David Gilmour - Remember that night

Pink Floyd is beyond doubt one of my favorite bands. Their philosophical lyrics, psychedelic/progressive sound and David Gilmour’s guitar(s) crunching and weeping.

When I first bought the DVD “David Gilmour - Remember that night - Live at The Royal Albert Hall” I was a bit doubtful. He left out some serious favorites from The Wall like Mother, Goodbye blue sky, Another brick in the wall, Run like hell and from the album A momentary lapse of reason, On the turning away, which I though was a bit disappointing. David Bowie also did Comfortably Numb, which coincidently is one of my favorites and the first one I looked at and immediately thought “Argh no, Bowie, your messing it up, man!”. Needless to say it grew on me. It is different as Bowie sings it as Bowie and when Gilmour takes over at the chorus, it is Pink all the way! A beautiful collaboration.

It is a fantastic show. As elaborate and spectacular as you would expect from an ex Pink member. After watching it, I watched it again. I suddenly realised that I’m not even missing those classics anymore. I still have to watch the second DVD with the bonus tracks and documentary, but for the moment I’m stuck on the music, so it will have to wait.

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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Always sanitize database input. You never know…

This is another gem from xkcd.com! This is the reason why you should always sanitize your database inputs. You never know as you get some really geeky people out there that will name their kids like this. Come to think about it, should there ever be another one, I got some cool names in mind!

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

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Muti API implemented in Afrigator

Last night Neville released a first draft of a REST API for Muti! POX, just as I like it… So I’m quite privileged and honoured to be one of the first to have an implementation of the API. Where better than Afrigator?

If you visit a blog author’s page, and this user has done the necessary changes to his profile, you would see it in action below the blog posts and podcasts. It shows basically the following details:

1. User’s Muti username
2. User’s total number of submissions
3. User’s total amount of Kudus earned
4. The last 10 links muti’d with the following details with the date, kudus, link and title.

Click here to see mine implemented : http://afrigator.com/author/14

I used MyWebShots for the thumbnails as I thought it would round it off nicely!

So if you would like to activate this on Afrigator, simply log in and go to the dashboard. Click on the “Edit your profile” button.

At the bottom of that form, there is a field for your Muti username. Enter your username over at Muti in there and save it.

Bang, thats it! If you visit your profile page (You can do it by clicking on your blog name in the main dashboard page) you should fine your Muti details there.

The XML specification is plain and simple at the moment. There are bound to be a couple of changes, but for now, this is how it looks and how it works:

All you need to do is to send an REST request to http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/{name-of-user}
For example, here is the request to see my Muti stuff: http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/stii

This will return some XML which you can then use to do what you please with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user>
	<submissions>316</submissions>
	<kudus>500</kudus>
	<link>
		<title>The title of the latest post</title>
		<url>http://somesite.com/link-to-post</url>
		<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
		<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
	</link>
	<link>
		<title>The title of the second last post</title>
		<url>http://othersite.com/link-to-post2</url>
		<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
		<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
	</link>
</user>

Now all you need to do is to parse that bit of XML and Bob’s your uncle!

Thanks to Neville for making this possible!

Next up: Zoopy!

Filed in: Afrigator, muti.co.za by: Stii

5 comments

Mail & Gaurdian makes you a part of their redevelopment process

The Mail & Gaurdian, one of South Africa’s leading newspapers, ‘leaked’ some inside info about their main news site’s redevelopment. Going from ASP to PHP and going with a custom developed system rather than an Open Source solution.

I love it! I think it is a stunning move on behalf of Matthew and Vincent to keep readers/bloggers up to speed with the redevelopment process of the site. We’re so used to stealth tactics and keeping new development under covers to release with a bang that we tend to forget that doing the whole process in public could be just as effective as proven here. It almost create a sense of belonging. It creates a lot of interest. It is all-in-all pretty exciting.

I’d love to know more and I have a suspicion that if you’re going to ask, the guys will tell! Magic! So Vince, tell us. Are you going to use some sort of MVC framework or is development happening from the ground up?

Filed in: Software Development, South Africa by: Stii

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Nudjit.com is a geek’s dream!

All geeks love gadgets. Every geek I know has drooled over the Thinkgeek.com merchandise. In South Africa, we sure as hell have a shortage on whats cool and what is downright hot! Now Nic, Justin and Gregor introduces Nudjit.com!

It looks fantastic. It already have some great reviews on some really hot gadgets and I’m excited to see whats happening next. Boys, keep it coming! If only I had a big enough budget for all these funky stuff… My bank manager would kill me, though!

Filed in: Kick-ass Tools, Software Development by: Stii

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A simple PHP 5 __autoload() example

This is probably the one reason why everyone should switch to PHP 5! According to Charl it is “teh shit”. It is the __autoload() function. You define an __autoload() function and by calling this function the scripting engine is given a last chance to load the class or include the class file before PHP fails with an error.

I’ve created this very simple example to demostrate the effectiveness of the __autoload() function. In the index.php file, I define my __autoload() function and tells it to include a file with the same name as the class. In other words, my class name is oneClass() so the file which contain oneClass() is called oneclass.php

//The magical autoload function...
function __autoload($classname)
{
	 require_once $classname . '.php';
}

Now I initialize class two :

$class2 = new twoClass('Second class');

$class2->getText();

PHP will require and include the file called twoclass.php without me doing anything. Nothing funny here… Thing is within class two I initialize class one. As you can see, nowhere did I say it should be included! So withing class two it autoloads class one and initialize it.

class twoClass
{
	private $text;

	function __construct($txt)
	{
		$this->text = $txt;
	}

	function getText()
	{
		$class = new oneClass($this->text);
		$class->getText();
	}
}

w00t!!! Nifty, hey? Note that I’ve create the page second.php to demonstrate how the same would result in an error due to the fact that I did not require class one. If you’d like to check it in action, feel free to download this example here.

Filed in: PHP by: Stii

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PHP confusion - why do some software still insist on PHP4?

PHP 4 reached its end of life the 31st December 2007. They will continue to fix bugs up until 08 August 2008. Yet, most of the biggest CMS software, guys like Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress keep on supporting PHP 4 instead of PHP 5. Why on earth?! I do get it that you cannot predict what version of PHP would be on a shared host, but the hosting providers should pull up their socks and upgrade!

PHP 5 is a 1000% improvement on 4 and has been out for a couple of years, so why would some shared hosts still cling to PHP 4? If these guys like Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress develop in PHP 5, surely hosting companies will be forced to upgrade their PHP version? It is not like they would suddenly break all PHP 4 code as 5 is perfectly backward compatible. So what is the issue? When will this software be rewritten in PHP 5? Hehehe, that would be quite a feat, except that Joomla! 1.5 was written almost from the ground up not all that long ago!

Filed in: PHP, Programming by: Stii

4 comments

New year, new theme!

Ok, its a couple of weeks late, but rather late than never they always say! With every new year comes change. This blog is no different. A new theme was overdue. Besides, with my latest gigs I’m sort of required to get my design skills up to date. What better place to start than right here.

Filed in: web development by: Stii

4 comments

Stumble Upon’s mathematical challenge

Ok, either they are a bit mathematically challenged or they have some secret algorithm no one knows about… I went into Stumble today and saw that Grant added me as a friend. Immediately I went to his page, but oh deary me, I cannot add him as a friend as I’ve reached my 200 friend cap.

Thats odd, as on my page header it says that I only have 166 fans, which I always thought was the sum of your friends and the people you are a fan of.

When I go to my friends page, I see that in fact if I add my friends to the folks who I’m a fan of, I get 171.

Either I’ve missed a class or two of advanced mathematics (you know, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”) or there is bugs in their system or someone cannot add and subtract over there. Oh well, I’ll add you as a friend, Grant, as soon as they clear this little matter of maths. Which ever way, I’m still a big fan of Stumble!

Filed in: Funnies, Social Web by: Stii

2 comments

Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo! Oh deary me…

It seems like it is official according to Techcrunch. Microsoft made a bid to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Quite a hefty amount of money if you ask me, but strangely I thought it should have been more. Strange.

Anyway, from a technical perspective, I wonder if all Yahoo!’s assets are going to have to “convert” to more Microsoft-centric technologies or if Microsoft is going to keep it as it is. In that case, I wonder how many of Yahoo!’s assets run on Linux. Even more so, I wonder if Microsoft is going to stop their “we’ll sue you for patent infringement” bullshit once and for all if that is the case. I reckon it would be quite interesting to know these things. Anyone got a bunch of links to some of the above mentioned information?

I’m almost dead sure Facebook does NOT run on IIS/Windows servers. I might be wrong, but I doubt it. If Facebook does in fact run on Linux, I have three words for Mark Zuckerberg: “Watch you back…”

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants, Linux, Open Source by: Stii

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