Griffin Interactive: Misc Archives

Zends PHP Web application framework

November 02, 2005

Zend have announced that they are working (with some industry players) in developing a standard PHP application framework.

Hopefully this will cement PHP use as a serious development language, I believe more often than not developers are put off by poor development practices when using PHP.

With PHP 5.0 and a Standard development framework (backed by industry players) then it is sure to add more clout to a already very popular programming language. And yes I say programming language NOT scripting language.

If Microsoft own .Net and SUN own Java then I wonder who will step in and fund the majority towards a credible PHP development framework? Project participants currently include: IBM, Oracle, MySQL and Intel.

JCB Song

September 23, 2005

jcssong.co.uk, created by monkeehub.com is a pure masterpiece and it is made even better if you are a fan of Transformers, and the A-Team. Check out the JCB Song music video too.

Google Blog Search

September 16, 2005

With the ever increasing popularity of Blog sites Google have decided to create a customised search site dedicated to Blogs. Called Google Blog Search.

I guess Blogs have infiltrated the Google search index on mass, and with many refers between blogs it means that most blog sites are top of the search pile. Maybe this the the sole reason to split them up into their own separate search site???

What I would really like to know is, how do Google define a blog site. When is a blog not a blog?

Make a difference

July 02, 2005

Every single day, 30,000 children die, needlessly, of extreme poverty.

This time round Live Aid is not about making a donation toward easing poverty in Africa, instead all that is asked is for you sign a petition to demonstrate that you care, and let the 8 wealthest countries of the world stand up and listen.

Sign now

Cillit Bang - Glass, Metal, Ceramic, Stone

May 17, 2005

You've got to see this!

Cillit Bang is a new household cleaner that has saturated the UK media recently. The lucky Kazoo website features a remix of this annoying advert. But it remixes it to a hardcore house music track.

You should see what they've done to the esure advert too.

Page sizes

March 20, 2005

I've created this table of page sizes mainly for my own reference. But it could be useful for anybody else who has trouble remembering the exact pixel dimensions for standard page sizes.

Paper name	Paper size		Pixels	Resolution
Paper name	inches	cm	Pixels	Resolution
9x11	9 x 11	22.86 x 27.94	2700 x 3300	300
10x11	10 x 11	25.4 x 27.94	3000 x 3300	300
10x14	10 x 14	25.4 x 35.56	3000 x 4200	300
11x17	11 x 17	27.94 x 43.18	3300 x 5100	300
12x11	12 x 11	30.49 x 27.95	3600 x 5100	300
15x11	15 x 11	38.10 x 27.94	4500 x 3300	300
A0 (841 x 1189 mm)	33.11 x 46.81	84.1 x 118.9	9933 x 14100	300
A1 (594 x 841 mm)	23.39 x 33.11	59.4 x 84.1	7017 x 9933	300
A2	16.54 x 23.39	42 x 59.4	4961 x 7017	300
A3	11.69 x 16.54	29.7 x 42	3508 x 4961	300
A3 Extra	12.68 x 17.52	32.2 x 44.5	3803 x 13350	300
A3 Rotated	16.54 x 11.69	42 x 29.7	4961 x 8910	300
A4	8.268 x 11.693	21 x 29.7	2480 x 3508	300
A4 Extra	9.27 x 12.69	23.55 x 32.23	2781 x 9669	300
A4 Plus	8.27 x 12.99	21 x 33	2481 x 3897	300
A4 Rotated	11.69 x 8.27	29.7 x 21	3507 x 2481	300
A5	5.83 x 8.27	14.8 x 21	1749 x 2481	300
A5 Extra	6.85 x 9.25	17.4 x 23.5	2055 x 2775	300
A5 Rotated	8.27 x 5.83	21 x 14.8	2481 x 1749	300
A6	4.13 x 5.83	10.5 x 14.8	1239 x 1749	300
A6 Rotated	5.83 x 4.13	14.8 x 10.5	1749 x 1239	300

Social Bookmarks

February 18, 2005

If you haven't heard about Social Bookmarking by now then where have you been?

Web sites such as delicious, spurl, furl, simpy, openbm and linkroll all allow you to add your own website bookmarks to their site. You can reference your favorite bookmarks at anytime by logging in or by visiting your own personal link (e.g. http://del.icio.us/cueball).

There is also a site called spiderous that takes a feed from all the popular social bookmarking sites for your viewing pleasure.

Happy New Year!

January 01, 2005

I'd like to wish each and everyone of you a very Happy New Year.

Beer logo madness

December 04, 2004

Lots and lots of beer logos and insignias in very high quality eps format, doubt i'll ever need them but here they are in one place, for future reference.

Old version

June 10, 2004

Have you ever gone to download a favourite piece of software only to find that its nolonger available or the latest version is available now at a price?

OldVersion.com is a site that has a selection of old utilites, there are not that many, but some may just be of use.

Another useful link can be found at evolt, it is a browser archive, very useful if you need to see how your website's look on out of date or obscure browsers.

Web Stressed out?

June 08, 2004

Keeping on the theme of open source software applications, here is a list of stress testing tools for your online web applications. Ideal for quantifying performance and discovering problems before you go to market.

Movable Type alternatives

May 13, 2004

Here is a selection of realistic alternative blog / CMS systems:-

Lamp - Blogging

Java

CMS Portals

Price to pay for MT success

Today saw the much awaited release of Movable Type 3.0, alas Six Apart have introduced a new pricing scheme that has got the whole MT community up in arms. The reason for this is the large price hike on the back of a release that only seems to differ by the fact that the comment system has been redesigned, and this I’m sure was only because of the spamming vulnerability in the previous version.

However there is still a free version available but this now comes with a restriction of only being allowed one author and three blogs, and therein lies the problem this restriction traps the user. You may never need more than one author and only ever use one blog but it’s the fact that you are being forced to pay for a possible future upgrade.

I believe that many users would not mind paying a small fee for the software as is, with no restrictions at least for non-commercial use. I bet there would have been far fewer disgruntled MT users today if a fee of say $49 dollars was asked for.

If Six Apart stick with this pricing scheme and maintain author/blog restrictions on the free version I expect MT plugin developers to dwindle vastly in number. Maybe to the point where the only plugins we see are from Six Apart themselves or 3rd parties who charge per plugin. Either way people will migrate to a similar system as is always the case. Heck you find this in open source software all the time. An yet that’s just the point Movable type has never been Open Source, its a product from a small start-up company that needs to make a profit, I just happen to think they've got their pricing scheme all wrong.

16k, 48k and 128k

May 07, 2004

If like me you were introduced to programming back in the days of the Sinclair Spectrum and also found 8 colour games that load on tape amazing then you will find this funny.

hey hey 16K

bobschneidermusic.com

April 29, 2004

Bob Schneider has a great looking website which includes full play of this latest album I'm Good Now - its laced with audio commentary, which makes this an original presentation. (The site requires flash).

[Designed by sofake.com]

Wonderful work of Carl de Keyzer

April 26, 2004

Carl de Keyzer has a wonderful portfolio of images at his site (created by Group94), The flash driven portfolio contains well over 1000 images and is presented with an introduction screen that is one of the very few intros that ive actually wanted to see again as opposed to hitting the skip button.

The portfolio is so vast I wont even attempt to mention its content here, go and see for yourself at carldekeyzer.com

Text Organism

April 07, 2004

Compose a ditty, create a random discription, visualise alphabetic DNA and publish an image entirely from ASCII. Now your close to wonder what is typorganism.

A clean Spellchecker

March 25, 2004

The Medical University of South Carolina has created a spellchecker that is accessible via a SOAP webservice. This is very useful for somebody like me whose spelling is atrochous.

The site also shows how you can call the service via a simple javascript bookmarklet to post to the webservice.

Speak and Spell

March 24, 2004

Play speak and spell online with this wacky flash version - not many words know, but a great nostalgia trip.

March 06, 2004

The one thing I really missed from Audio galaxy was its facility by which it showed you other bands that might appeal to your taste.

Well horay for Music Plasma it does the same type of thing, you enter your favorite band / pop group and it responses with a list of similar groups that may also interest you.

Give it ago. (I'm sure ive see the GUI before from another visual search engine).

Game Links

March 03, 2004

There are quite a few good 'free' online games floating around the web at the moment. They are so addictive I’ve decided to add a games area to my links / bookmarks so I don’t have to hunt around for them in emails.

I've added links to some all time classics including Pac-man, bomb jack, Tetris and loads more. It’s amazing what you can do with Flash.

ASCII Generator

February 29, 2004

Create a fancy ASCII logo using this online ASCII generator just type what you want to appear select from the range of over 135 font styles and hit the button and then just cut n paste it where ever you want.

Sing us all a song

February 24, 2004

I saw this a couple of months ago but forgot the link, now ive found it again so ive blogged it for reference.

Its a funky flash application created by Erik Bunger for the Swedish radio station Sveriges Radio.

Just type in the words you want and press the sing button and the words will be sung back to you from a database of song clips.

More TV Nostalgia

February 23, 2004

After looking up an old British Kids TV programme called "number 73" I discovered links to more TV nostalgia from the 1980's. So here they are for future trips down memory lane.

Free Stock Photography

February 19, 2004

I've been busy adding to the list of 'free' stock photos in my links section. These are online photos that are totally free to use. Sure you could use google image search but are those images totally royalty free?

The quality of the links differ from amature photography to almost professional looking portfolios. When I get 'round to it I will rate them to show the most useful resources.

Please report any broken links!

Become an Internet radio DJ

February 17, 2004

Listen to amateur internet radio stations using the free destiny media player from Pirate Radio Network. Or pay $39 and download their Internet Radio broadcasting software and become a DJ within minutes.

Ive listen to a few stations using the RadioDestiny player but alot of them seem to be broadcasting at low bitrates (10 kpbs).

I checked out one of the Radio station's websites this site must win the crap design award for 2004. Dont take my word for it have a look frankievradioshow.com

Costly Valentines day

February 14, 2004

All the local restaurants cash in on Valentines day using the 'set menu' method.

I decided to take my wife out for a Valentines day meal, we sat down to eat only to find that the usual menu was replaced for a 'special valentines' menu. Which oddly enough comprised of only one set meal, thats fair enough but it was the usual optional set meal at three times the usual price. Nice one!!

Blogging within the workplace

February 04, 2004

Richard MacManus of www.readwriteweb.com envisages widespread use of web blogging within the workplace this year. The reason for this is that he along with many others (including me) believe that blogging could be used to fill the void of communication found within many medium to large corporations.

The quote below reminds me very much of the current situation within my workplace:

"One project team often won't know what another project team is doing, even though there may be a lot of knowledge they could share that would be mutually beneficial and therefore benefit the company as a whole."

Where I work we are currently attempting to tie project team blogs together into a departmental intranet, it is hoped that this will open up communication channels and produce the project awareness that is dearly lacking.

We will only discover the fruits of our labour within the comming months. However I am slightly dubious on how much information will be freely broadcast across departments as similarly suited teams struggle for supremacy.

TV adverts 1980's style

February 03, 2004

x-entertainment has a list of old American 1980's commercials (Mediaplayer format), most of them didnt make it to the UK, but im sure I remember a few. (Doublemint, Speak and Spell).

Prank calls on the Radio

January 30, 2004

I stubbled across this streaming internet radio station Radio Prank whilst trying to find some of the old Jerky Boys material.

Football badges

January 24, 2004

Just a selection of my old football icons once used for a divison 2 league table back in 2000.

Installing MySQL

January 20, 2004

The following links take you through a step by step installation of MySQL on Linux Redhat.

MVC PHP

January 18, 2004

Back in November (2003) I blogged an entry about php.MVC, with a need to pursue this futher i've discovered a whole host of sites all regarding the Model-View-Controller and PHP.

php|architect MVC (free download - registration required)
php|architect discussion
MVC Frameworks written in php
(Includes: PhpMvc, Phrame, eocene, Ambivalence, Krysalis and more)
php patterns
Sitepoint thread about PHP templating systems (useful for MVC)
BinaryCloud
rwfPHP
Horde

LDAP - Public access playground

So you just want to test your LDAP application against a pre-populated database, and there's no time to install your own and add dummy data.

Why not try one of these LDAP servers that are set-up specifically for this reason.

To access:-

Novell developer labs -LDAP public access server

To install:-

A dot com for 2004

January 09, 2004

Happy new year!!

A new year and on the off chance I noticed that www.griffininteractive.com was available to buy, so although by now it really doesn't matter I just couldn't help myself.

What about Bob?

January 01, 2004

I was hoping that Bob Monkhouse would get a proper tribute from the BBC, instead there was a slight mention and a re-run of an old showing of room 101.

I had the upmost respect for Bob and hopefully the beeb will dust off some of his work for us some time soon, even if its only one of his radio programmes.

Robert Monkhouse 1928 - 2004

Christmas reindeer

December 21, 2003

Little did Dave know wearing that many party hats made him look like a Christmas reindeer.

Badger badger badger

December 17, 2003

Badger badger badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom.

This seems to be everywhere at the moment so here it is again!!

Web design practices

December 12, 2003

Webdesignpractices.com is an interesting site that studies various HCI design practices, the articles are backed up by real-life research and therefore is not just based on a single persons opinion.

Search engine tools

December 11, 2003

There are a host of very useful search-engine utilities available at searchengineworld.com these include a webpage size checker, search engine result predictor (like Poodle Predictor), Keyword Density Analyzer and more.

Also see this site webconfs here you will find links to a search-engine spider simulator, back link checker through Google, and a similar page checker.

Googles poodle

Poodle predictor is a site utility that predicts your search-engine results, you just enter your web address and bingo a list appears with a prediction of how a search engine such as Google will return results.

You can use this to see how user friendly your result descriptions will be, and refine them for the better.

It also spiders the results for all other links within your web page.

Styles in the Crib

November 26, 2003

A CSS crib sheet well worth referencing from mezzoblue. It contains loads of CSS related issues all in one place and is often updated if and when new things are discovered.

Restricting bandwidth

November 25, 2003

So your Internet connection speed is super fast, but your client's isnt. To make sure you dont get carried away with bandwidth hungry pages test them all first using a slow down proxy.

Using Sloppy you can set your download limit to mimic a dial-up modem, and using a timer you can produce a rought estimate on how long a page will take to download.

Another application that simulates web speed is available from xar.com, this shareware app also gives download timings for each individual file.

Lots of buttons

November 13, 2003

1652 buttons and counting at gtmcknight.com, why not upload your own buttons (they must follow the same format!!). You can also download a zip of the current library.

Lots of logos

November 06, 2003

There are over 5000 free logos in Illustrator format available from this Russian site logotypes.ru. I swear they will be useful one day.

Vector Tracing

October 30, 2003

With the sudden requirement to turn some images into vector graphics I turned to look at these.

Vector eye
Autotrace (Open Source)

Autotrace also has a number of GUI implementations created by other Open source developers.

Flash back

It’s been a while since Flash graced my desktop.

It also took a while to remember how to move all my scene objects. The problem occurs when you want to resize the scene document. It would be ideal if once resized the scene objects would take up relative positions to the new size, alas they don’t.

I finally found the solution it entails using "Edit Multiple Frames" icon and setting this to cover the whole timeline, selecting all (ctrl-a), then you can finally move all your objects, this will not affect motion or shape tweens.

3ds Max 6.0

October 28, 2003

Max 6.0 hits us with a whole host of improvements and new features. Check out the full lowdown at the 3ds site.

Schematic View
Particle Flow
Vertex Paint
mental ray&®3.2
reactor®2 dynamics
Dynamic Shader UI
Network Render to Texture
Network Region Render
Spline/Patch Modeling
Relax UV's
Mirror Skin Weights
Edit Vertex Normals
Shell Modifier
Load/Save Rendering Settings

Smashing Pumpkins!

October 22, 2003

As its that time of year again I thought I'd blog this site. Its all about the art of extreme pumpkin carving.

BTW, the puking pumpkin is my favorite.

The Lynx effect

October 16, 2003

Im going to have to put all my favelets / bookmarklets in one place, but until I do here is a favelet (by pixy) that lets you view your page as it would be seen via Lynx.

You know what to do, just add this to you favorites.

LynxView of the document

Viewing that link reminds me I must use lists for my side links :o|

Regular Expressions

October 13, 2003

Here's a site I wish I would have found a while ago when I needed an expression for UK post codes. Its got a whole host of expressions ready to cut n paste :)

Making your site search engine frendly

September 25, 2003

Here is an article at scribbling.net that looks at ways to aid googlebot's ability to find your website.

Creating a photo album with Movable Type

September 19, 2003

Movable Type does not come with the functionality to upload batches of images, however there are a number of tips and hacks available to create a Photo-Log type gallery.

The remit for my image gallery is:

Upload images in a batch
Resize images into thumbnails
Searchable
Set access rights to certain albums
Template driven
XML representation

Not much to ask, but the most important I guess is the batch upload, I dont want to spend ages uploading a file at a time.

Backup MySQL database

September 17, 2003

Ive logged this one for future reference, its a little batch file used to automate the mysqldump command. It uses the 7-zip utility to compress the sql files http://www.7-zip.org.

If you want to do this in 'nix simply write a BASH script using the tar tool to compress the sql files, and add the script to your cron list.
#!/bin/sh mysqldump -uroot -ppwd --opt db1 > /sqldata/db1.sql mysqldump -uroot -ppwd --opt db2 > /sqldata/db2.sql

cd /sqldata/ tar -zcvf sqldata.tgz *.sql

rem ----------------------------------------------------------- rem backup.bat - No Zip File rem Filename: C:\DATABASE-2003-09-23-1100.sql rem ----------------------------------------------------------- @ECHO OFF



FOR /F "TOKENS=2-4 DELIMS=/ " %%A in ('Date /T') DO SET DV=%%C-%%A-%%B 

FOR /F "TOKENS=5-6 DELIMS=:. " %%D IN ('ECHO.^|TIME') DO SET TV=%%D%%E 

SET SAVPATH=C:\ 

SET FILENAME=DATABASE-%DV%-%TV%.sql 

C:\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe --quote-names --opt -uuser -ppassword database > %SAVPATH%%FILENAME% 

rem ----------------------------------------------------------- 

rem backup.bat - Zips SQLFile(s) using 7zip 

rem Filename: C:\SQL-2003-09-23-1100.zip 

rem ----------------------------------------------------------- 

@ECHO OFF 

FOR /F "TOKENS=2-4 DELIMS=/ " %%A in ('Date /T') DO SET DV=%%C-%%A-%%B 

FOR /F "TOKENS=5-6 DELIMS=:. " %%D IN ('ECHO.^|TIME') DO SET TV=%%D%%E 

SET SAVPATH=C:\ 

SET FILENAME=SQL-%DV%-%TV%.zip 

C:\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe --quote-names --opt -uuser -ppassword database > database.sql 

C:\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe --quote-names --opt -uuser -ppassword database > database.sql 

C:\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe --quote-names --opt -uuser -ppassword database > database.sql 

IF EXIST %SAVPATH%%FILENAME% ( 

del %SAVPATH%%FILENAME% 

C:\Progra~1\7-ZIP\7zn a -tzip %SAVPATH%%FILENAME% -mx *.sql 

) ELSE ( 

C:\Progra~1\7-ZIP\7zn a -tzip %SAVPATH%%FILENAME% -mx *.sql 

)

DEL *.sql

SOS Math

September 01, 2003

Just discovered a Math site which would have saved me hours of headaches during those Math lessons on subjects such as Advanced calculus, series and Homogeneous Linear Equations.

Its a bit late now but I will use this as a reference if I ever have to solve a fast fourier transform anytime soon.

Colour

Here are some very good online colour tools.
Ideal for chosing that all important colour scheme for your next web site design.

4096 Color Wheel

ColorMatch 5K

The Color Schemer

Color Blender

Another colour blender - Added feature allows you to download colours as Illustrator/Photoshop palletes (Very handy)

Colour Picker

Back to School

July 06, 2003

W3Schools is a great reference site, it is structured like a reference library so it is easy to find the all important piece of information quickly.

Aswell as reference there are also many tutorials, which include basic HTML and XHTML, to advanced XML, XSL and SOAP tutorials.

References include:

- HTML 4.01
- XHTML
- CSS2

interdependent select boxes

June 10, 2003

Here is a simplified version of the classic interdependent select box (this is where the selection of one item from select box A automatically updates the items within select box B).

However instead of using two select boxes and lots of client-side scripting we use radio buttons for the first selection and a drop-down for the next option. This achieves the same result by using CSS and the DOM reducing the required scripting to only ten lines of code, and creating a design that is usable across all the standard compliant browsers.

View the example here

TV theme text generator

Now you no longer have to generate meaningless amounts of latin garbage to fill up spacers use this to create retro TV theme waffle.

TV theme text generator

While I remember the Tab

May 26, 2003

This site was mentioned by Zeldman because of their really good implementation of CSS Tabular menus, so thats why im documenting it here for future reference.

The site also gives reference to these css menus.
Read on:-

Why its so easy to crash Internet Explorer

May 07, 2003

Here is a simple piece of html mark-up that will cause IE 5.0 + to crash.

And here is the link to prove it!

Is the Web dead?

May 01, 2003

After working in the Internet industry now for more than eight years, I dont know about you but im finding that more and more web sites are closing. Or being updated so infrequently that its almost years before you see anything new.

My own home towns' website hasnt changed for so long that the copyright logo is dated 1999, Reading Town

Visual Thesaurus

April 24, 2003

Don't get stuck for a word again with this nifty online thesaurus, has a really neat front-end too.

Check it out here

New look, New Hosting and New framework.

April 23, 2003

Its all brand new, I have finally moved my website to a faster hosting service and now use a faster publishing framework, called Movabletype.

I chose it over a number of different frameworks mainly due to the fact that it precompiles and caches the pages hence making them quicker to load. Also the templating system is highly decoupled from the backend logic, making it easier to maintain and produce cleaner mark-up.

I may decide to use Postnuke again however I think i'll wait until it incorporates a cache and templating system.

Peaceful expression

April 09, 2003

Brushstroke.tv is the site of 'Melanie Goux' a motion graphic designer from Atlanta, Georgia, US.

Visit the poster of peace competition and express your feelings about the current war. The deadline for entry is 17 April, 2003. And don't forget to read the rules before you submit your entry.

Confused about DVD-R/RW formats?

January 23, 2003

Don't be confused about DVD write formats
DVDplusRW.org gives us the FAQ's about all of them. So to learn about DVD recording click here

IE Booster

January 22, 2003

Web Browser Extensions for Internet Explorer 5/6

IE Booster is the product name for a collection of tools that extend the context menu of Internet Explorer. These tools are very handy for the developer and include the following features:

Highlight CSS specific elements.

Show Server Response

Show referenced Stylesheets

Show Images

Resize Window

Download now from paessler.com

How to stop the dreaded Form Element see through bug!

July 19, 2002

So how do we stop our form elements in particular select boxes from always being displayed when we place another CSS layer on top of them?

This is a bug with IE and Netscape, and its not just form elements, it is also an issue with Applets, Plug-ins and other OS Controls. According to Webreference there are no fixes to this issue however we've found a website that seems to disagree.

Positioned Elements and OS Controls, Applets and Plug-ins

WebFX have create a web site devoted to the implementation of DHTML / JavaScript widgets, one of which is the XMenu. This menu system has been developed so that it can display the menu parts above the form elements, that would otherwise appear straight through.

Okay so wheres the snag, well there is one, the script incorporates functionality that is built into the Windows IE 5.5 + web browser, it uses the 'popup Object' so only use it if your intended audience is ONLY I.E.

Griffin Interactive