skip to content

“You gotta get up to get down” - Name that tune

August 15th, 2008

So, its undoubtedly the long nights of coding, and repeated triangle chokes I’ve been enduring, but I’ve had this 80’s song in my head and I can’t get it out.  I don’t know the name of the song, or the artist, and I now consider it my personal mission to figure it out.  This song is my white whale.  Its a poorly rapped song, and between every verse is some dude in the background singing “you got to get up to get down… you got to get up to get down…”

I know that’s not much to go on… but if you’re a child of the 80s, it should be enough.  Now I know all you whipper-snappers won’t know it, so if you want to participate, but don’t know the song, then just tell me what song was your white whale.  Sharing in my misery will make me feel better ;)

Please, I beg you.  If you know this song, throw me a lifeline!  If you’ve never commented on a blog ever before in your life, make this a first.

Things are getting scary.  A video search for “gotta get up to get down” brought me
this video, which is probably the single most scary thing I’ve ever watched.  And yeah… I’m ashamed to say that I did watch nearly all of it.  Its like a car accident… you know you shouldn’t look but you can’t avert your eyes..

What a bad… bad… bad song!

I hereby pledge that ExpressionEngine 2 will not be released until I have an answer for this.  Jones, Ellis, Camacho… you guys listening!

CodeIgniter Libraries in subfolders

August 12th, 2008

Quietly last night CodeIgniter gained the oft-requested ability to load libraries from subfolders.

Added the ability to store libraries in subdirectories within either the main “libraries” or the local application “libraries” folder.

Many more good things abound in CI-land.

Where’s that file coming from?

August 05th, 2008

Courtesy of PHP::Impact ( [str Blog] ), here's a detailed "map" of the CodeIgniter system's file structure when loading files. Its beautiful.

CodeIgniter File structure

Cool Stuff for Cool People

July 22nd, 2008

Man there’s good stuff on the net, and sometimes I even get a moment to read it!

  • Jamie Rumbelow‘s, got a good start to a series of CodeIgniter articles with his first part of The Guide to CI Databases.
  • From the “D’uh, why didn’t I think of that!” department comes the excellent (and funny) CleverAndy.  You know all those designs you do that your clients pass on for one reason or another?  CleverAndy helps you find them homes so they don’t go to the island for misfit toys (or um… whatever the design equivalent is).
  • 36 seconds!  Fedor Emelianenko… wow.  You are a bad, bad man.  But seriously… Megadeth?
  • Learning ExpressionEngine?  Micheal Boyink (he of the mighty pogo) has put together Train -EE just for you.  Fantastic resources, including instructor led workshop training.  Congrats Mike, this is the way it’s meant to be done!
  • jQuery sparklines.  Looks to sweet to pass on.

BambooInvoice 0.86 Release

July 15th, 2008

Get it while its hot!  BambooInvoice 0.86 features a slew of features and bug fixes including some obvious and useful ones, as well as a few treats. 

For full details, see the changelog.

Turning off smileys in iChat 4

July 10th, 2008

Instant message has become a part of my daily life.  I use it pretty much non stop for work, and my work involves writing a lot of code.  It isn’t uncommon for me to send something like

if ($a=($b+$c)) 

I like iChat (Adium of course is the old favourite, but hasn’t been used much since I moved to Leopard and Apple improved iChat so much), but sometimes it’s too cute for its own good.  This is especially true of the “helpful” way it converts :) and ;) into :) and ;) respectively. Helpful in the same way that Clippy was helpful.

This behaviour gets very annoying when one is trying to look at code.  The above code example becomes if ($a=($b+$c)).  You can image how annoying this is when every third line of chat is code.  So I went hunting through the iChat preferences to find a little box I could uncheck and turn off smileys, only there was no box to be found.

A quick trip through google didn’t turn up too much either, but I was able to figure out where iChat kept its preferences for that.  A minute later, I had figured out a way to turn them off.  Here’s how:

Browse to /Applications/iChat.app, and “Show Package Contents”.
Show Package Contents

Next up, browse into Contents/Resources/English.lproj and look for a file called SmileyTable.plist.  This is where all the smiley definitions are stored.  Without it, iChat can’t translate smiles, so rename it to “SmileyTable.plist.banished”.  If you ever want smileys back, just reverse the process!

code with no smiles in it

There, that feels better ;)

My robots have taken over Firefox 3

July 04th, 2008

Or maybe… just maybe… the Firefox team has been plotting all along, and have actually taken over my site.  Oh well, I can think of many worse things!

If you’re on Firefox 3, then type about:robots into your location bar.

about:robots

Brilliant, funny, witty.  Robots.  What’s not to love?  This is the second time Firefox 3 has impressed me with their wit.  I also wrote about Beta software? Firefox “gets it” last year.

CodeIgniter 1.6.3 & ExpressionEngine 1.6.4 released

June 26th, 2008

Despite mad work going into ExpressionEngine 2 development, we’ve still be heavily focused on keeping our current products the best we can.  To that end, today we managed to eek both a new version of CI and EE out the door.  While relatively light on new features (there are some nifty ones in there though) the main thrust was a significant improvement to the Input library for both security and performance.  To this end, I’d like to publicly express my gratitude to Pascal Kriete (Inparo), whose tireless efforts helped us immensely.

EllisLab Developer Summit 2008

June 17th, 2008

Time for a little self imposed isolation. For the next 2 weeks, I’m living, breathing, and dreaming ExpressionEngine as me and Derek Jones have left the comfy confines of our homes to drop into the quiet little town of Portland for some serious “think time”.  Over the next 14 days I’ll be considerably less active then usual, as I try to put all my energy into developing.  Most of the crew live in and around Portland, so I’ll get the opportunity to finally meet our new Code Mechanic Jesse Hurlburt face to face, bring Lisa a big plaque picture of all of us as our superhero selves, and get beaten up by Rick (that’s what you get for working for a bjj expert).  Good times.

I’ll try to post images and updates as I go, but I didn’t bring a camera, so I’ll be relying on the charity of strangers, and my macbook’s built in camera.

Things worth reading

June 16th, 2008

I've been kind of in isolation the last week or so, (more on that in another post) and I've not even taken the time to read my RSS feeds latesy, only skimming a few things here and there, or marking things for reading later. So today, I had a bit of time, and boy am I glad I took the time to re-visit those! Here are a few wonderful things worth your time to read.

  • How To Make An IP-To-Country Tool With PHP and MySQL. Mathew Pennel, web monster and editor of Digital Web Magazine has written up a wonderful article here. I find myself linking to one article every month or two that this guy writes and nodding my head knowingly. This guy is great.
  • Doctor Jones has completely made me re-examine Apple's Spaces with his article My Day With the New Spaces.
  • jQuery for Designers has written up Coda Slider Effect. Its sexy as all get out. GREAT work there Remy. This is super well done. I will be stealing inspired by you soon!
  • Continuing on the jQuery train of thought here is the always excellent jQuery blog. Recently they wrote jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects which contained a few big tidbits in there. Biggest? API standardization. Unless you're a nerd of pretty high-order, that's probably not as cool to you as it is to me, but something that everyone can enjoy - Enchant (the effects library) is being rolled into jQuery proper. I think this is an immensely smart choice if only for marketing jQuery to new users. New users tend to compare feature by feature and make decisions, well now there's a big checkbox in that column. Nice work guys!
  • And finally, Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices from Smashing Magazine.

Man, there was some good stuff on tap! Something from each of those will be making their way into my work in the very near future.

« First  <  3 4 5 6 7 >  Last »

Derek Allard

I'm Derek Allard, a programmer, author, and award-winning instructor. I'm also Technology Architect at EllisLab, and the programmer behind BambooInvoice, a simple, Open Source, web-based invoicing application. [more about Derek]

Categories