Darren Beale

Today we stepped off the property ladder with the sale of our house in London completing for the asking price and with the money that we’ve gained over the last 10 years of house price inflation being placed in a high interest savings account.

Our feeling is that the worst that’ll happen is that we’ll lose out on a further gain but that most likely our savings at today’s rates (if you shop around) of around 6.2% AER will likely beat the median estimations of HPI at around 5% for the next 2 years or lower. There are also many camps that are screaming about a crash but there are so many factors to consider that our heads begin to spin so we’re simply going to sit it out for a while and see what happens. My gut feeling is that a price correction downwards is most likely.

Of course there’s much, much more to owning a home than simply making some cash. Renting for the past 12 months has shown us the negative aspects of being a tenant including the general insecurity that you may get kicked out next month and simple things like not being able to replace - say - the crap cooker or boiler. It’s also very important to have a stable environment for the little ones to grow up in and not have to deal with things like changing schools every 12 months; we can see that this sort of thing is certainly worth a premium.

Hence we may still buy, indeed over the past few months we’ve looked at over 20 houses, but with another baby coming and general uncertainty over the stability of the economy - what with being self employed and all the US shenanigans too - we’re very definitely going to hold off now until the new year at an absolute minimum.

Morris wanted a ’scary’ pumpkin and Eden wanted a ‘pretty’ one, here’s the best that Daddy could muster.

Hard work.

Kurt and I attempted so see the entire piece last night at the Barbican. We managed the first half which was 1.5 hours and whilst being in awe of complexity and the sheer effort being used to manually repeat the same chord for 45 minutes without a break by half time we could face no more and left early; I feel less of a philistine to now know that it’s normally played out over 3 days.

I had a great time and also managed to fit in clearing the last things from our house before its sale and seeing Orient nail Port Vale 3:1 at Brisbane Road thanks to Karl. Shame about the Rugby and the F1.

I have Office 2007 and I have Adobe CS3 (on Vista). Adobe CS3 comes with Acrobat and Acrobat Distiller but I’ve not been able to get Word 2007 to play nicely with either so I can create PDFs from Word like I used to.

I was about to sit down and fix the issue once and for all but on the off chance I thought I’d check with MS first. Good job I did as here’s an Office 2007 add-in to enable save as PDF.

I was in Bristol for a few days earlier this week for Skillswap (which my company sponsored) and the UWE Web Developer Conference; both were excellent events so kudos to Laura and Dan & team respectively.

Being at these events and rubbing shoulders with lots of smart people that are passionate about their particular corner of our industry was really inspiring and really brought home to me just how much there is happening in my birthplace. I’ll admit I was a tad jealous of those that can attend these events by simply jumping on their bikes and cycling in.

Anyway, if you can make it be sure to attend BarCamp Bristol. I’m gutted I can’t as I’m in Norwich but from what I heard this week, it’s going to be pretty special.

Whatever your opinion about HTML emails if you are charged with writing them then you’ll definitely want to make sure that they are as consistent as possible across the board for desktop and webmail clients.

Well, luckily for us the guys over at campaign monitor came up with a really useful guide drilling down into specific CSS support client by client.

Email client CSS support guide.

Very good work.

Here on our dev servers we turn PHP error reporting full on so we get to know of any issues with our code well before it hits production (where errors are turned off).

This does however cause problems with older legacy sites that generate reams of warning errors because the developers were slack and - say - didn’t declare all their variables. So, the obvious solution is to set the error reporting at the VirtualHost or.htaccess level.

Or is it? At the recent PHPWM meeting I brought up my issue that whenever I set it to be:

php_value error_reporting E_ALL & ~E_NOTICES

which in php.ini will give you errors but not the notices, it was _definitely_ not working for me in the vhost. A possible solution offered was to use the integer value of the constant instead but we all couldn’t remember what that was.

A quick Google later and it seems that using the text constants doesn’t work in the vhost or .htaccess but the integer version DOES. So the definitive answer to “How do I turn on PHP errors but get it to ignore warnings in a vhost” is

php_value error_reporting 6135

Well, this works for me on php 5.2.3 anyway

Francios a core member of the Symfony team recently blogged about the 20 most popular plugins of the Symfony project based upon page views.

That list is:

1. sfSimpleCMSPlugin
2. sfGuardPlugin
3. sfPropelActAsNestedSetBehaviorPlugin
4. sfMediaLibraryPlugin
5. sfSimpleBlogPlugin
6. sfSimpleForumPlugin
7. sfFeed2Plugin
8. sfgWidgetsPlugin
9. sfThumbnailPlugin
10. sfUJSPlugin
11. sfControlPanelPlugin
12. sfFormValidationPlugin
13. sfMogileFSPlugin
14. sfLightboxPlugin
15. sfCaptchaPlugin
16. sfNiftyPlugin
17. sfPrototypeWindowPlugin
18. sfPropelLoadbalancerPlugin
19. sfSavvyPlugin
20. sfYzClientSideValidationPlugin

I find it very interesting that the ’simple’ ones are all in the top 6 with the CMS one - which is very new - already taking up top spot.

It proves that the interest is there for off-the-shelf solutions built upon this great framework and I feel that there’s going to be lots of exciting activity in this space over the coming months. For example  I’m sure I’m not the only one who is eagerly awaiting the impending release of Magento which is based upon the Zend Framework.

I recently got wind of a new workshop on The Multipack’s forum called Transcending CSS being presented by CSS don Andy Clarke of Britpack, and this book fame. Not sure what bribes they used to get him doing this but it’s definitely happening and I’ve already booked my place before they sell out.

I also really like the general Workshops for web people philosophy:

Professional & Affordable Workshops For Web People

Learning from the web is one thing but being in a room with a leading light from the industry with other like minded people is infinitely better. Unfortunately this normally comes at a hefty price and requires you to travel and pay for accommodation.

Our Approach

We believe that it is time for a change and intend to start hosting professional workshops, given by experts, put on in modern venues around the UK for around a £100 - £125 depending on venue, considerably cheaper than most. We do not currently charge VAT although this may, unfortunately, change in the future.

Workshops

Starting in November 2007 in our home town of Leicester and using the Leicester Creative Business Depot’s Courtyard Room we hope to put a fresh spin on the workshop for a price we can all afford.

This all sounds perfectly splendid and at £100 with a top-drawer speaker and plenty of time for networking afterwards it’s a bargain.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

I was recently asked if I’d sucessfully got the Symfony plugin sfSimpleCMS working and I’m afraid my answer was no. I had tried briefly when preparing for my talk, but something didn’t work and I carried on with other things.

Being reminded of it and having an hour to kill before I head off to the pub I thought I’d give it a stab, here we go…

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