lots and lots of Smarty plugins here!
The Register – on Piles
Short Reg article on Apple’s Piles – new ideas for their GUI. “Gestures” are talked about too.
I tried gestures for a while in my browser but they were too clumsy and difficult to use for me. They could make using a mouse easier for RSI suffers though.