Cross posted in Arts
]]>The list is a great read in itself. I urge you to check it out.
]]>Lists are always controversial. When Rolling Stone released its list of top 500 albums of all time, the comments came fast and furious. “Thanks for completely shitting on hip-hop and the influence it has had,” wrote one reader. “According to this list who needs the last 20 years anyway?” wrote another. Even seemingly safe choices proved divisive. “Please get the stinking Beatles off these lists. They are a glorified pop band that for some reason we are all programmed to believe were great.”
Essentially, the comments revealed the problem with lists—they are incredibly subjective and getting two people to agree on what should be included is an exercise in futility. We expect this list to have the same issues.
....
With that in mind, here’s our list of the most influential people in Reno music over the last 25 years. While we know not everyone will agree with the choices, we look forward to the dialogue it will generate.
Cross posted in Arts
]]>At South by Southwest during our “ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak preview” I got a chance to reveal some big news about the future of ExpressionEngine that I wanted to explore in some more detail here for anyone who wasn’t able to attend.
ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter.
CodeIgniter is our Open Source PHP based framework. You can learn more at CodeIgniter.com, but in a nutshell it’s the toolkit that many powerful applications are built on, and now we can add ExpressionEngine to that list.
This is great news if you’re an ExpressionEngine user, a CodeIgniter user, or both. As an ExpressionEngine developer you will have a greatly expanded community of talented developers working with you, and for you. I said during my talk, “The nerds are excited, and you should be excited that the nerds are excited”. As a dyed in the wool nerd, I stand by this!
If you’re a CodeIgniter developer, this means you can drop a full-fledged content-management system right on top of your existing code base, and have it work. You want a forum installed? One click. You want need member management, a wiki, end-user tools, mailing lists, mobile blogging capabilities, permissions… all there. One click. Proven, simple, powerful.
Very exciting! Since I started using Codeigniter at version 1.0, I have noticed a huge increase in my productivity, and a huge leap in my knowledge of php and web programming. There is something about coding with Codeigniter that inspires clean, elegant code. A good example of the power of Codeigniter is a very basic CMS I had put together for Noble Studios. It worked, but it wasn’t pretty. It was one hack on top of another, with a bunch of pieces glued together that was very slowly turning into a usable framework/CMS, but I simply do not have the time or resources to properly develop it. We work very quickly and I had to do what I had to do. However, this latest project gave me a chance to revisit the very core of this CMS and I saw the opportunity to do it right. I chose Codeigniter as the core and was able to produce a marketable, flexible, and maintainable application in a fraction of the time it took to build the original. I am most happy with the ACL/User Authentication system, and I am considering ripping it out and making it available as an app for the community. The point is, a good framework really does allow you to spend more time on the real functionality and value of an application. And with EE as the CMS and the power of this framework, we can tackle much larger development projects in the same amount of time as doing it from “scratch”.
]]>
Woo!
]]>
Saturday night after a little bit of mushroom and absinthe, I was flipping through my sketchbook and stopped on this drawing. I like this drawing, and it was just a sketch of the tree of life. Man growing, evolving, his mind reaching its absolute potential. Staring into this drawing I realized something. Slightly trippin I quickly wrote it down on top of the actual sketch. The irony of man is that his constant search of the meaning of life, god, etc, is always in the one place he cannot actually look.
]]>First, our controllers method. This handles setting up our form validation rules, building the captcha, and storing the captcha data in a session for retrieval later. We have a rule for our captcha field that is a callback to our validation function, “cinput_check”.
<?php
function contact()
{
$this->load->library('session');
$this->load->plugin('captcha');
/* Setup captcha defaults */
$captcha_defaults = array(
'img_path' => './images/captcha/',
'img_url' => 'http://site.com/images/captcha/',
'img_width' => 200,
'img_height' => 50,
);
$this->load->library('validation');
/* include your additional form field rules here as well */
$rules['cinput'] = "callback_cinput_check";
$this->validation->set_rules($rules);
/* include your additional form fields here as well */
$fields['cinput'] = "Captcha";
$this->validation->set_fields($fields);
if ($this->validation->run() == FALSE)
{
/* since validation failed, generate new captcha
data and update the session */
$cap = create_captcha($captcha_defaults);
$form_tpl['captcha'] = $cap['image'];
$this->session->set_userdata(array('cinput'=>$cap['word']));
$this->load->view('site/contact_us', $form_tpl);
}
else
{
/* Continue to process form */
}
}
?>
This is our call back function, and validates the posted captcha value against the generated value stored in session. For some reason checking $str against the value in $this->session was not working, so I simply bypassed that and used the value from the input handler.
<?php
function cinput_check($str)
{
if ($this->input->post('cinput') != $this->session->userdata('cinput'))
{
$this->validation->_error_messages['cinput_check'] = 'Incorrect Captcha characters.';
return FALSE;
}
else
{
return TRUE;
}
}
?>
The form is just a generic form, but here is what the captcha field looks like for reference:
<p><?php print $captcha; ?><br />
<label for="Captcha">Type in the code:</label>
<input type="text" name="cinput" id="Captcha" value="" /></p>
For more information on Codeigniter check out their extremely well documented User Guide.
]]>
Over the weekend The Mantis and I made our first Radio Liners. This was the first time I have attempted to create anything with sound. It is definitely fun and I am excited to learn more about it. We used cubase to record and compile the audio. We made one for Jager Hour, our not so consistent show where we play records and ramble on until we are too drunk to continue, and for general broadcasting on Lunchbox Radio.
Check them out!
Jager Hour
Lunchbox Radio
Noble Studios took us on a trip to Amsterdam for a 2 day workshop, team building, and they 5 days of whatever the hell we wanted. It was not wasted, although, we definitely were. The workshop was unexpectedly productive and the entire trip has brought the whole office closer together. We were mentally stripped down built up again. Personally I feel refreshed and focused. More focused than I have been in a long time.
We knew it was going to be a good trip from the minute we got the airport at 6am. Everyone was all smiles and completely embracing, especially towards Nicole. This is the first time they have met here and honestly, they probably, up until that moment, didn’t think she existed!
The flight was easy. We started drinking in Reno and didn’t stop until Amsterdam. Definitely made the trip smoother. Once we were finally there, and thanks to our pilot we got there an hour earlier, we unloaded our gear and headed straight for a coffee shop. From here the trip is a blur of laughter, fun, productivity, art, drinks, good food, and flight butt. Oh and the best pot I have ever smoked. I could probably go on and on on details that are unimportant except to those of us that were there, but I won’t. Basically, the trip was amazing. Everyone I work with is amazing. And it was absolutely incredible to have shared this experience with Nicole and crew. I can’t wait to go back to Europe.
Nicole and I at the Bushdoctor coffee shop:
Drawing and smoking at the Bushdoctor:
The best pancakes I have ever had in my life. Something I am going to crave for years:
]]>NEW YORK Nicholas Gurewitch’s “Perry Bible Fellowship,” the offbeat comic that ran online and in newspapers, will end next week.
“I’m making this decision for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I want to do other things besides be a cartoonist,” said Gurewitch.
A “Perry Bible Fellowship” hardcover book called “The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories” was published last fall by Dark Horse Comics.
When working in such an environment, I have found that it pays to be confident. Be deliberate about your code. Think before you act, blah blah blah. Just doing something and “seeing what happens” could mean your site gets exploited or you expose sensitive to the wrong people. Not a desired result. If you need to experiment, do it outside the influence of the live site. Create a place on the site for you to test and play. Password protect it if you have to. Once you are satisfied, roll that into your live code. Remember that while you are working on the site, chances are someone is visiting. The best advice would be to setup a development/staging environment on an internal server, but if that is not an option do what you have to to simulate it.
While this is the stuff of nightmares, I have learned a thing or two from it. One being that you must be able to quickly reuse and refactor code with minimal fuss. Not all projects are made equal, but most have the same basic requirements. Handling database connections, querying the database, filtering user input, and some way to quickly deal with forms. When you write a function, think to yourself: can I reuse this later? Try to decouple your functions and classes from the application. Make them as generic as you can so that you can quickly reuse them in another project. Not everything you write will be like this, but try to think ahead. Don’t tie your MySQL wrapper class to a specific database. Does it have basic CRUD functionality? Write it so that its not tied to a specific table. For a lot of my projects I have includes like html_helpers.php, or date_helpers.php. I can quickly copy these files to my new application and haven’t spent a lot of time rewriting code. Using a framework helps a lot. I was using my own built from years of coding similar projects until I found Codeigniter. It basically takes care of all the non fun, repetitive coding for you, and lets you get to the fun parts.
It will save you time in the long run, and since that is the one thing you don’t have a lot of, it’s an invaluable practice.
Since we are in the land of nightmares, I will assume there is no revision control. Which means no easy way to track your code. One very easy, and very obvious way to keep a library of code is to create a directory on your computer to store scripts, snippets, classes, etc, that you can use again later. Be sure to name them appropriately.
When you do have to work on live code in a production environment you generally have to make quick decisions. The problem with that is that years down the road, even weeks down the road, when you revisit your clever hack, chances are it wont make much sense. Your coding style could have changed, or you just don’t remember what the hell you were thinking. All you know is that it works now, and the client wants changes. Comment your code. Don’t over do it, but explain enough so that if you have to come back to it later you will know what it means. I know that seems obvious, but I can’t count how many times I have gone back to old code and just sat there staring, silently cursing the previous developer… er, myself.
It also helps to stay consistent. If you use camel caps for class names, dont start changing that when you go back to the code. If files are named with a certain structure, try to stay with that flow.
Be smart about your variables. Be descriptive. $myvar doesn’t say anything. Yeah, its your variable. But what is it holding? Why is it there? $current_date is a good example of a descriptive variable.
Since we have no time to study code, we need to be able to quickly get in there and understand what is going on.
As far as PHP goes, I generally keep php.net open in a tab in my browser. and I try to save time by finding ways that other people have done something. If I can’t find anything, well, you don’t lose that much time. Its worth looking and what you discover could help you later. Visit phpclasses.org and check the forums at devshed.com. Check out Pear too.
When management refuses to allow the use of 3rd party code, or any open source code… well, what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
Errors happen. They are going to happen. Log your PHP errors instead of displaying them. It will be an extra step when debugging, but that is far better than the alternative. Add this to an .htaccess file in your web root:
# supress php errors php_flag display_startup_errors off php_flag display_errors off php_flag html_errors off # enable PHP error logging php_flag log_errors on php_value error_log /home/path/logs/PHP_errors.log
I have found that if you break up your CSS into several files, it makes it easy to reuse later. For example. Most of my designs follow a similar layout, header, footer, sidebar, and main content. I have a CSS file called grid.css that contains the basic definitions for positioning these elements. When I need to create a new layout, I just copy this base file and change a couple width values and I am done. I also have a file called reset.css that reduces everything down to a common baseline for consistency between browsers. I cannot stress how much this has helped me in getting a site working in Firefox, IE6, IE7, and Safari. I squash the major bugs once, and only once. As far as the html, I do a lot of copy/pasting. I keep a bunch of html snippets in a library on my computer.
Same thing with javascript. Keep track of your code, and you care reuse it later, expand on it, and not spend most of your time setting up the basic foundation.
Yeah yeah, its all web coding 101. But it pays to know these things.
]]>
Check out the new sketches.
]]>
Yeah, this image sums up my weekend. I started reading the Django manual. Holy shit, I am way impressed and absolutely love it. I wish I would have gotten into Python earlier.
]]>Every so often, Bob B. observed that his company’s e-commerce site would crash-hard. No one had any clue as to why it happened, but everyone knew how to fix it. Restart both the IIS and SQL Server processes and, voilà, within a minute, the site was up and running again.
Like an old car with a few quirks, the company worried that tinkering with the application might make things worse. But after a few months and a handful of customer complaints, Bob was permitted to investigate the issue so long as he wasn’t too intrusive.
Pieces started coming together. Some Web surfer from Ohio got into an infinite redirect loop that was creating a new session with each iteration. Apparently, the AOL user was patient enough to let that loop continue for almost 11 hours.
]]>In the end, Bob figured out exactly how the problem had happened: some random visitor using an older version of AOL bookmarked their site. The user wasn’t trying to visit the site, let alone waiting 11 hours for a page to come up. He or she just happened to have the AOL browser open, which would then periodically attempt to update the favicons for its bookmarked sites, and then diligently follow the endless redirects as ordered.