thislab.com - Web development and design by Fred Wu.

First of all, not all parts of the Zend Framework enforce the class naming convention, at least not upon calling ‘em. For example, view helpers are called directly by the ‘chopped’ class name:

// actual class name:
class Path_To_The_CustomViewHelper {}

// calling it in the view:
$this->CustomViewhelper();

Also, models are both named, and called by their class names without any paths (but yes we have to include them in the include paths).

You would think that in most cases calling the classes by their full names (with paths) should work, right?

Wrong.

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Since I fully switched from Windows platform to OS X, I noticed that the spell check in Firefox no longer works. A quick google search revealed that the problem is caused by All-in-One Gestures and persists on both OS X and Linux.

I have been using All-in-One Gestures on Firefox for a very long time (primarily on Windows). Fortunately I only use the two very basic gestures: back and forward, so it’s okay to ditch it and find an alternative.

There are only two alternatives to date: Mouse Gestures and FireGestures. The former has not been updated since 2006 and breaks the spell check at least on my system. So I gave FireGestures 1.0.5 (the current version on the Firefox Extension website) a try, sadly it breaks the spell check too. I then went to the developer’s website and found out that there is a 1.1 dev version, and it has what I have been looking for: [Linux][Mac] Fixed bug: Breaks inline spell checker (Alternative words is not showing).

Downloaded, installed, and sweet, the spell check is back! :)

Magento 1.0 is out.

Last time I checked (when it was 0.8 beta) I couldn’t install because my host doesn’t have pdo_mysql. Since then I requested pdo_mysql to be compiled and now is a great time to give it another spin. ;)

It should be very interesting because Magento is built on Zend Framework.

Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is released today. I thought I’d give it a spin, I like the idea of having an automated plugin upgrade system. :)

So far so good, things are pretty smooth. If you’re going to upgrade too, remember to backup all your files! I for instance have accidentally overwritten my theme files, so I had to take them from the backup.

About the new back-end: I don’t really like it. To be honest I prefer the old style any day. The new back-end lacks contrast (too bright actually), making things more difficult to recognise. Also, when posting, some of the options such as the categories are now down the bottom. Why? We do still have a sidebar, why not use it?

The new back-end also has some styling issues: e.g. on a wide screen, everything is squeezed to the left. I say bring back the fluid page width!

2.5 has some highlights though. We now finally have a asset management feature (file management and gallery), it is simple but still better than nothing. The automatic plugin upgrade feature works really well! Just remember to CHMOD your plugin directory (wp-content/plugins) to 777.

I haven’t fully experienced with this new installation yet, but I am not that impressed with it, mainly because the back-end is in my opinion worse than the old one in terms of user experience.

Okay, so what is a transparent layer? How does it benefit a developer?

Well, please watch the screencast (4min, 12MB) first, you will see the transparent layer in action.

To me, I wanted to make a framework that is more feature-rich than Kohana but at the same time is not intrusive. By having this transparent middle-man layer, a developer is able to seamlessly enhance the Kohana framework without altering the existing user application.

It might not be useful to everyone but what the heck, it at least is useful to one person, me. :D

Here is the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

It has an ‘Emulate IE7′ button which is neat. So now I have IE8 (with IE7 emulation), IE6 standalone, Firefox 2 and Opera 9 installed on my Windows box.

It’s about time for Microsoft to pay attention to standards. I wonder how long we have to support IE6/7 for, another 5 years?