As a recent fan of twitter (you can follow me if you like) as a short (read text message length) form of blogging, I was quite interested to spot a blog post from Andy Davies about using twitter to mashup with traffic data feeds. I used his technique, though in a simpler format e.g. I didn't bother with the Yahoo! Pipes element, to create a traffic alerts feed. As we're in the Northwest of England, I wanted to use a traffic feed relevant to this locale. To this end, I used the Northwest UK RSS feed from the Highways Agency traffic feed list.

So let's cut to the chase, how do I do this? In a nutshell: Create a new twitter account; link that to a twitterfeed.com account (a service that turns RSS feeds into twitter posts) and an RSS feed; then follow in your normal twitter account the new twitter account just created and, if you want text alerts of the data (e.g. when you're actually travelling round the area), turn on device updates for the following of the new account (assuming you've already registered a mobile device for this purpose in your main account).

Then you get new tweets and or text alerts each time there's a new RSS entry in the source feed. Sweet

If you want to subscribe to the results for that feed simply skip all the setup above and just follow NWUKTrafficAlrt in your twitter account.

In case you've not noticed on our main site, we're hiring - a PHP web developer (OOP).

I'm currently sat in the PHP London 08 conference and just thought I'd post a note. I'm currently listening to Rob Allen enthuse about the Zend Framework in the 'my framework is better than yours' session.The three frameworks under discussion where Code Igniter, Symphony and Zend Framework. Having listened to all the debates, I'm still glad we've settled on the Zend Framework for our day to day work, just seems more flexible for existing and new projects at the same time - the others seem only to have relevance when starting from scratch.

The morning sessions in the main track seemed a little basic over all, however you have to pitch at a wide audience level so that's to be expected. Fortunately, Marcus Bointon after lunch (which was really quite nice for a conference) talked about mail() and all the things that go with that, handling bounces, VERP and a few other niceties. It was unfortunate that he ran out of time towards the end as it turned out to be informative and quite in depth without getting to the point of boredom - I've found his slides on-line which should help finish the learning.

I'm now looking forward to the 3rd annual UK PHP conference this Friday. I went to the conference the first year it ran and it was good to truly geek about the language, I couldn't make last year as I was on my way back from Australia (was actually between Syndey and Dubai at the time!) so I'm over-ready for another PHP geek dose.

My only problem now is deciding which track to follow on the day - choice is sometimes not a good thing! Perhaps the sessions will be videoed and I can see all of it.

While I'm in PHP geek mode (I am every day but that's what I get paid for), I've just discovered the PHP Podcasts web site - I've got that linked in the feed reader and am already starting to enjoy the aggregated content.

We've started to use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) a lot here at SPM and so I was intrigued when the Leeds branch of GeekUp were having Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! to speak about it.

Whilst Christian's talk was an introduction to the YUI posing the question Javascript Evolved?, it was fairly basic for anyone who's used it in anger however it was a good talk, light hearted and well presented, ideally suited to the level of the audience. Christian took a straw poll of who had used the YUI to date and there seemed to be about 10 hands that went up around the room of about 70 attendees. This surprised me quite a bit as I thought it would have had a wider exposure - I'm sure it will after the presentation. For me it's the enterprise approach to the framework model that is YUI that won out over the other libraries out there. One of Christians' key points was that YUI is more than a library, in fact a true framework - JavaScript, CSS and widgets all available from a single source. The other thing I like about YUI is that it's developed by Yahoo! - who set a high standard in terms of cross-browser compatibility as well as understanding the nature of scalable solutions for their own sites. I'm looking forward to getting into the new features of the latest release of YUI version 2.5.0 out today! I hope that the new version doesn't break too much as I'm just in the testing phase of a project with a client and would like to get the new version in before it goes live - we shall see. If you missed the event, then Christian's slides are available on-line.

The man from Yahoo! also kindly brought some promotional merchandise along to the event - we all were then invited to put our names in a hat and a draw was then held. To my surprise my name was called out third and better than the t-shirts and beach balls that were won by some, I'd won one of the two copies of Christian's own book: Web Development Solutions - Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy (published by Friends of Ed from Apress). I shall look forward to getting into that once I've finished my current read: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 also from the same stable.

As usual things are busy round here, however, things are getting better since we've added two new staff again. Firstly at the beginning of last month, Phil Wastell joined us as a Web Developer and has already started to have direct impact on my over-heavy work load. Phil already knows quite a bit of PHP, xHTML and CSS and is starting to get his head round the approaches we use on top of those technologies such as OOP, Zend Framework and YUI. Additionally, at the beginning of this month, Emma Parker joined us, initially on a part-time basis, as an Account Manager - this should over time help us to keep in touch with our clients more, so if that's you, expect to be hearing from Emma in due course.

Alongside our own clients we continue to service other firms in the New Media sector, especially where they don't have the high-level technical skills in-house to deliver application level projects. This has recently resulted in a situation where we've signed an out-sourcing deal with a local marketing and design house. We now undertake their high-end projects on behalf of their clients - they get to provide best-of-breed approaches to them and the code developed is sound internally rather than creating a bunch of maintenance headaches as previously. For us it means we drive the direction of the code used and know things are backed up properly and we can keep the version control of the sites developed under a tighter reign. I've got a meeting next month that may result in a similar approach by an SEO / Accessability company from the South - so you never know, might be announcing more growth soon

Discovered today that a previously working ethernet driver for the IP1000A chipset stopped working when upgrading to the latest Fedora 7 kernel (2.6.22.1-41). When compiling the driver there's now output indicating a problem:

ipg_main.c:4045: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘pci_module_init’

If you've installed or upgraded to Fedora 7 (or are running a 2.6.22+ kernel) along with an ethernet adapter using the IP1000A chipset (e.g. from /sbin/lspci getting something similar to "Sundance Technology / IC Plus Corp IP1000 Family Gigabit Ethernet" - running on an Abit motherboard here) and are using the drivers as found at http://www.icplus.com.tw/driver-pp-IP1000A.html (and this zip file in particular) then you'll need the following mod for the source code:
Continue reading "IP 1000A ethernet driver Fedora 7"

Being a business analyst in a team with developers and designers there are interesting times when structure competes with creativity.

I was reading a book by "37signals" called "Getting Real" and they propose that developers of software should move away from paper based documentation such as functional specs and move straight to Real development of screens. They suggest creating mock ups which are then developed, amended and fixed from there and that we should  dispense with useless functional specs. www.37signals.com

I like this concept and am excited by what they propose. It is certainly upside down from how I have previously worked, but I like it!

What are your thoughts in living with that tension in regards to holding the end users nerves whilst they see development going on with less structure, no functional spec and only near the end is the spit & polish added?

I was visiting Cedar Farm (www.cedarfarm.net) a few month ago and came across a mixed media art exhibition (very good it was too - abstract and colourful with clever use of language and text and partial objects) where the artists incorporate the concept of 'psychic interruption' into their work – the idea that 'voices' from another realm, time or place can have input into todays creative/design process...

Anyone had any experience of this? Interesting possibility or a load of rubbish?

Comments please...

If like me you're using the Beryl window manager for linux (extremely cool eye candy) and have misbehaving Java applications that don't show windows properly, the title bar draws but the rest is blank, then you'll need to employ the fix as detailed in several places on the net including Arch Linux Wiki - Beryl.

Basically add the following to your .bashrc file or /etc/profile (then restart X)

export AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolkit"

As I'm running on x86_64 I also had to install a 386 library (libXp) as well (as the Java in use was a 386 version) for the Java apps to work. This cured things for blank windows with the Zend Studio IDE and Business Accountz both of which I use daily!

Just discovered a new Firefox extension plugin today - ScribeFire (formerly performancing) which lets you create and edit blog posts direct from within the firefox interface. In fact this is my first post using it, so it's a bit of a 'test' post!

It's pretty cool as it supports a wide variety of blogging APIs and does a 'split' window mode. This mode is quite cool as it allows you to have ScribeFire open at the bottom area of your window and the site you're browsing at the top - which makes it easier to get accurate context when writing. Nice

Anyway give it a go and let me know what you think about it.

I've been having issues with Netgears WN802T wireless access point - there's a full rant on Netgears' forums about it - I'll see what comes of that.

It's really annoying when QA suffers as it seems to have done with these devices, hopefully a later firmware update will start to rectify things but for now I'll stick with my old access point (WG602 v1). The worst thing is the wasted time one spends trying to rectify these problems, compounded by talking to muppets in a call centre outside the UK who only know how to follow the scripts they've been given rather than actually understanding anything about the products they're 'dealing' with.

Rant over (for now!)