As of this morning the wxPHP project at Sourceforge.net has officially rose from the dead.

Landon Bradshaw has joined making this a team effort.
If anyone else would like to join the force contact me.

It will take awhile before we can get our first release out but hopefully not too long. For those wishing I’d finally get ACal 3.0 done, well you’ll just have to wait a little longer as wxPHP is just so much more thrilling.

I have now finished an iCalendar/vCalendar parser written in pure PHP and consisting of a mere 100 lines of code.
And it works great. It’s fast. What more can you ask for? (Don’t answer that question)

In the coming days I will be integrating this into ACal and setup a importing/exporting system.

The W3C has once again updated the XHTML2 working draft. Yesterday to be exact.

All I can say is that hopefully in 2006 sometime it will be at least in the Candidate stage.

There is no such thing as a perfect operating system (OS). Windows is full of problems. Linux is unpolished. Mac OS X is plain weird in some areas.
But I believe if an OS ever will become near perfect, it will not be Apple or Microsoft’s long horn. But the the open source Linux.

Why do I believe this? Because Microsoft sells an OS to make money. Selling the product is their top concern.
Apple I must say is close, but for some reason they seem to run off the road a lot. OS X only runs on the PowerPC which creates such a limited market it can’t be the near perfect OS.

Linux is made by the user. Anyone can take the Linux source and create their own OS out of it. While this does have disadvantages it also means that no single company controls the OS. It’s the people’s OS. This makes the OS whatever the users want it to be. Which is near perfect.
But I believe one of the major pitfalls is also the greatest selling point. It’s free and open source. How can this be a pitfall? Well look at the lack of video and audio encoder/decoders. There’s really no great video software for Linux. Ditto for audio. Graphics require specific video cards for which there actually are some good drivers. There’s patent mine fields. And well it just drives me away.
But it’s also what makes Linux so great. Anybody can use, contribute, and distribute. But I do see these pitfalls falling away in the future.

I have been working on a subversion repository viewer because I couldn’t get any of the current ones to work for me.
Download: SVNView 0.1

This release uses a simple XML configuration file. And allows you to see the listing, comments, revisions, dates, and download files.

I’ll release updates in the future as I work on my local copy.

I’ve been on the quest for some good documents showing exactly how to write a good PHP5 extension. A comprehensive document that virtually goes through everything. A document that is always up to date. Something authoritive and cross platform.

And what did I find? I found some good PHP4 docs but that didn’t help much because I wanted to use PHP5 features. I only found one document about PHP5 which was unofficial and only described how to write an extension in C++ rather than C.

Looking at the official PHP documentation I read a comment that mentioned looking in the ReadMe files in the source code for PHP5 information. And so that’s what I did.
But is this the best they can do?

I put everything I could find into a single document and called it The PHP Extensions Collection. Hopefully in the future something better might be written.

I was not able to find a list of valid fileType (OSType) parameter’s anywhere and finally did looking in a header file. So I thought I’d post them here. This is Mac OS X 10.4 by the way. Here are the available kQTFileType’s:

kQTFileTypeAIFF = ‘AIFF’,
kQTFileTypeAIFC = ‘AIFC’,
kQTFileTypeDVC = ‘dvc!’,
kQTFileTypeMIDI = ‘Midi’,
kQTFileTypePicture = ‘PICT’,
kQTFileTypeMovie = ‘MooV’,
kQTFileTypeText = ‘TEXT’,
kQTFileTypeWave = ‘WAVE’,
kQTFileTypeSystemSevenSound = ’sfil’,
kQTFileTypeMuLaw = ‘ULAW’,
kQTFileTypeAVI = ‘VfW ‘,
kQTFileTypeSoundDesignerII = ‘Sd2f’,
kQTFileTypeAudioCDTrack = ‘trak’,
kQTFileTypePICS = ‘PICS’,
kQTFileTypeGIF = ‘GIFf’,
kQTFileTypePNG = ‘PNGf’,
kQTFileTypeTIFF = ‘TIFF’,
kQTFileTypePhotoShop = ‘8BPS’,
kQTFileTypeSGIImage = ‘.SGI’,
kQTFileTypeBMP = ‘BMPf’,
kQTFileTypeJPEG = ‘JPEG’,
kQTFileTypeJFIF = ‘JPEG’,
kQTFileTypeMacPaint = ‘PNTG’,
kQTFileTypeTargaImage = ‘TPIC’,
kQTFileTypeQuickDrawGXPicture = ‘qdgx’,
kQTFileTypeQuickTimeImage = ‘qtif’,
kQTFileType3DMF = ‘3DMF’,
kQTFileTypeFLC = ‘FLC ‘,
kQTFileTypeFlash = ‘SWFL’,
kQTFileTypeFlashPix = ‘FPix’,
kQTFileTypeMP4 = ‘mpg4′,
kQTFileTypePDF = ‘PDF ‘,
kQTFileType3GPP = ‘3gpp’,
kQTFileTypeAMR = ‘amr ‘,
kQTFileTypeSDV = ’sdv ‘,
kQTFileType3GP2 = ‘3gp2′,
kQTFileTypeAMC = ‘amc ‘,
kQTFileTypeJPEG2000 = ‘jp2 ‘

Hopefully this helps someone.

I am now working on an iCalendar / vCalendar parser that I can use in ACal for importing and exporting. I plan to do something cool with this so that we can interact dynamically with iCalendar apps like Sunbird and Apple’s iCal. For example you could publish you calendar to your web server’s live folder. And the iCalendar file in the live folder it automatically importing and if appropriate exported whenever one changes.

Like you could public your calendar from iCal. ACal sees it and imports it automatically. Somebody changes the event table in ACal and the change is automatically reflected in the file iCal published. You can then subscribe to the iCalendar file from iCal and have both always up to date.
Kind of cool I think.

Other than that I’m basically waiting for IE7 0.8.0 to be released so I can include it in ACal 3.0 alpha 3.

As of today in ACal you can have event notifications be sent to groups, users, and email addresses. Well technically here’s how it works.

When adding an event and you choose “Alarm: Email”, there is a recipient and message field. The recipient field can contain a mixture of groups, usernames, and raw email addresses seperated by a comma. For example if you wanted to send the event notification to the admin group and another user you could do this:
“Recipient: admin,otheruser”

Each recipient is validated. But say what if I type in “admin” and well that happens to be both a group and a username? Well the way it works right now this is how it goes:

1. If it’s a group add it to the groups array and go to the next one. Else{
2. If it’s a username add it to the users array and go on. Else {
3. If it’s a valid email address add it to the emails array and go on

And then some other code goes and gets all the email addresses from the groups and users and adds them to the emails array, then implodes it and sends it off to the alarm bot.
In the future I’ll make this more complicated. So you could do something like this:
“Recipient: group:admin,user:admin,myself@there.tld”
Sort of like variable declarations.

So that and some bug fixes is what I did today in ACal. Other than that I think tomorrow the wxPHP project may start.

Well after not working on ACal for some days today I added some more stuff and fixed some bugs in Users & Groups.

For example users can now have defined email addresses. This will allow event notifications to be sent via email to a group or specific username without know a specific email address. This is going to be a really great feature that normally is only found in desktop calendars, but we are working to change that.

It looks like I’m going to get the wxPHP project on SF.net. I have been working on the basic wxPHP skeleton lately. And today looked at the wxPython source code to see how they did it.
Mostly preparing. Once I have ownership of wxPHP@sf.net the source I have will be checked into CVS. (Wishing Sourceforge had SVN service as well)

Things will probably really take off on May 20th because then the two week waiting period ends. So hopefully this works. And hopefully my old iMac will be able to handle the constant compiling and recompiling.

And do I need help? You can be sure I do. If you would like to help out, contact me by either leaving a comment here with your email or see my user page.

Watching the Canadian news these days is as good as watching a good movie. With the the Liberal government being the bad guy and the Conservatives having fun with the Liberals fumbling of the ball.
If everything goes OK on Thursday the Liberal government will be toppled from power. And what a great day that will be.
All I can say is that it’s about time. Hopefully it happens.

We don’t need continued Liberal corruption. Not that the Conservatives are that great but at least they’re better than those Libs.