MacFlightGear is No More

As I’ve posted is the forums, I will no longer be working on the FlightGear flight simulator–of which I have been doing a Mac OS X distribution.

My reasons include the following:

1. It takes up too much time.
2. I’m sick of being the only one working on the Mac release.
3. FlightGear is so badly designed in some vital areas it makes me want to quit.
4. FlightGear is an unorganized project.
5. There should be no need for what I was doing.

So I quit. Let me know if you would like you continue the project, I can give you some pointers and help you get going but that’s about it.

First Sun Burn for 2006

Today my skin was burnt for the first time this year. And it sure felt good being up there on the roof with the all the warmth.
Finally the cold weather is gone and I only have to wear one layer instead of five.

New Time Statistic

You can update my time statistic for work to 67%.
It seems these days I work from sunrise to sundown. And I pretty much do. How things change in a year.
Maybe it’s time to start a night shift.

My goals for the first beta release which will be the first public release are listed below.
I’m not going to do an alpha series this time around because this way I can pick up where v3 left off.

1. Real time iCalendar syncronization.
2. Ability to manage events over the web.
3. Users and Groups.
4. Recurring events.

This will make the web calendar useful to most people, including myself. Also included of course is localization support which is better than anything I’ve ever built, and customizing via templates is easier and more flexible than ever.

The current source is available from the subversion repository.

The Zend Framework

Zend recently released their first preview release of the Zend Framework. At first I looked at it, and thought maybe when it matures I’ll start using it in ACal 4. I’ve already written a database layer for ACal which is in my opinion easier to use than the one in the Zend Framework. But after trying to figure out how to build the template system I decided to try the Zend_View component. Zend says they use that component on their web site already so it must be good enough to use.
So I checked it out, and after having incorporated into the ACal source code, I can tell you it’s staying. The concept is very similar to what I did in MachCMS. It’s very simple and yet works really well.

There are many things that are possible in ACal using the framework, some which I never even thought of before.

• Zend_Feed – RSS feed of latest events.
• Zend_Mail & Zend_Mime – Event notifications and related
• Create PDF of events.
• Zend_Search_Lucene – Search calendar. I doubt it’ll be used though because the technique may not work in our situation.
• Zend_Service – Allow images in events through Flickr.

Overall the framework is interesting and will become even more useful as development continues. And it may even make my life easier.

ACal 2.2.6 Released

This week I decided to fix the two security vulnerabilities reported by one named Alex in ACal 2.2.5.
So first I changed the code so instead of including the header and footer files they would be read as a file instead of as a PHP script. Second, I got rid of the cookie based authentication system and switched it over to session based authentication. I have to remove the “remember me” feature for now but at least the security hole is gone.

But even after looking at the 2.2.x source code, I can hardly believe so many people use ACal, but I guess at least it works, and now that I’ve released 2.2.6 they can rest in peace.

SubEthaEdit Replaced with Eclipse

I’ve been using SubEthaEdit for all my coding for some time. The things I liked about it was nice syntax coloring, block-edit, and automatic tab-indenting among other nice features.
But recently with the release of 2.3 they no longer offer it for free to non-profit users and because I’m not willing to pay $49 CAD for a little piece of software, I quickly looked for something else to replace SubEthaEdit on my system.

I tried TextForge, and others that I’ve forgotten about, but ended up with Eclipse. Once I had Eclipse installed I installed two plugins, PHPEclipse and Subclipse. And so as of today, Eclipse has taken over my cross platform development environment.
For Mac OS X specific projects, Apple’s Xcode is still the master.

How Can I Tell?

People have asked me, how can I tell if someone is a born-again Christian?

For some time I’ve had an about me on this site saying how I’m a Bible believing believer. I try to refrain from using the label Christian because of how that word is so misunderstood today.
I have placed my faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ. Who now stands between me and God the father making intercession for me so that I can enter into an eternal life of glory when He comes again.
He has paid the penalty for sin, none of us can pay, and now if only we let Him he gives us NEW life! A new life starting with the spirit within us transforming us into the image of Christ.

How do I know if you are one of of them? If you live like it! In your everyday life, in your talk and in your walk.
Gen 1:11 says, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”

If you are born again in the spirit of God you will produce fruit of the same matter. And that’s how I know you are real.

Automatic Schema Update

I’ve been working on ACal somewhat–on the database constructor method. I thought to myself, there’s a good chance that the SQL database schema is going to change in the future. It would be very convenient if ACal automatically updated the schema as needed. And so I got to work and after about 3 hours of work and debugging, and 101 lines of code, it’s a reality.

So now instead of doing this to upgrade the ACal calendar:

1. Backup data.
2. Delete database.
3. Reinstall calendar.
4. Import data.

It becomes a single step:

1. Upgrade calendar.

So much nicer if I do say so myself. No other PHP system I know of does this right now.

Don’t Click Here!

I really recommend everybody who even remotely works with web site to read the W3C article, “

Don’t use “click here” as link text

I’ve made the mistakes laid out there many times, but have really improved on that over the years. Now what really bugs me is when other people do it on their web pages

ACal Project Update 2006

Nothing has happened to ACal in a very long time. Currently there is an open security bug and version 3 is pretty much a mess.

I decided to start version 4 as I have time. Here’s the preliminary goals.

1. Should use a standard template system.
2. Include L10N support.
3. Be tightly integrated with iCalendar systems.
4. Use PHP 5.1′s new native timezone support.

So ACal 4 will require PHP 5.1. The main reason I want to start afresh is because in version 3 I went a bit to crazy wanting to make everything really cool. There was no template system which also caused a lot of pain in the long run. This is basically what needs to change.

ACal 4 will use PDO for the database system.
Also the source code is now hosted at Sourceforge.net again using their new Subversion service.