It doesn’t get much better

Posted on July 31, 2007 by bealers

My boy Morris just got a new lunch box (bag actually) for when he goes to ‘big’ school in Sept.

Let’s just cut to the chase and list the features that aforementioned lunch box has:

It’s Dr Who themed (this is definitely A Good Thing if you’re a four year old with TV fixation)
It’s got a ‘scary’ picture on the front ‘with a brain in it’
You press the brain and LEDs flash where the Cyberman’s eyes are
You press the words and it talks “YOU WILL BE DELETED…DELETE!” giving it all Dalek voice.

If there were a 4yr old boy’s* version of Wikipedia then doing a lookup on ‘kick ass’ would bring up this lunch box I’m sure. He’s sleeping with it at the moment.

Where’s mine?

*for the record his twin sister had the option of same lunch box but spurned it

Come and work with me

Posted on July 30, 2007 by bealers

After recently passing the 1 year milestone I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take on a couple of extra resources at Siftware increasing the headcount to 5. The aim is to free me up to spend more time on managing this and other business interests. I don’t do this lightly as it’s a huge investment for us but the work is out there and it’s not like I’ve haven’t done this before.

We’re looking for a heavy-hitting PHP developer to effectively take over my role as mentor, architect and day-to-day resource planner plus a junior looking to get in on the ground floor.

If you’re reading this and either role sounds of interest then please send your CV with a covering note telling us why we should employ you to careers@siftware.co.uk. Also if you know of anyone that might be interested then please don’t hesitate to forward this on.

A Pragmatic Look At Symfony

Posted on July 29, 2007 by bealers

On Thursday I presented to around 30 developers attending the July Bristol Skillswap at Bristol’s Watershed.

It was my first ever public speaking gig (if you ignore some sales presentations) and I’m delighted by how well it went. The talk was a ten minute powerpoint introduction and then 45 mins of live coding – this was pretty taxing – finishing off with a 30 min Q+A.

The powerpoint bit was a breeze and the coding went OK because I’d run through the whole thing on a number of occasions to prepare. I did wobble at one point when I got an error but it turned out that I’d saved a file to the wrong place.

I got some great feedback from Ed Mitchell, the guy running the show, and according to him the audience was paying very close attention to everything I was doing; so at least I didn’t bore them.

I also got to meet a few underscore regulars including Rick Hurst, Andy Gale, Dan Hilton and Oliver Humpage (who also works at the Watershed as a techie) and the evening was finished off by getting pretty messy with Ed, Toby Roal and Dan Dixon who all seem like good eggs.

For those of you interested here are the following things I used in my presentation:

Flood panorama

Posted on July 24, 2007 by bealers

The flooding is really getting on my tits now.

Anyway, here’s a 360 panorama that I created using a great photo stitching and panorama hosting service called Clevr.

This was taken on my phone, a Nokia N93, as I was standing on a wall on the side of The A4104 between Holly Green (where I live) and Upton (where I work).

A great party

Posted on July 23, 2007 by bealers

Kurt has got around to putting some photo’s up from his 42nd birthday party which family Beale attended the weekend before last in Wanstead, London.

I have to say that I got particularly mullered, crawling into bed around 3:30am. My last recollection is Kurt delighting in turning his music up VERY LOUD to annoy his having-too-many-loud-parties neighbours.

Kurt and Mandy we salute you for putting on such a good bash and thanks for putting us up!

The island that is Upton

Posted on July 23, 2007 by bealers

I found this photo last night and it confirmed just how bloody lucky we’ve been, so far.

Original photo found on the BBC website.

Update: Thanks to Oli at ic360 for sending me this picture which I’ve since doctored.

Still rising?

Posted on July 22, 2007 by bealers

We recently watched a guy from BBC News 24 doing an interview outside our house telling us that the levels are likley to rise, which is worrying.

Anyway, here’s some photos plus more on my facebook

Above: the car parked closest is outside our house

Very lucky, so far

Posted on July 21, 2007 by bealers

At around 9pm Saturday evening standing at the end of our little layby on the A4104 looking over the fields into Upton and over to Malvern the scene was pretty remarkable with there being water as far as one could see.

Continue reading →

New Symfony plugin: sfSimpleCMSPlugin

Posted on July 17, 2007 by bealers

Preparing for my talk I was on the Symfony wiki and came across this:

This plugin allows you to add a simple Content Management System (CMS) to your symfony application with the following features:

* Uses Javascript and Ajax to provide a neat user experience
* Edit zones in pages
* Edit page URL (you can use / in page path)
* Edit content in the real context (‘edit in place’)
* Preview result
* Create and manage a tree structure for pages
* i18n ready (the interface is translated)
* l10n ready (a page can have different versions)
* support multiple templates
* Basic publication workflow
* Breadcrumb navigation
* User management is controlled through sfGuardPlugin

It is not aimed at replacing full-featured CMS packages, but offers a lightweight alternative for when you build a website that has to contain pages often updated by special users. It is voluntarily simple, and very easy to configure; so it should fulfill most basic CMS requirements.

Sounds exactly what we’ve been looking for (or at least intending to build)

More here

A Symfony talk at Bristol Skillswap

Posted on July 16, 2007 by bealers

So it’s public now, I’ll be doing a stand-up talk on Symfony for Bristol Skillswap on the 26th July in the Watershed.