Pragmatism in the real world

UK Readers: Don't buy petrol from BP or ESSO

This is very off-topic, so feel free to skip! Received a round-robin today via email. As I don't send on such things, I thought I'd mention it here as I'm getting fed up with the price of petrol, especially given the profit that the big oil companies have recently announced: Received from a good friend so leave the rest to you! See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it. We… continue reading.

Life outside of PHP

I thought that I'd answer Davey's question: what do you do to get away from PHP?. I also enjoy seeing the non-PHP side of people on Twitter, though I'm tending to use Twitter as a micro-blogging tool more at the moment. I enjoy spending my "non-PHP" time with my family. We are members of the National Trust as it gives us cheap access to land where the boys can run around freely. We also go… continue reading.

Downtime

Just a heads-up. Tomorrow, this site is being moved to a new server and so is going to be down for most of tomorrow from around 10:00 (GMT) to late evening.

OT: A Bit Wet

An off topic post for this blog, but I thought I should mention that it was a bit wet yesterday and it took me 4 hours to do my usual 30 min commute from work back to home! A couple of pictures show it better: Just after I'd left work: Joining the M50: I got home easily enough – mainly it was a case of taking it easy which wasn't difficult as the traffic was… continue reading.

Quiet around here

Sorry that it's been a bit quiet around here recently. It's been manic at work (more than usual!) but hopefully that's behind me for a few weeks now. I'm sure everyone who reads this blog is probably up to date with what's happening in the PHP world, so I won't repeat it all here, as you can just wander over to Planet PHP anyway! In the Zend Framework world, Pádraic has written an interesting set… continue reading.

Upgrade time

Just a quick note to warn you that the server that akrabat.com runs on is going to be upgraded tomorrow, so expect serious downtime as we see what happens when you go from FC-old to FC6 ! All should be back up and running by the evening though!

New Theme

Thought, I'd have a go at understanding WordPress themes! The image at the top is an actual road sign on my way to work, which has unfortunately been removed by the council. If you see anything broken, let me know please as I've only actually tested this in Firefox! (I know it's broken in IE…)

Demo!

Tomorrow morning, I get to demo our first Zend Framework powered application to the MD of the client's company. I'm dealing with the IT director there, so it's a little nerve-wracking to be presenting to the boss-man! The demo is going to go well as it's a pretty damn good application. Tomorrow I'm gonna write an Active Record type class to make dealing with the database easier. Zend_Db_Table just doesn't cut it!

Overworked

I've been really really busy at work recently. With end of month coming up, we've been looking to complete jobs that can be invoiced this month, reduce work on jobs that won't be invoiced this month and add in a few "quick" jobs that can be invoiced this month. Can you tell that worrying about cashflow is part and parcel of being in a small company?! One result of all this is that I haven't… continue reading.

Is this thing on?

DevNotes is where I intend to write about my development life. In general this means that I'll be talking about PHP coding as that's what I do most of my development in at the moment. I currently work for Campbell Shaw and also do a little bit of freelance work for my old company to help them out maintaining code that I wrote for them. In my spare time, I am (slowly!) writing some plugins… continue reading.