2008

• Sync’ MP4 Tracks through MTP

  I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.

  (more…)

• Blending ACL and FSM-based Workflow

  After reading through the documentation, I find that the role based ACL and work flow can be more tightly integrated. Therefore I made all the transaction into many FSMs and my work flow component now consists of one work flow library and one work flow management model. As I am going a more normalized design (I use denormalized design in work as it deals with a lot of documents, however for a small project like mine, a denormalized design should do well).

  (more…)

• MVC: Kohana vs. Zend Framework

  After comparing my own implementation of MVC with CodeIgniter’s, now I’m comparing Kohana’s and Zend’s. I have just shifted from CodeIgniter to Kohana recently in work and is currently learning on how to use Zend Framework to build my web-app. As everybody knows, Zend Framework is more like a collection of library classes than a framework a la Ruby on Rails, using MVC in Zend Framework would require one to begin from bootstrapping stage. However, in Kohana, just like other frameworks, bootstrapping is done by the framework itself so the developer will get an installation that almost just works (after a little bit of configuration).

  (more…)

• Gotta start working

  After delaying for quite some time, I think I should start the project before I get bored with it. The project will be either hosted on this current domain (coolsilon.com) at least for now and will probably move to another domain if needed. The site will be either a blog aggregator or just a simple article submission site that works kinda like digg / reddit, however, to be promoted to the frontpage the submission would have to impress the opposite group.

  (more…)

• Magic SQL

  Ever wanted to find the number of days between two dates without counting weekend (Saturdays and Sundays)? In PHP you typically needs to do a lot of calculation and a lot of factors needs to be considered. Therefore, in the end you will end up having a whole bunch of code that you will probably start asking yourself whether you are programming a web-calendar or something similar.

  (more…)

• FSM-based Workflow System

  Recently I am being assigned to work on a FSM based workflow system to enable my other colleagues to use it in their application. I am rather impressed with the simplicity of the workflow system (initially designed by my Technical Director) and decided to post some notes here. The workflow system was developed for CodeIgniter PHP framework and Drupal CMS.

  (more…)

• Real Life Enterprise Class Website Development

  Recently I am involved in developing some small modules for a enterprise class website using CodeIgniter (CI). There was no restriction given on which framework should I use for the development and I chose CI as I learned a bit on it (when I was considering whether to shift my personal development project). Of course there are other reasons why I chose to learn CI, for example the superior documentation and screencasts available.

  (more…)

• Working Life

  I didn’t realize that I have been working for 3 weeks until the Labour Day which was a public holiday. Many things happened in these few weeks and I am still struggling to catch up with it. My superior and colleagues have been very helpful and offered me some helpful tutorials and books. I was instructed to build a event scheduler application using codeigniter in the first week and then work on a side project that extends a form using DOM methods and properties.

  (more…)

• What a WonderFOOL Life

  I have just re-started to find myself a job as my work in mybloggercon almost come to an end (after helping them to set up an April Fool Prank). I have sent some enquiry letters to apply for a job in web-development field mostly involves PHP. I prefer PHP over ASP.NET because I can have greater flexibilities in developing in PHP as what I experienced when I was developing my final year project.

  (more…)

• Symlinking two Blogs

  I am currently doing some organization to my blogs. Few weeks ago, after spending months struggling to work in Ubuntu 7.10, I learned about symbolic links. Then I thought this would be good for my project file management. Therefore I started to re-organize my project file structure to utilize symbolic links. One of the projects that uses symbolic link is the current wordpress theme.

  (more…)

Random Posts

• Working Environment Setup, for 2020

  In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.

  (more…)

• Linked Data Principle

  Semantic Web is not just about putting data on the web, but also making links to allow a person as well as a machine to explore the web of data. Links are made in the web of data connects arbitrary things together as described by RDF as opposed to links in the web of hypertext, where links connects to only web-resources. Linkage of arbitrary things then allow related things to be found while performing search.

  (more…)

• Dragon Curve

  I really don’t know how to start explaining what is a Dragon Curve. However, I find it is interesting enough after finding out that there’s actually a fixed pattern of occurrence. Therefore I spent some time writing a series of scripts to plot the generated fractal into a graph. What I didn’t expect is, the series get really complicated after a while.

  (more…)

• New directory structure

  While the previous file structure works well, I decided to tune some details before deploying the latest WordPress release. Besides that, I also started a new theme development project after my last theme which was developed more than 2 years ago. Thankfully, everything seems to work so far.

  (more…)

• Building problock – my personal experience

  A few years ago, I was asked to build a game or simulation (alongside 2048) as a part of a job application. Being very impressed with Explorable Explanations, I implemented Conway’s Game of life with Javascript and jQuery (that was before ES6 became popular). Then I made a very simple grid maker jQuery plugin to dynamically generate a grid of divs. If you check the source code, you may realize I rely on Underscore.js a lot back then.

  (more…)