In the evening just before July Morning we have successfully released the beta version of MaYoMo.
We’ve got a new map, which has much better performance than the old one, a lot of cleared and working functionalities and of course a very very long list of removed bugs.
MaYoMo is a “social news network” for journalists and their readers that empowers a new era of Internet news creation and distribution. With an ever-expanding corps of citizen and independent journalists based in every corner of the globe, MaYoMo is shaping the evolution of journalism and delivering the world’s most inspired multimedia news content. Now, thanks to MaYoMo’s highly unique and entrepreneurial “news channel approach,” professional, amateur, and student journalists can create and manage their own custom news channel, unleashing new career and business opportunities based on the company’s shared revenue advertising model. MaYoMo lets you discover the power of news like never before and experience the new future of journalism and news content distribution.
July 1st, 2009 | Tags: citizen journalism, July Morning, mayomo | Category: DEV, Misc | Comments (5)
Giffy is a free online drawing software that is absolutely easy to use.
Probably it’s one of the best free alternatives to MS Visio.
The interface is intuitive so that the diagrams that you need to make are no more boring and annoying task.
One of the features that I like most is the absence of download and installation (and of course - the sequential process of all that updates that follow after the installation) - you need just to make an account on the site - and than start working …
My first one-minute test diagram is ready: 
That’s the second feature that grab my attention - I can easily share my work 
June 23rd, 2009 | Tags: diagramming tools, Giffy, UML, Visio | Category: DEV | Leave a comment
I was faced with Load Balancing restructure of the project that I work.
Basically on such case you need separation of 2 database connections, one that READS and one that WRITES data - which gives tremendous performance improvement.
The Load Balancing itself is not subject of this post, so I’ll stick close to the code modifications that were needed.
Different people have different approaches. The three I liked most is as follows (they are not ranked, just listed here):
Being lazy and preferring to think a little instead to coding charmant quantities of code I have combined some of the
features described above.
Zend gives us the ability to set default adapter either by:
Zend_Db_Table::setDefaultAdapter($dbAdapter);
or by explicitly calling it from the model class.
So the solution comes pretty trivial - all of the controllers implement the ISetCustomDefaultAdapter($adapterType).
Before data manipulation we call it with $adapterType=DB_DATA_WRITES and after finishing operations, restore the default adapter with $adapterType=DB_DATA_READS.
Although decoupling controllers and database could result in not-so-strict OOP design (basically on OOP fanatics),
my experience showed me that people behind Zend have designed the framework so flexible that it could fix to any requirement of our multidimensional practice.
May 22nd, 2009 | Tags: Load Balancing, PHP, zend | Category: DEV, PHP | Comments (1)
Using the file transfer object in Zend Framework 1.8 for handling file uploads as in:
raises Implementation in progress exception:
You can easily overcome this by using the receive method of the Zend_Form_Element_File:
$form->file->receive();
Hope this saves some time until the implementation goes up…
May 14th, 2009 | Tags: Implementation in progress, PHP, zend, Zend_File_Transfer, Zend_Form_Element_File | Category: DEV, PHP | Leave a comment
May 12th, 2009 | Tags: bugs, fun, mac | Category: DEV, Misc | Comments (7)
April 1st, 2009 | Tags: coding, fun | Category: Misc | Comments (2)
Putting it all together is real questionnaires managing module. What we’ve got briefly: a routine to spread given questionnaire, clean-up routine and now present: course filter form or form selector. The purpose of the form selector is to duplicate our questionnaire per single course.
It’s pretty basic and simple – we are looking for all courses in their signature. Than just a single click and the work is done – questionnaire is duplicated working with particular category is simple than it sound, since in the courses table there is a category column, so we can easily select it.
My previous post on the subject contains details on deleting duplicated questionnaires. In the next I will examine the process of extracting data of cloned questionnaires.
As usual the sources up to now are available here.
March 17th, 2009 | Tags: cloning questionnaires, eLearning, moodle, questionnaires | Category: PHP | Leave a comment
