March, 2010

Well it wouldn’t be a blog without some kind of “renovation post”, so here goes.

I’m sick to death of the damn palm trees out the back. They would have to be one of the most useless trees around, providing no shade and continually dropping palm fronds on the ground.

Got them booked in to be chopped down in the next few weeks which will be great. Also getting the mango and macadamia nut trees cut back. Seem’s like a full time job keeping the gardens in order. Doesn’t help that it’s so hot in Rocky that the last thing I want to be doing is gardening. Maybe during winter.

I’m also tired of the wireless internet in the house, so I’ve got a fella coming around to give me a quote on running ethernet. With all the network devices running in here, it seems like a logical thing to do.

Will hopefully let me centralise my storage so I don’t have to have a bunch of external hard drives sitting around plugged into everything. Just have a network device plugged in with all the computers / ps3 / beyonwiz accessing the central store. Good times.

I’ve become involved in a project at work that requires a website to be built, so I decided to bite the bullet and finally leverage the power of a php framework.

I’m not sure why, but for some reason I had never really embraced development frameworks. I had read about different ones but never really taken the time to download and try to use one.

Google says there are a bunch of different ones, but in the end I decided to have a bash with CodeIgniter. Truth be told, I picked it by going on first impressions of the website.

So far the whole experience has been great. I think the whole MVC design pattern I picked up from OS X development really helped and in a way help solidify the MVC stuff I already knew.

It’s been ridiculously fast to get a basic, decent website up and running and I’m currently working on the whole user authentication side of things.

I spent a few days reading about different authentication libraries and in the end I’ve decided to go with Tank Auth. It seems pretty lightweight and simple, so will be a good start I think. Ideally I’d like to include LDAP support in the web app, but that will come later.

I’m feeling positive about this project. Got someone pushing me all the way so chances are it won’t end up as vapourware like many of the other projects I seem to start and never get finished… sigh… but that’s a whole other blog post.