Projects Status

I have been doing different tests in making PHP extensions lately and things seem to be good except for some problem I’ve been having with shared extensions. But I’ve decided to wait for my Tiger box to come before I work more on that.
In the meantime I’ll try to get ACal3 alpha 2 out.

Xcode 1.5, Subversion, and SSH

I’ve always used Xcode for checking in my stuff into the SVN repository, but when I started using a remote SVN (Subversion) server over ssh, I quickly found out that it doesn’t work all that well. But I also found the fix. Here’s what you do.

1) From a new Finder window press apple+shift+g and type in .MacOSX
3) Double click on the file called environment.plist
4) In Property List Editor click on New Child
5) Call it SVN_SSH and set the value to “ssh -l username” (without the quotes) replacing username with the username you need for accessing the repository.
6) Logout and then log back in.
7) Checkout your source like normal. For example: svn co svn+ssh://server.tld/repos

And from there on go like you normally would. Open the Xcode project and starting using it’s integrated version control management.

Rebirth of wxPHP

I am announcing the rebirth of wxPHP. wxPHP is a project to create a wxWidgets wrapper for PHP. Or you could also say bindings.
I’m trying to takeover the wxPHP project on Sourceforge.net but if that fails I’ll have to do it somewhere else.

Here are my plans for it. Even though I barely know C++ myself, I will attempt to write a PHP extension. This extension can be compiled as a shared library or built statically into PHP.
The extension will require PHP5 just to make things easier. PHP 5 has much better support for object oriented programming (oop) and wxWidgets has a lot of that.

I’m currently wetting my feet in writing PHP extensions. But I hope to get a really basic something out the door in the near future.

And just because I’m working on this too now doesn’t mean that ACal will recieve no attention.

Users & Groups Support Added to ACal 3

I have now checked in complete support for users and groups in ACal 3.0.

What does it consist of? A user is simply a record containing the username, password, and a list of groups the user is part of.
A groups is a record consisting of the group name, and rights that group has. For example a group may have admin, editor, or read-only rights.

In the future I want to work on this some more and allow a user to have more personal information such as real name, email address, etc. This would allow event notifications to be sent to a group (via email records of users in that group) instead of only a specific email address.

But for now I’m just going to get the basics done so that we can get alpha 2 out the door very soon.
And I will continue to do alpha releases until the calendar is ready for everyday use and then a beta phase will begin until everything is done and it has been thoroughly tested.

ACal Status Update

This here is a little preview of the new preferences pane. It’s a semi-transparent layer that floats on top of the calendar until closed. It’s not really a window but an absolute positioned, fixed, floating div.

As of today I am now using the BerliOS SVN repository because I’m tired of waiting for SF.net to adopt it.
You can find out more about that on The ACal Project FAQ.

Users and Groups are coming along. It’ll be in SVN this week.

And totally off topic, Dojo Toolkit is now hosting my Firefox builds.

ACal 3 Redesigned pref Window

I have redesigned the ACal preferences window. It looks a lot better and works better also.
I’m working on the Users and Groups feature. I expect this to take a little while because I want it to be complete.
Then comes event categories. I also need to complete event notifications. Much needs to be done.

Alpha 2 is coming later than expected because I did not have that much time to work on it. It will come either this Saturday or early May. Depending on how well things go.

NTP Server Support in ACal 3?

Hmm, sounds like a good idea to me. I’ll just put it this way. If I can add this feature is a unobtrusive way, it will be added.

Just a few more tweaks and fixes and the acal trunk with have full support for time zones. Thanks to the PEAR Date package which made things a little easier.
If I add NTP support it will be using Net_NNTP_Client. Also a PEAR package.

So good things are coming. It’ll just be awhile before ACal 3 is in a good state. Which is probably a good thing because PHP5 is being adopted rather slowly anyway.

[UPDATE]
As of my latest checkin to the ACal Subversion repository, support for time zones has been added!

I know I’ve said it before…

But I don’t like time zones! If for no other reason because of inconsistency.

I’ve been working on adding time zone support to ACal and it’s being going through, albeit slowly. Almost at a crawl.
Why? Because there is so much to test and with each small change you need to make sure it works properly before going on. Timestamps are especially hard to figure out. I’ve been going wild trying to get this all working.
If nothing else works I’ll be inventing my own data and time format to fix all these problems. But hopefully we’ll have this done by next week.

So… what have you been up to?

I don’t know about you but here’s what I have been doing.

I recently started to volunteer for UMO (Mozilla Update or update.mozilla.org.)
I’ve been helping to review extensions, manage comments, and other editor stuff.
But also some work on the actual UMO web site as well.

What else? Well I just finished a small CMS project which uses my XML parser and also my security system. It’s a nifty little CMS. It’s fast and easy to work with but not good for very complex web sites.

Today I started working on ACal 3.0 again. It looks like I’ll have to push back the beta again. I still hope to get alpha 2 out this month.
Right now I’m working on time zone support. Just to make things go faster and for more features I’m using the Pear Time package. You won’t need to install the Time package yourself because I’ll include it with ACal.
When I have these time things sorted out I’ll be working on Users and Groups. Planning has already started for that.

Google Maps are Cool

Take a look at http://maps.google.com/

I just noticed now that they have a new Satellite view. It’s really neat.

That Problem is the Public School

Many organizations are fighting for Christianity in the public school system. Recently it became legal for Islam to be taught, but those wishing to teach Christianity are persecuted and even disciplined.
While I do believe this is a major battle I also realize why it is such.

The public school system was first defined in the communist manifesto. Why? Because it’s just another way, and very important way to control the next generation. Whoever controls the public school system in a way has the future of that nation in his hands. That is why there is such a major battle there.

This could all be eliminated by totally removing the public school. I do not believe in the goverment owning the nations children. Training them is the God-given responsibility of their parents.

XML Parsers

I needed an XML parser for PHP 4 and tried MiniXML but ran into many problems with HTML entities. Very strange problems.
I looked into other XML parsers written in PHP but most were too complex for what I needed. So what did I do?

Well the obvious thing would be to use SimpleXML right? Well wrong. Because I need something for PHP4 due to the fact that this particular web host won’t upgrade to PHP 5.
So then the obvious thing to do is write your own parser. Right?

At first I thought it would be simple. But it ended up taking me about 4 1/2 hours just to write a very simple parser. Well maybe you should take into account that I’ve never written something this complex before.

XML isn’t complex in itself but yet writing any kind of parser is fun, in a difficult and challenging sort of way.
So what does this really great and simple parser do? Well it loads an XML file, creates an array from it. You can add elements and get everything back in XML or Array format.

I meets my needs, for now. In the future I’ll be able to do a better job.