BlueFire Data Solutions

So I’ve spent the better part of a week and a half/two weeks working on getting up to speed on Symfony, the PHP framework I finally settled down to using.  If you haven’t heard about it, I strongly suggest you check it out.  It’s a very user-friendly framework, with the ability to build on the base code and extremely easy to get into.

Symfony Project

There is some excellent documentation to read – including an open sourced copy of the printed manual, which is updated with the latest and greatest data about each version (currently running at 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2).

I decided to start running through the Askeet tutorial – which is currently just for version 1.0, but stubborn as I am, I’ve been working with the latest version of 1.1, with the intent of moving to 1.2 when it becomes fully stable.  If you are up to the challenge yourself, feel free to drop a line if you have any questions, or check out the community forums – you’ll see me up there, mainly in the Askeet forum atm (DBA_Alex, just fyi =p ).

I have gotten up to day 11, which is where I’ll be picking back up tomorrow.  I’m truly looking forward to when the project team finally updates the askeet tutorial for the other symfony versions.

Anywho, tonight I’m getting back to work on updating the blog’s design to match the rest of the site – something I hope to complete before the week is out.  Once I finish that, I’ll be pushing out a few tutorials that I’ve held onto which I’ve been polishing up – one on Pentaho report creation, and another on using the php sparkline program.

Tags: Symfony

Well, the past weekend was fun – spent a good chuck of time hacking my PDA to have a better touch-based interface. This all started when I saw this over at Lifehacker.

Now the main reason why I wanted to do this was because I never really liked my PDA – Windows Mobile is not a very user friendly interface. I like things to have the capability of being very complex (i.e. being able to do all kinds of time saving features) but also ergonomic.

With the touch interface of the iPhone, I’m able to add that layer of ergonomics that has been lacking. Yes yes, I know I was able to use all kinds of software before the iPhoneesque interface, but again, it’s about the usability not just the functions.

So anyway, I got to digging around on the Internet and found a much better tutorial on how to perform such an interface conversion: Hackaddict.net

Following Jen’s lovely guide, I was able to get my PDA using almost all of the software she suggested.

Here’s my PDA’s install of S2U2 – it was once called Slide2Unlock. Either way – it’s a cool little app.

Then of course, there is the main application, rlToday. This app gives your PDA the basic iPhone-esque interface.

I’m now starting to play around with Touch Commander and UltimateLaunch – just google them, though they are not free, they get your PDA even more touch-interfacing to your apps. I’ll probably write up a review about them soon.

In other news, I do have some tutorials I am writing – but I’ve not finished either of them up. Will get them up here soon though.

Tags: hackaddict.net, iPhone, lifehacker, PDA