Kitsched!

Postmark library for CodeIgniter

Janos — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:05:11 +0000

Friday afternoon I received an invite to try out the beta version of Postmark, a transactional e-mail delivery service from Wildbit, the guys and gals who made Beanstalk and Newsberry. What are transactional e-mails, you might ask? The answer is: e-mails generated by a web application after an user action such as registration, requesting a password reminder, receiving a reply to a comment, etc. The problem me and many developers faced is that sometimes the client’s servers are blacklisted and these e-mails land in the users’ spam folder. This is where Postmark comes to the rescue, hopefully – instead of using the built in mail function of your web development language of choice you issue a call to Postmark which sends out the e-mail from their “well regarded” servers so that hopefully they land in the user’s inbox.

To give something back, I’ve put together a CodeIgniter library for this service. This grants easy integration of Postmark with your CodeIgniter web app: you upload two files, fill in your API key then include the library where needed and send mails away.

Download & credits

Get it here.

You can contribute to this code here.

Based on Markus Hedlund’s Postmark class for PHP.

Installation

Upload the contents of the cipostmark folder from the archive to the root of your CodeIginiter install directory (on Mac be sure to merge with the existing folders). Basically Postmark.php (with capital P) needs to sit in /system/application/libraries/ and postmark.php needs to be uploaded to /system/application/config/ – Before or after uploading edit the configuration file (postmark.php) and fill in your API key.

Usage guide

Now you can use the library in your web app:

$this->load->library('postmark'); $this->postmark->from('from@example.com', 'From Name'); $this->postmark->to('to@example.com', 'To Name); $this->postmark->subject('Example subject'); $this->postmark->messagePlain('Testing...'); $this->postmark->messageHtml('Testing...'); $this->postmark->send();

… or you can specify all the parameters in the send() function like this:

$this->load->library('postmark'); $this->postmark->send('from@example.com', 'From Name', 'to@example.com', 'To Name', 'Example Subject', 'Testing...', 'Testing...');

If something goes wrong the library and the Postmark service outputs quite user friendly error messages.

Hopefully this will come in handy for some of you.

Cavnic by night

Janos — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:53:55 +0000

Alrighty, after that post added before we left the house, here are not one but two fresh videos from Cavnic. Made tonight:

Best enjoyed in HD (720p). I’m off to sleep.

Suior by night

Janos — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:14:03 +0000

For the few of you that haven’t been spammed with this the last two days via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and my Messenger status, here’s Ioana and me riding the nearby slope of Suior by night.

This was the first real test of the gadget I got for Ioana’s birthday (but for myself too, to be honest), a GoPro HD helmet cam.

The end of another era

Janos — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:17:38 +0000

I just uninstalled Winamp.

I’ve been a Winamp user since the autumn of 1998 when I got my first computer but I used it even before that on various friends’ computers. Look how enthusiast I was when Winamp 5 came out back in 2003 after the mess that Winamp 3 turned out to be. However, I had enough. Now when I uninstalled it with Revo Uninstaller I noticed that it left behind not less than 1500 registry entries – which were subsequently deleted – I haven’t even checked the directory size but I guess that I can safely say that 1500 leftover registry entries is bloat. Plus it always insisted on updating and installing stuff I never needed – toolbars, bundled software, you name it. Yep, pure bloatware.

I’ve been having an affair with foobar2000 at my last job, mostly because I had a less powerful computer over there and Winamp was eating up too much of its resources. And now that affair turns into a full blown relationship because as of today foobar2000 becomes my main media player.

2009 – My year in pictures

Janos — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:29:50 +0000

On one of the evenings at the start of December I got nostalgic looking at my Flickr photos taken this year and this idea popped in my mind: how about a blog post like this? Since then this post has been brewing as a draft and it turned out huge. So grab a pack of popcorn and here we go!

The year started out on the negative side, with us being at work (which turned out to be unpayed work) and being unsure about the future as the so called economic depression hit the construction company we were working for, both me and Ioana. But then we took a day off and went to Borsa only to find the secondary skilift closed. And this secondary superior skilift would have been the one that would have made our trip worthy – but we had a great time nevertheless managing to snowboard the badly maintained slopes.

Technically the photo above was taken last year, but it marks the worst part of this year and my life actually: my mother’s stroke that happened right after we returned from that Borsa trip I mentioned above.

But life went on, and between the cracks of the nightmare I was living we visited the ski slopes at Suior where we admired the freshly installed snow makers and then got horrified when we found out the prices for one ride on the chairlift. We also checked out the Burton Learn to Ride event up at Cavnic, and I remember this was in the weekend that fell exactly between the two weeks of my mother’s hospitalization. The second photo features Ghitzuca doing a Rodeo 5.

Then right in the middle of that mess came the long before planned Austrian ski holiday. Can’t really comment except that I’m left with some of the best memories of my life. Obviously the best holiday ever. The photo set on Flickr sort of speaks for itself.

Right after we returned, like my troubles weren’t enough, Ioana’s great grandmother died. May she rest in peace.

Obviously after returning from Austria the local slopes seemed like poor attempts at the title of “slope” but we had our share of fun, mostly because we “discovered” the old school vibe at Mogosa a slope that was right under our noses all these years but only now we had the actual skills to ride it. And only now it had enough snow to be rideable. Plus the skilift is unbelievably cheap so it was an obvious choice after the big spending around Kaprun.

The Five-O Jib Stars 2009 freeski / snowboard contest and the mandatory afterparty ended the winter season officialy and then we ended it unoficially one week later at the same place where we opened it 4 months or so before.

I couldn’t wait for the real spring though so I could be out with my RC “toys”. Had good times with both my car and my helicopter and I remember that I carried my helicopter to work daily due to the fact that I could go around the flying field on my way home and actually fly if the wind was friendly. I crashed once again but got back in the air quick because it wasn’t that bad of a crash, I had all the parts I needed from the last stock up and I made friends in the local RC community so I got some servos really fast.

Around this time of the year we started visiting Hungary hard, first going to Aquaticum in Debrecen around my birthday then one month later to Hajduszoboszlo where we spent one day bathing and the next day at an RC helicopter meet which was a real eye opener for me. So many helis – such skills.

The photo above was taken by Ioana around the Rooster’s Crest where I remember seeing a a guy and a gal with mountain bikes. That’s when the idea popped into my mind… Of course the real star of the photo is our trusty dog Ina and one of her trademark tricks: the tummy crawl.

Then came the first trip of the year to Cluj-Napoca where we partied hard with the Infamous guys, Cristi, Cosmo and other friends.

We returned to Cluj the next week to see General Midi and although the party was a massive failure the next day I had the chance to test Cosmo’s bike and the idea got cemented.

Yet another Hungarian trip followed, this time with Rada and Vlad. We went to Aquaticum again and checked out the mall in Debrecen, where I ate the worst fast food I ever ate. Fuck you Burger King and your commercials.

Then the idea got implemented, bikes happened and the rest is history as they say. Many trips followed and most of them will be remembered as magical. I loved biking back in high school and I pedaled a lot back then and so it was a blast to rediscover those times plus being able to go offroad without the fear of my bike breaking in two. The trips are well documented on EveryTrail, Bikemap and of course Flickr in various sets.

A quick surprise trip to Budapest to deliver Tina to the airport after which we quickly scoped out the city from the lookout at Citadella.

A week later we were at Valea Vinului with our bikes and everything, but sort of failed in doing any significant rides mostly because the second day of the stay turned out to be rainy and crappy.

We returned to Hungary for the fifth time this year and this time with Steve who was about to leave for the States. More splashing and fun at Hajduszoboszlo. Truly good times.

Ride Down Mogosa + afterparty. The contest was great, mostly because we hung around one of the most challenging parts of the track and a guy with too big of a mouth so we laughed our asses off listening to his comments. However we couldn’t really get the vibe of this particular afterparty since we had no friends around to party with.

Hitting my credit card hard I managed to get one of the gadgets I’ve been drooling for for around 5 years: a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx GPS. From this point forward the bike trips became much better documented.

We returned to Valea Vinului with Ioana’s parents and this time we rode around and hiked the place properly. Mission accomplished!

I had a revelation discovering that I can use some time off work to actually plan the trips with the help of a map, Google Earth and some imagination and so being blessed with great weather all through late summer and autumn the real adventures began. During the weekends we were usually out both days on our bikes or on foot and we made trips even during the week after we finished work. Boy, did we feel great!

Then, our main biking partner, Vlad, left for the UK.

We were invited for the unofficial inauguration of The Blue Track around Targu-Lapus.

This was followed by what I consider my chef d’oeuvre in track planning. The most beautiful bike trip of the year. When I look at the photos I can’t believe that I took all of them the same day. 40 km of pure epicness. Yeah, I’m modest.

I thought this will be the season closer but then we fit in one more.

Here are a couple of local VIPs, Ioana and me (behind the camera) as guests, at the official inauguration of The Blue Bike Track I mentioned above.

Then the autumnal rains and cold came and life slowed down. I’ve bought a micro helicopter to fly around the house and it turned out to be a blast. Actually not a big surprise since everyone was raving about this particular model on the various RC helicopter forums.

We also visited TM09Base to conclude that we’re too old for festivals like this.

I took the dog to the vet a couple of times and it ended in surgery. She got neutered.

We made a late autumn road trip to Poienile de sub Munte which is a village pretty close to the Ukrainian border and…

We had a late November walk on the hills around Baia Mare and around the same time, Ioana started experimenting with HDR. The photo above is a processed view of Baia Mare taken from Tolvaj Denes – Piatra Talharului – The Burglar’s Rock.

A couple of days before Christmas I visited a conference where I met a few of the people who represent the online part of Baia Mare…

And on the same day visited the opening ceremony of a program that celebrates traditions in my lovely county of Maramures. I sort of celebrated the “free” in freelancer that day.

And that ladies and gentlemen is the year in pictures for me.

Vroom vroom!

Janos — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:51:25 +0000

A photographic update to my last post. For the sake of remembering the good times.

Relaxed Christmas

Janos — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:26:21 +0000

Because of the weather that sucked big time this was one of the most relaxed Christmases of the last few years. My activity consisted of sitting in front of the computer and playing games, visiting family and going out one night to have a drink with Cristi. But what really defined this Christmas was playing games on the PC.

Steam had, and actually still have, their Holiday Sale going so I fetched a couple of games at very good prices: Mirror’s Edge, Torchlight, Luminees (had fond memories of it since the PlayStation Portable times – turns out it’s not that great on PC), S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Torchlight (great hack and slash!) and last but not least Grand Theft Auto IV. I played GTA4 like a maniac these days getting to 25% completion in 32 hours of playtime. And I haven’t sandboxed at all – sandboxing in GTA means to go around shooting people or doing other bad deeds and obviously getting into trouble with the police. The game has a great story and amazing graphics, but I’m probably not telling news to anyone since it won a ton of awards last year. Unfortunately I have to keep the graphics settings to a minimum, but I can play it fluidly. Maybe a video card upgrade would be nice but I’m not sure I can allocate funds for that right now.

The non-bought-from-Steam game I played a lot these days was Richard Burns Rally. This is closely related to the Christmas present we “surprised” ourselves with with Ioana’s brother: a second hand Logitech G25 racing wheel. All I can say that the experience is a blast. You’re really “there”. I tried to qualify out of rally school last evening but I was missing the time limit by 1 or 2 seconds. This isn’t that bad considering that Richard Burns Rally is THE most realistic rally simulator for the PC. Hopefully I won’t try anything I learned in real life. Must keep in mind that our 75 horsepower Citroën C3 is not a four wheel drive 300 horsepower Subaru Impreza WRC. :-)

This is it in a nutshell.

Roll the credits! The photo illustrating this post belongs to Ioana.

Google Wave invites

Janos — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:47:40 +0000

If anyone’s still interested… First come first served. :-)

A landmark day

Janos — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:24:29 +0000

I’m talking about yesterday. I have two reasons to say it was an important day:

1. Yahoo mercilessly killed Geocities with my first ever website on it. No way to easily backup my stuff (as in download an archive with everything) but at least I managed to grab a few screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) – too bad none of my screen grabbing software manages frames well. Unfortunately there’s not much on archive.org either.

2. I upgraded my ancient Orange service plan that had 180 Orange and 25 national minutes to a brand new one called Delfin 8 – which is cheaper than what I had and has (hold on to something) 700 Orange minutes and 125 national ones. I could have gone for a cheaper plan as I’ll never talk that much, but it’s also nice to have the peace of mind that I can if I want to. All this upgrade happened after I called customer service because I wasn’t able to confirm my payment. Me the phone power user. Not.

Template Monster = Bad

Janos — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:33:09 +0000

I’ll post this here because this blog is less volatile than Twitter:

I fucking hate working with Template Monster templates. To characterize them as lousy would be a huge understatement. I’m imagining the so called “designers” as they throw element after element on the page pretty much freestyle without caring about pixel size, spacing or other stupid things like this. Why should they, after all? Let the poor web developer slap himself when he’s on the job and the client expects the work to be done.

That’s what I’m doing now…

And it keeps snowing…

Janos — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:44:58 +0000

It’s starting to look dreamy up at Cavnic, but wait, it’s the 15th of October, where’s our autumn?

To register or not to register…

Janos — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:08:33 +0000

… this is the question.

Tonight a thought that has been circling in my mind for some time returned with a vengeance: let’s register Tweetie and NetNewsWire! But then I remembered that the slight inconvenience about having these apps unregistered are the ads delivered via Fusion and The Deck respectively. Which both serve quality ads and actually helped me discover a couple of cool applications and services I might have missed otherwise. So please Mac developers, pick worse quality ad providers if you want me to register your apps. :-)

Webcast + me = FAIL!

Janos — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:32:46 +0000

Romanian knowledge not only preferred but downright needed. If you want to understand what I’m babbling about that is.

Is eToro a scam?

Janos — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:42:59 +0000

Or the fastest way I ever lost $50. Actually “only” $25…

But first of all the I’ll answer the question posed in the title of this entry: no. eToro is not a scam. However it’s very easy to lose money if you’re not careful. And unfortunately I wasn’t that careful.

And now on to the story. I discovered eToro accidentally and I’ve spent quite a few days on the demo account to familiarize myself with the system before commiting to deposit. Unfortunately there are some differences when you’re dealing with a real account. Differences I didn’t know about until after I actually made the deposit. If you read around about Forex trading systems, there are warnings everywhere to only invest money that you afford to lose. And I heeded them, although the $50 required as the minimum amount to be deposited is at the top of my “I can gamble that” threshold. On the demo I wasn’t actually trading currencies but commodities, more specifically gold and as it was going very low I thought hey, I can’t go wrong with this, it has to climb back to a “normal” rate sometime and that could earn a bit of money. I could even set a “take profit” limit and have the computer work for me…

This is where I went wrong. You see, on the demo account they give you 2000 virtual dollars to play around with (and you can request more by contacting customer care) and this gives you the ability to use low leverages. To be short: leverage gives you the ability to “move” a large sum of money by using a small amount of money. So I made my deposit and clicked the commodities tab only to find out that the minimum amount of money I should have had to be able to start one trade with gold was $200. Nasty. Clicking back to the Forex tab I received another blow: with $50 deposited one could only initiate two trades and these trades are incredibly risky as you’re using a 400x leverage. You can indeed win big with this leverage but it’s a lot more likely that you’ll lose big. You see when you initiate a trade there’s a “stop loss” defined and with a 400x leverage it all becomes very sensitive. What I mean is that if the exchange rate suddenly moves by a few thousandths of a unit, you’re not there to close your trade in time and your trade’s stop loss is tipped you lose all the money you invested in the trade. Even if the rate later returns, your money is gone. Lower leverages give you less profit but the currency can fluctuate quite a lot without risking too much. But lower leverages require more money. With 400x trades you’re practically playing an action game watching the 1 minute charts, keeping a close eye on the slightest modifications in the exchange rate and hitting the close trade button at the right time.

And this is where another downside of eToro comes into play. While the interface is butter smooth in demo mode but there are serious lags when switching to real money trading. And it’s not my imagination, many others are also complaining about this around the web. And these lags can cost.

I stopped when my balance went under $25 and I couldn’t initiate another trade. Now we’ll see if my withdrawal request will actually yield because the process sort of started out on the wrong foot as I requested the withdrawal to be made via PayPal yesterday and today they’ve sent me an e-mail requesting my bank account details and stating that I’ve requested the money by wire transfer. I politely replied that they’re wrong, and even their interface confirms this. (I’ll keep you posted on how this all progresses – watch this post for updates.)

I wrote this post to give others a chance to learn from my mistakes before commiting to deposit. Hopefully…

It’s pedaling time

Janos — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:44:37 +0000

If you’re a really old school and hardcore follower of this blog you might remember that I asked about snowboarding alternatives waaay back in the spring of 2005 (and then again last year).

Well, here’s a follow-up (4 years later):

That’s a Merida Matts 20 MD. An entry level disc brake bike one might say but just enough for me. Been test rode and I can report that it’s a big bag of awesome.