SoftwareThinking Blog

Firefox 4 is out!

softwarethinking — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:47:57 +0000

We’ve just had IE 9 released and now the final version of Firefox 4 has come out too and spoilt IE’s thunder. First impressions: brilliant! Easy upgrade, its fast and it looks great to boot.

Internet Explorer 9 is here

softwarethinking — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:46:57 +0000

This week saw the RTM release of Internet Explorer 9. It finally brings IE up to date with support for HTML 5, CSS 3 and a much faster Javascript engine. Please note: you may pick up a slight bias in the following post.

Implementing the Metaweblog API in PHP – getting started

softwarethinking — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:16:16 +0000

My first post in my mini-series covering an implementation of the Metaweblog API. Rather than write a re-hash of what others have already done I thought I’d just link to them. I will be covering the missing steps myself – such as handling multiple categories and a workaround for sending custom attributes.

Shortening CodeIgniters timespan function

softwarethinking — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:16:48 +0000

CodeIgniter has a built-in timespan function that can return a text version of the time between 2 dates. However I find it’s too accurate and returns too much information for my needs and have shortened it by overwriting the default version, forcing it now to return only the latest information.

NetBeans vs PhpStorm

softwarethinking — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:28:15 +0000

NetBeans and PhpStorm are IDE’s for PHP development (NetBeans does Java , C/C++ and more too!). I’m a real fan of NetBeans. Along with the usual set of features such as syntax highlighting and code completion it comes with PHP docblock comment support, support for xdebug, HTML, CSS and JS syntax highlighting and much more. Best of all it’s FREE. PhpStorm is the new kid on the block. It’s a commercial product from JetBrains packed full of features. But is it actually any good?

Download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

softwarethinking — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:49:58 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for download for anyone, not just those with an MSDN subscription.

The full release of Visual Studio 2010 has been set for March 22nd 2010.

Windows 7 – It’s out!

softwarethinking — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:34:32 +0000

Actually that’s a lie. It’s still not out yet, and assuming the release is in American time, it still won’t be out for another 10-20 hours. But that won’t stop the hype. Tomorrow will no doubt bring a media onslaught of news stories on Windows 7. The general view seems to be of delight – “it’s Vista, but fixed” to sum it up in one.

Don’t forget though, that tomorrow does not only bring the release of Windows 7, but also the ‘official’ release of Windows Server 2008 R2 (it’s been out on licensing for over a month). In my view the ‘R2’ editions of Microsoft products seem to be minor updates with the odd feature thrown in to try and justify the price tag appended to them. R2 of Server is little different although to be fair the R2 release does feature live migration of Hyper-V virtual machines, but it’s mainly about compatibility with the client OS.

Which brings me back to Windows 7, again. It will be interesting to see how much coverage it gets in the main stream UK media.

JQuery – My event’s have stopped working!

softwarethinking — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:52:05 +0000

Have you been writing your JQuery javascript code and suddenly found the next time you test it some of your event bindings are no longer working? This happened to me today, and it took a fair amount of debugging to find out what was going on. Turns out that if you are calling the JQuery AJAX functions, you need to rebind you events.

So the easiest solution for me was to call my own function in the load function’s anonymous function, like so:

$("#remotetableload").load("file.php", function(){ myFunction(); }); function myFunction(){ //my bindings }

The main trouble I had with solving this problem was coming up with the right search terms to find an answer in Google to be honest. Eventually found the answer in the JQuery FAQ, there are a few other solutions other than the one above, so check it out.

Windows 7 Annoyances

softwarethinking — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:34:24 +0000

It seems that with the imminent arrival of Windows 7, businesses, consumers and critics alike are shouting about the wonders of Windows 7. I’m not one of them. Whilst I have nothing against Windows 7 and it is a great improvement over Vista, it’s not been the smooth setup I was hoping (even expecting) for. A lowdown of some of the issues I’ve experienced:

Boot manager installed itself onto wrong physical disk – without asking – without confirming. This is really annoying as it means I have to boot from a drive that I otherwise use exclusively for storage. It seems to be fairly easily solvable, but that still doesn’t remove from the fact that Windows 7 did it in the first place.
I’ve used both Windows XP and Windows Vista with my wireless USB adapter but Windows 7 didn’t recognise the Vista drivers nor did it have any default drivers. A much older Vista installer on the manufacturers website seems to have done the trick – but now the wireless link drops every 20 or so minutes.
I occasionally play Enemy Territory and Quake Live, both are excellent games and both require Punk Buster. I struggled getting Punk Buster to install correctly on Windows 7, was constantly getting kicked for numerous different reasons (md5 mismatch, no admin rights, out of date), running pbsetup.exe did nothing, eventually found another PB application called pbsvc.exe which has solved that particular issue.
ATI’s control center and driver install must have gone wrong somehow (I’ll admit, it could have been ‘user error’), anyway I could only get the drivers to work, and indeed can still only get the drivers to work, not the control panel.

Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is great. Just don’t expect everything to be smooth sailing.

Free enterprise-ready BI tools

softwarethinking — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:11:47 +0000

I discovered Pentaho today – they are the company behind an open-source, advanced BI Platform. As they so succinctly put it themselves on SourceForge:

[Pentaho is] a complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL). Use it as a full suite or as individual components that are accessible via web services. Ranked #1 in open source BI.

I’ve only played around with their Java based report designer so far, but it seems pretty good. It’ll connect to a wide variety of datasources through JDBC (that’s the Java version of the ever popular OBDC) including the big guns like Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL. The designer itself is really easy to pick up, just drag and drop the fields from your query onto the report page, add in a few labels and you can output the report to PDF, TXT, RTF or to their own report server.

Anyway for the wonderful price of nothing, it certainly seems quite competitive with the much more expensive Crystal Reports and SQL Server Reporting Services (although I like that too!). Of course the report designer doesn’t come anywhere near my personal favourite, Telerik Reporting.