Karl Katzke

Is there a framework that is uncomplicated, easy to get started in, will let you build applications out quickly with a minimum of hassle, and will let you integrate non-standard behaviours and ‘best practices’ that you feel are important?

Frameworks are great because other programmers can walk into the project and …

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My girlfriend’s a busy and poor college student. But she needed a new computer to replace her elderly iBook, so we waited until the new iMacs came out on August 7th … and she pushed the ‘order’ button on a new black/silver iMac the day they were released. She added …

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CDBaby.com has switched back to PHP from Rails… but with a catch. Derek silvers says that PHP would do what he wanted just fine with his new-found Rails programming skills. Texas Startup Blog covered this last week.

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This article is a lot closer to the truth than Penthouse, Maxim and FHM would have you believe.

Stay tuned: Coming up in the next week, I’ve got an article coming up about extending sfGuard with user profiles and handling related records with the Symfony Admin Generator.

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Occasionally I review things here that *aren’t* related to web development.

I enjoy a glass of wine at night sometimes. Recently, with the amount of stress/strain at work, I’ve enjoyed it a bit more. Since it’s hard to code with a hangover, it’s nice to be able to pour just …

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I read this article on ReadWriteWeb about how Google Apps aren’t ready to be used in the Enterprise, according to Microsoft. It was originally published by Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet.

Ok, let’s take a look at these claims one by one.

1. Google touts having enterprise level customers

…

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sfGuard is a Symfony plugin that implements a user management and login system for an application. It supports both groups and individual users… and it saves you from having to ‘roll your own’ user administration system. I’m going to walk you through the basic installation. The steps I take are all taken from the Wiki page, but I’ll expound a little bit more about styling and creating a custom registration process.

Authentication and security are important for any application greater than a mere toy. It’s much better practice to implement something that’s standardized and depend on the security of lots of eyes and a decent user-base as opposed to depending on the obscurity of your own code to secure your app. I highly recommend using sfGuard.

First, the usual installation steps — in your project root directory, use $ symfony plugin-install http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfGuardPlugin
$ symfony propel-build-all
$ symfony propel-load-data (application name)

The last one is actually important, even if you don’t already have fixtures — you need to load the admin user so that you can log into your application and access these new features that you’re automagically adding. More below the jump.

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For a long time, I’ve used Safari to post with wordpress. But with my upgrade to 2.2.2 I’m not impressed.

There’s CSS bugs in the admin panel. There’s problems with the editors — code only, becase the visual one doesn’t display. There’s problems with the javascript in the options screens. I had to crack open Firefox just to change the link format.

I know that Wordpress doesn’t claim to support Safari, but fer chrissakes — it’s the third of the big3, and makes up about 5% of the traffic to my site. I’m glad that the themes I’m using at least support Safari.

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Hold tight! We’re moving content and switching hosts like the busy web programmers we are. I promise, the theme will get better tomorrow… unfortunately, it looks like all my comments are lost. Sorry.

A big shoutout to our former host, patriot.net, who deleted our database before we had a chance to …

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I really, really like the check_yum plugin. Here’s a link: http://www.openfusion.com.au/labs/nagios.

If you’re installing on CentOS, you’re going to want to
yum install elinks
, then run cpan as root and install
install Nagios::Plugin
… after that, you can install and add to your nagios command config. I usually run it in NRPE on …

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