Vision Creative Inc, It’s my new home

As of this month I have started a new job as Web Design/Developer at Vision Creative Inc. one of Edmonton’s leading design and marketing firms who is working on the new look and feel for the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA).

I am working with a great team of excellent designers and am lucky to be in a collaborative environment where I can learn and become a better designer.

The only downside is getting used to my apple keyboard.

I think they also have one of the city’s coolest offices, Pictures will come in time!

Aiden Turns Two!

Another year down, Aiden turned two November 16th. It is strange to think that one year ago he just started to talk, Could not speak and now is running, walking, talking, and becoming more independent.

It is fascinating to see how kids develop and how they become their own little self.

For his birthday he got a few Automoblox, one of my favorite toy cars that I wish was mine.

phpCollab v3

I am volunteering what precious free time I have to an Open Source Project called phpCollab. phpCollab has been around for many years and has sat neglected for the past 3 years. Recently new life has been brought to the project by http://www.ideato.it. I will be working on the Wireframeing, Visual Design, and front end developement.

phpCollab is an open source internet-enabled system for use in projects that require collaboration over the internet. Those organizations, such as consulting firms, that rely on a division between firm-side and client-side information will benefit most from use of phpCollab

http://www.php-collab.com/

My battle with Cake PHP

I have been reading “Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional” and really enjoying the book. I think I have learned a lot, and while I am about 1/3rd through the book I have made a General observation about Cake PHP while using the Bake feature. While it appears to save time in setting up an application and will allow you to test the relations and mapping of your Database Scheme it lacks documentation. Not documentation in the process of baking your scripts but documentation in the code explaining what the MVC is doing and its relations to each other.

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs in 3D!

My wife and I finally got a chance to go out and see a movie. We saw “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” in IMAX 3D. The movie was great and seeing it 3D was excellent!

This is probably one of my favorite movies ever. The story was amazing, the animation and all the small details in the movie were perfect. The movie is actually based off of a children’s book by Judi Barrett.

I recommend you see this movie now if you haven’t already.

Google Wave Invite – A Haiku Contest!

Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool”.

Google Wave is designed as the next generation of Internet communication. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems like email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave’s existence.

Via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Like many Google products they are not publicly available for what can seam like years! Google Wave has been sending invites for a while now and I have been given a second batch. So the last time I announced on Twitter that I had some to giveaway I got more responses than I could deal with. So this time I asked my Twitter followers how I should decide to pass these invites along. Well it came down to a haiku contest.

A haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively. Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji or verbal caesura. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku.

I have 9 Invited to give away, so if you are interested leave a haiku in the comments and I will pick at random 9 winners on Friday the 13th (spooky).

Feel free to enter multiple times but make sure your entries are different.

Aptana 2.0 != PHP

Aptana… What can I say? It has been a love hate relationship, from poor initial 64bit support. Its lack of efficient FTP support. Its wavering pro features that eventually trickled down to the community version, and then removing the pro version altogether.

I have been using Aptana for years, and have had a lot of frustration over its development. It seemed that every update caused an issue with something I needed or was working before the latest update. But when it came to PHP in my mind it was an excellent tool.

Aptana as you may or may not know is based off of the open source project Eclipse. And like many other applications based on Eclipse (Flex, Zend Studio, and more). But Aptana developed their own PHP Plug-in that was very good, and with version 1.5 of Aptana I think people saw a great improvement.

Now Aptana is toting there IDE as the “Leading IDE for Web APP Development” that could be true, just as long as you are not planning to release a web app based on PHP.

Version 2 was released about a week ago along with the news that if you wanted PHP support that you would have to use the PDT plug-in. This made people upset and disappointed.

To be fair Aptana has not completely ditched PHP, they are now contributing to the PDT project. The only problem is that the PDT project was the reason many people used Aptana in the first pace. It is slow, bloated, and not as easy to use as Aptana’s own PHP plug-in.

So where does that leave us? Well if you look in the discussions many people are voicing outrage and that PDT or Aptana no longer tools they wish to support. Many alternatives have been suggested, many are not free. Coda, Netbeans, and Textmate.

But remember i said that Aptana is now contributing to the PDT project? Well they may have made a poor decision in removing PHP support so soon. Without having something significant accomplished for the PDT project like restoring some of the same functionality that the Aptana PHP plug-in had. If they only waited to announce this migration and released the new PDT with an improvement then I think there reputation might have been spared, the php community is not a YoYo and it is on the way down and may not return back.

Fifty People, One Question

Benjamin Reece’s videos from ask yourself are simply inspiring. The simple honesty from complete strangers is something I love about these videos.

Links:

• http://www.vimeo.com/deltree/videos
• http://vimeo.com/askyourself

What happened to the gallery?

What happened to the gallery?

Well to say it short, I have not had time to update the gallery. My new photos are all in my photo blog www.thewonderingphotographer.com But for the past week or two I have not had time to post new images there. I can assure you that as soon as I do the photo blog will be filled to the gills with new images!