Now you can see it in action!

This is Hitpads Remixer embedded:

This is Youtube video how to play it:

Few words about hitpads.com:

HitPads.com is a total departure from last year’s music discovery paradigm: “I am listening to your song but I’ve stopped interacting with my computer”. Now listeners can engage your music with unprecedented input like a DJ thereby creating a brand new paradigm: “By interacting with my computer I am listening and getting to know your song.”

This Music Discovery Experience like no other is achieved via our Unique HitPads Remixer Virtual Instrument and Embeddable Widget, a Technological Breakthrough that Unifies Immersive Music Discovery, Multilevel Viral Music Publicity and Listener Driven Music Creation.

Take the tour here

The error appeared was like: “Unable to return ‘affix’ for unknown CreoleType”

This is Creole issue – it cannot accept LONGVARCHAR and TEXT fields from Symfony schema.

To fix this  please change text constant in CreoleTypes.php file (line 39 in my Creole version).

const TEXT = 30; //php 5.3.0 fix, using an unused int

This is not good solution but you need to build your model somehow. As temporary solution this is OK but we need to wait bugfix from Creole developers.

I’d like to share with this pretty simple script with you, hope it will save you few minutes.

You guys who familiar with this Symfony plugin for assets management probably know that it uses sfThumbnail plugin for making thumbnails of image assets.
sfThumbnail has configuration in app.yml and it looks like:

all:
  sfAssetsLibrary:
    upload_dir:       media                  # Asset library root, under the web/ dir
    check_type:       false                  # Set to true if you want to restrict the type of assets
    types:            ['image']  # Accepted asset types if check_type is true
    thumbnail_dir:    thumbnail              # Where the image thumbnails are stored
    use_ImageMagick:  false                  # Set to true if you have the convert command
    thumbnails:                              # Name and size (in pixels) of the thumbnails created at upload
      tiny:                                 # Displayed in the list page
        width: 70
        height: 70
      small:                                 # Displayed in the list page
        width: 100
        height: 100
        shave: false                          # Cut strips to constraint the image size
      middle:
        width: 200
        height: 200
      large:                                 # Displayed in the details page
        width: 450
        height: 450
      original:                                 # Displayed in the details page
        width: 800
        height: 800
    search_pager_size: 20                    # Number of resuts per page
    mass_upload_size:  5                     # Number of file upload controls displayed in the mass upload form

This is cool but when you have your project up and running and decided to add new type of thumbnail (for instance name it ‘big’)

      big:
        width: 400
        height: 400

“This is simple science” – you need to get all assets objects and resize them in the following way:
1. Create batch script in you symfony batch folder:

$ symfony init-batch default dev mybatchname

Also make sure that it users ‘backend’ application (or application that uses sfAssetAdmin module)

2. Place content from the following code block into your batch script

 <?php /* sfAssets resizer batch script

 *
 * !!! BEFORE RUN THIS SCRIPT BACKUP YOUR ASSETS FOLDER !!!
 *
 * This batch script resizes all image assets stored by sfAssetsLibraryPlugin plugin
 * If you changed thumbnails' dimentions or added new you'd love this script.
 * Just make changes to your app.yml and run this script.
 * This script doesn't deletes any assets from disk - it's overwrites.
 *
 * @package    alexfilatov
 * @subpackage batch
 * @author     Alex Filatov http://www.alexfilatov.com
 */

define('SF_ROOT_DIR',    realpath(dirname(__file__).'/..'));
define('SF_APP',         'backend');
define('SF_ENVIRONMENT', 'dev');
define('SF_DEBUG',       1);

require_once(SF_ROOT_DIR.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'apps'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.SF_APP.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'config'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'config.php');

// initialize database manager

$databaseManager = new sfDatabaseManager();
$databaseManager->initialize();

// batch process starts here
// If you have a lot of records you should refine this using hydration
$c = new Criteria();
$c->add(sfAssetPeer::TYPE, 'image');
$assets = sfAssetPeer::doSelect($c);

foreach ($assets as $asset) {
	echo 'Processing ' . SF_ROOT_DIR.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'/web/'.$asset->getFolderPath() . ':' . $asset->getFilename() . '...';
	sfAssetsLibraryTools::createThumbnails($asset->getFolderPath(), $asset->getFilename());
	echo "done!n";
}
// batch process ends here

?>

3. Run it

php mybatchname.php

Important notice: if you have a lot of image assets (thousands) you need to refine this script using object hydration.
I’ll do it later, just to let you know.
Peace!

Imagine Star Wars refined with this technology?

read article on techcrunch

Conclusion:

The study shows a clear set of common practices and guidelines for setting type in Web design. Note, though, that these findings are not scientific and should serve only as rough guidelines:

1. Either serif or sans-serif fonts are fine for body copy and headings, but sans-serif fonts are still more popular for both.
2. Common choices for headlines are Georgia, Arial and Helvetica.
3. Common choices for body copy are Georgia, Arial, Verdana and Lucida Grande.
4. The most popular font size for headings is a range between 18 and 29 pixels.
5. The most popular font size for body copy is a range between 12 and 14 pixels.
6. Header font size ÷ Body copy font size = 1.96.
7. Line height (pixels) ÷ body copy font size (pixels) = 1.48.
8. Line length (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 27.8.
9. Space between paragraphs (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 0.754.
10. The optimal number of characters per line is between 55 and 75, but between 75 and 85 characters per line is more popular,
11. Body text is left-aligned, image replacement is rarely used and links are either underlined or highlighted with bold or color.

Read full article here: Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices

Just got an invitation to hi5 social network and accepted it.

After that I decided to find which of my friends are already there and imported all contacts from GMail address book.

Threre were more than 500 contacts but only 30 were already registered in hi5.

And, the worst news, ALL of them were checked! This is unfair because there no any possibility to uncheck them all.

To uncheck them all you need to do the following steps (assume that you use Firefox with Firebug addon):

1. Select “manually send invitations” (instead of automatically sending) and you’ll see the list of all your contacts.

2. Take a look in hi5 html page source code and and make sure they are using JQuery there.

3. Open console in Firebug and execute the following code:

$("INPUT[type='checkbox']").attr('checked', false)

All checkboxes became unchecked.

4. Manually check all necessary contacts and press submit.

This is minus for hi5 developers – there MUST be a possibility to uncheck all contacts!

Playing with pretty nice PHP search engine Zend Lucene in Symfony as a sfLucenePlugin

If you’re building a website in UTF-8 (all stuff: db, html, etc) you proabably can get the following PHP Notice:

Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an illegal character in input string in ... pluginssfLucenePluginlibvendorZendSearchLuceneAnalysisAnalyzerCommonTextNum.php on line 56

This is caused by lack of information in the installation guide of the sfLucenePlugin.

Few minutes of Google-ing could brought you the following:

try to add in config/search.yml:

  index:
    analyzer: utf8

This line solved this problem for me, hope for you too.

For me this is new world but it smells like Symfony sometimes – almost the same approaches with domain (Symfony: model) management, CRUD generator (Symfony: Admin generator) here excites as much as in Symfony.

“Leaving” PHP world for Groovy-Grails-Java was quite hard on start and I still stuck in researches. But I have smart enough guru in the stretched hand distance, please let me introduce Alex, The Grails Guru.

If you are Symfony developer you’d love this framework. You’ll see there similar things you’ve used to use in Symfony:

• mvc: domain classes + controller classes + view in GSP pages
• routing: you can define any route rule in a special routing construction
• configuration: there no any YAML configuration files but .properties files instead
• partials: are also present in Grails like includes
• and so on, I can’t remember on a spot. I’ll be adding this list with new features.

BUT started developing Grails applications you’ll get all Java development advantages:

• Continuous integration development
• Maven 2, dependencies management (management of so many libraries becomes easiest task)
• Reliable, useful  and fast IDE IntelliJ IDEA (you can try it for 30 days)
• Professional TDD (saying the truth, not all PHP developers using it, but in Java world things become better)

On other hand you can try work with Grails on Ubuntu Linux, it is faster then Windows machines.

I’ll be posting my achievements and research results here while learning this amazing tool.

Also has created a team and you can join it here.

Ukrainian LHC@home team

Last Saturday 07/26/08 me and my friend decided to create simple online service for Ukrainian market.

Idea was in the follwoing – create free of charge open source database of geographical locations of all IP addresses of Ukraine.
Every visitor has possibility to see his IP address and set his Ukrainial location with help of drop downs.

Possible stakeholders of this service are:

- e-commerce services like auctions, online malls
it would be easy to find goods near to you with it, for example find motorbike in 50km radius.

- social services (social networks)
Also find people near to your location and get in contact

- and so on, connected to location definition

So we decided to start development of this project with Symfony (actually I enforced him to do that ).

Two days ago we finished first stage and now project in “locations-collection” stage.

Please take a look on www.opengeo.org.ua

The next step will be development of analysis module and user interface improvements, for example make location tag-cloud instead of select-boxes.

Feel free to say your opinion in comments to this post – it will be very useful!