Jon Bauer’s Blog

Jason E. Sweat’s “Guide to PHP Design Patterns” arrived this week, I hope I’ll have some time to dig into it. On first glance, there is definately some overlap between other advanced php books, including the kick ass “PHP5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice” by Matt Zandstra, and “Advanced PHP Programming”, by George Schlossnagle. But it’s Jason’s Test Driven Development approach to the patterns that I expect to be most interesting.

Lesson of the Evening: As much as you want to say you built it from source, Just try the .rpm first.

just point your Firefox browser here. http://http/

Time in one hour from now:
< %= 1.hour.from_now %>

I’m now using Fedora Linux (Core 3) about 95% of my time, both at work and home. As I begin to use it almost exclusively, one of realizations I’m coming to is that Fedora/Linux comes with everything you need, and more.

I sat down recently to search for professional grade flow charting software, and time tracking software. I was willing to pay for a good solution to either problem, so I searched. I found some pretty unimpressive stuff.

Then I thought to actually check my own computer. Wow. Duh. Either already installed, or installed in 30 seconds using Yum, solutions to my problems appeared.

Kivio - Allready installed on Fedora. Great flow charting, logic diargram software. Exports perfectly to .pdf. You can add stencil packs for cheap here.

GnoTime - A Gnome GUI Time Tracker app, that has an “egg timer” style recorder, which you can stop and start as you work on different projects, or while even taking breaks. Eazy, simple report generation, showing time spent on each project, and even invoice billing information.

Everything you need is already at your fingertips.

The Ruby and Rails books arrived today. Yes, I’m jumping on the bandwagon here. No, I’m not leaving PHP. Just going with what works. And it does seem to work, pretty well.

I’d like to see the installation of Ruby alongside PHP get a little easier, but maybe I haven’t spent enough time with it. I’ll dig in and post my thoughts.

When Cake catches up with Rails, ping me, I’ll be in my cave, digging for Ruby.

ok, I know from the last post, it looks like i’ve been on vacation for a long, long time. Quite the opposite! I’ve finally upgraded to Wordpress 1.5, so give me a couple days to get situated and I’ll be posting lots in the coming weeks.