Karl Katzke

You might be wondering what these three things have to do with one another.

The basic gist is that I’m trying to use the Wordpress 2.5 RSS widget to read in my Google Reader ’shared items’ feed. Google Reader will publish your shared items in an Atom RSS feed. For a sample, you can see mine here.

The RSS feed is all fine and dandy. It’s valid, it’s namespaced correctly, and it’s got all but one of the required elements. The problem comes when you try to parse it with Magpie. Inside the “entry”, there’s a “title”. There’s also a “source”. The “source” has a “title” attribute as well.

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Inc.com published Joel Spolsky’s Travel Tips… but there isn’t much in there for, you know, the common people. I’ve been flying since I was twelve, but I only fly once a year and I’m on a budget — no first class tickets for me. My father was a regular …

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This is required reading for anyone who’s even thinking of offshoring some programming work. However, it’s not the entire story.

I’ve managed several offshore teams from here in the states for clients. There’s two ways the project can go: You can hire someone like me who speaks english and ‘programmer’, has enough of a business mindset to understand your business processes (because why would you write a program that implement’s someone else’s idea of how your business runs?) and has enough of a technical mindset to lay down the technical specifications. This is what the article above recommends. There’s more ways to do it … read on if you’d like to see a discussion of them.

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This took me some time to figure out… here you go.

1. Add the Telephony network repository in YaST2. The URL is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/telephony/openSUSE_10.3/ …

2. There’s a bug in the deps for Asterisk with mISDNuser (the version in the repository is more recent, but is “uninstallable”) that will block the install process…

…

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Kottke talked today about a video on Serious Eats featuring Mario Batali on How to Sauce Pasta.

I disagree that this is the only way to sauce pasta, though. The sauce depends on the goal of the sauce. In the case of Mario’s sauce, it’s to feature and accent the pasta. But there’s some sauces, like my family’s spaghetti sauce, that could be featured by themselves and stand up on their own merits — and the pasta simply serves as a base, much like a rice or couscous bed would.

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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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