Kohana is Code Igniter on Steroids

Still, it is lightweight and clean. Kohana is a Code Igniter fork that is completely open source and community driven. If you are used to Code Igniter, then Kohana would be a walk in the park. The one major difference is that Kohana is exclusively for PHP 5 while Code Igniter supports from PHP 4 and up. Kohana is strinctly OOP with benefits like visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons. Cool!

Whats more is that while Code Igniter supports only $POST arrays and no GET, Kohana lets POST and GET arrays live together in harmony with the same tight security of Code Igniter.

Another trivial thing thats always kind of bugged me of Code Igniter is the directory structure. Kohana’s directory structure makes a lot more sense. See, Code Igniter has one directory at the root called System. In this directory is a bunch of subdirectories of which your application directory is a part of. Kohana went and put the application directory with the system directory on the root path. I know, I know, it really is pedantic of me, but it just makes so much more sense to do something so insignificant. Well, actually, on second thought, its not as trivial as it might seem. Come upgrade time, you only need to upgrade the system folder and your application folder would be untouched. Code Igniter stores a bunch of system related files in their app folder which could get overwritten when upgrading, but need to be upgrade every once in a while as they do make changes to those files occasionally.

Another thing is that changes and fixes happens a lot faster in Kohana as it is a community project. Code Igniter is brilliant, but it was kind of slowish in releasing fixes and improvements as Ellis Labs first do Expression Engine (it seems) then Code Igniter. Kohana living in a community allows for rapid expansion and fixes.

All in all, I think Kohana is a great fork on an already great framework. Keep up the good work. If you are worried about it only working on PHP 5, well, PHP 4’s end of life was the 31st of December 2007 already! Convert! At least bugs will be fixed till 2008-08-08. Cool date they chose!

Filed in: Code Igniter, Open Source, PHP, Programming, web development by: Stii

1 comment

Telkom’s scapegoat = Eskom

Today I phoned Telkom to upgrade my ADSL line to a 4Meg line. It took me all of 15 minutes just to verify that I’m me due to the systems that slower than a sloth. So off this call centre oke goes:

“You know, this bloody country… The power must be off somewhere and some servers must be down. Eish, these Eskom guys are pathetic. You know, the CEO gets something like a million Rand a month. If they cut his salary by R600 000, then he’ll still have a half decent salary (realy?! you don’t say!). You know how many people they can employ with R600 000??? 15 000 @ R4000 per month. Those guys, they really don’t know what they’re doing. Yesterday, a client had to hold for 20 minutes just so I could complete his order. Yadayadayada…”

At that point I has literally laughing out loud as I thought it was simply too good that Telkom blames Eskom of bad service! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Priceless.

To top it all off, after I held on for almost 20 minutes to do my order, this guy tells me:

“Sorry sir, but I’m not authorised to complete this order. Please hold while I transfer you to one of my supervisors”

I rest my case. There is abso-bloody-lutely NO, NONE, NADA coincident that both these companies’ names ends in “KOM”…

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants, South Africa by: Stii

6 comments

Have a bad day. It looks quite liberating

Sheesh have I ever felt like doing all this?! I bet you will feel a whole lot better right after you destroyed the piece of equipment up until your boss calls you in and fires you. Is it not funny how its always the monitor that gets the most flack? Shame.

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

1 comment

Get it through your thick f@cking skulls…

…if I was interested in your shitty deal-a-day, I would have visited your bloody website!

So, dealaday.co.za, please for the love of Nana Mouskouri, explain to me just WHY you think I would be interested in your shit. Another thing is you’ve got my name all wrong. It is NOT “Deal Maker” last time I checked.

Going through my junk folder I see you’ve been sending me shit since Al Gore invented the internet.

I’ve never visited your site, nor did I subscribe to your deals. Well, how the hell could I subscribe to get your daily deals if I have never visited your site?! I sure as HELL did not subscribe on a mailing list of the people whose database you are using to SPAM. Who the hell is marketingdb.biz anyways?! I’d love to know how THEY got my email address!

Ok, I hear what you’re saying. I must unsubscribe and it will stop. Riiight. Well, tell you what. I’ll do just that since you both (deal-a-day and marketingdb.biz) are in South Africa and are contactable. Just for my own sanity. But should I get ONE MORE FUCKING EMAIL from you, I will… I will… I will crap in my pants. BIG shit.

Is there not laws of any kinds against SPAMMING like this? Paul? Do you know?

BTW, is this a good deal?! Just out of pure curiosity, of course!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

23 comments

Whussup with Digg?!

For a while now I’ve been unable to log into Digg. Very frustrating! Click the login button and get to a screen as white as a South African Night is black. Hope this will be resolved once they’ve implemented OpenID!

Filed in: Funnies, Social Web, Web 2.0 by: Stii

7 comments

Tired of Facebook app requests already? No Problemo

I stumbled upon this absolute genius little Javascript that you can drag onto your bookmarks bar and hit it when viewing your requests page. This little script will ignore all active requests, one time! Genius. Simply beautiful. Oh, and simple!

Here is a screen cast of this bookmarklet in action. Watch this, then go to http://www.ignoreall.com/ and get the thing. Works like a damn charm!

Filed in: Kick-ass Tools, javascript by: Stii

6 comments

SA blog awards - Tips, Tricks & Unspoken rules

Our annual popularity contest is upon us! This year it seems the guys organizing is going to be much more strict with an entirely new set of rules. The rules are clear and easy to understand (even for a layman). Here is a couple of Tips, Tricks & “Unspoken” Rules to keep in mind:

Ask to get nominated. - As proven by Shaun Okes, if thou ask thou shalt receive… If your blog’s got half decent traffic, odds are fairly well stacked in your favor that it might just make it to the voting round! The My Digital Life guys looks like they’re all geared to have their main blog in the “Weblog of the year” category and at least 3 user blogs in every category. Competition is sure going to be excruciatingly tough in ‘08.

Once in the voting process ask for votes. - Again, as above. If you really want it as bad as you know you want it, get yourself 1000 email accounts and vote for yourself 1000 times. Frankly, if you want it that bad, you probably deserve it.

I’m trying very hard not to give Sessa a butt-cramp, but hell, conversations… Be visible. Now. See, once the voting list is out there, everyone starts to read 8 times as many blogs as before. No really. People take the time not to vote blindly. They actually read every blog before casting their votes. Just to be safe though, make sure people are “aware” of your “presence”. In other words, become a comment troll. See, if people sort of see and remember your blog and if you are in a category amongst fairly unknown blogs to the voter, people will vote for you simply because they’ve “seen” you somewhere so you’ve GOT to be good.

Rule: Please, FOR PETE’S SAKE, do NOT bitch about the logo again. It is such a bloody pain in the butt for everyone and even though you might think you can do better, keep it for yourself. Wait… maybe the organizers can organize a special category this year! They could have a “I can design better than everyone else and get my croniez to vote my design to stardom only to be vetoed eventually anyway because clearly I cheated as my design is crap and got the most votes” category.

Now I’m wondering, is Ideate going to be excluded this year as Mr Cherry himself is a contributor over there? If so, it would be a damn crying shame! By the looks of it Dave already excused himself as he was involved in some way, which is damn unfair as he is doing a damn fine job over on his blog. I’d prefer he does it more often, but hey, I’m the last one to say that. Actually, Sessa is the last one to say that. I might be second last. Here’s a thought for Fred, Shane and the boys. Just until after this thing, hide all Jon’s posts.

As far as the category for “Most Controversial Blog” goes, are you kidding me?! The organizers might as well wrap that one up NOW and split it three ways between Guy, Bolton and Richard. Done deal. No contest. Then again, splitting it 3 ways is not exactly the point of the entire exercise, right? Maybe we’ll have a contest over after all…

PS: Don’t forget to nominate Stormhoek this year! Please! We cannot afford to bite the hand that pours… AGAIN!

Right, geek out geeks!
PPS: Not done in Photoshop. B with her new Nokia

Filed in: Blogging, South Africa by: Stii

11 comments

Playing tag… AGAIN

Mike tagged me almost a month ago. Well, if January was February it would have been 5 days to a full month. How this is supposed to work is that I now have to tell everyone 8 things about myself they probably don’t know. Quite frankly, I can think of 8000 more interesting things to talk about, but myself.

Here is the 8 things:

1. I used to love to play tag when I was 8 years old. Now I love playing tag using blogs as it makes me feel 8 years old once more.
2. Tags is actually XMLRPC calls from one blog to another which Afrigator, Amatomu and Technorati picks up and let bloggers tagged see that they’re it. A.K.A. a pingback.
3. Tagging Charl is like trying to tag that skinny, slinky boy on the schoolyard which everyone always misses. Charl uses blogger.com/blogspot.com and they don’t support pingbacks.
4. Tagging Belinda is great fun! It will confuse the living daylights out of her.
5. Tagging Sessa is likely to irritate the living SHIT out of him… Damn, I’m such a sucker. Mind you, it would probably piss off most the guys I’m tagging here. (With the exception of B, who’ll be confused…)
6. If you get into the game late, you’re going to struggle to find other friends to tag. I know about another 200 or 300 if you need names. Just shout.
7. Tagging is cool as it makes me want to stick out my tongue at Facebook and go: “Nah nah-nah nah naaaah nah! We can also social network without you, Big Brother!”
8. I’m so damn unfit that all this tagging gave me a blinding side stitch

Here’s tag for you. Play nice! If you’ve already been tagged, I do sincerely apologise:

• Chris Mills
• Jonathan Hitchcock
• Belinda Pretorius
• Charl van Niekerk
• Karl Fischer
• Steven McD
• Henre Rossouw
• And just for size: Stefano Sessa

Filed in: Blogging, Funnies by: Stii

6 comments

When geeks protest

Found this on http://www.geeksaresexy.net/. I love it!

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

3 comments

Open Social, Facebook. They all suck.

Although I use Facebook 2 to 3 times a week and sometimes more, I absolutely hate it. A lot of whoohaa was made about Open Social, but all that will allow you is to develop apps much like Facebook’s apps for a bunch of different platforms without rewriting anything for any specific platform. Nifty.

No, what I’d like is something completely different. I do NOT want to have an obscure Facebook URL (http://www.facebook.com/people/Stii_Pretorius/754367316) to my profile, forcing people who would like to know more about me to register at the god-site, sucking in and exploiting even more people’s shopping habits. I want to be able to see everything about my friends in the one place that really matters to me. This damn site. Well, this one and the other one(s) I have. I want to log into my Wordpress dashboard and poke my friends, send them some private messages, see what their statuses and/or moods are, etc. In other words, I want blogs to interact the way Facebook profiles does, only across the dark cloud and not behind Facebook walls. It does not happen at http://someotherurl.com, but right here on http://stii.za.net. Privacy issues, security, identity theft, spam and all those other nasties would certainly prove to be a challenge, but I’m sure we’ll be fine. We always end up being fine.

This could be where the clever people from DataPortability.org could be very helpful. Surprise, surprise! Even Google, Facebook and the Open Social guys are joining the conversations surrounding the issue of portable standards, according to Read/Write Web. Awesome. Now, somehow, they just need to open up and let my friends go and we can have an even better web. 2008 might just be the best year ever! Will it ever happen? We’ll see. Time will tell.

PS: Photo was taken from the window of a computer hardware store in George.

Filed in: Social Web, Web 2.0 by: Stii

11 comments