Category Archives: Software

Looking for Diagram, Workflow and Chart designer.

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At the moment I need to write a couple of work flows and charts so I can be able to demonstrate the usage of a tool I’m currently developing.

The only tool that I knew that could do this kind of work (on Linux) was Dia. Although it has a lot of features it seems (I’m not sure, since I’ve only used it once) that there aren’t much sheets available to download, and I don’t like the ones provided by default.

Later I’ve decided to look for another program, and I’ve found Kivio an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application integrated in The KOffice Project.

Kivio provides by default a couple of nice sheets, so let’s hope it works as expected.

Joomla! 1.5.6 Released

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Till a couple of days now I was using Joomla! 1.5.5 but yesterday a new release came out.

This new release is a security release made to solve a high level security issue, then it’s recommended to upgrade immediately.

Some websites are already being owned because of this security flaw, do not risk to get owned too and update your website software as soon as possible.

If you need help read the migration/upgrade instructions in here.

Joomla!

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Last week I’ve wrote in here that I was looking for a CMS with a couple of specs. After a lot of reading I’ve decided to bet on Joomla!, although it has a couple of bad reviews it fulfills my needs (I hope).

At the moment I’m running Joomla! 1.5.5 stable.

Yesterday after I installed the software I’ve looked for some tutorials that would guide me through the process of developing a component for this version of Joomla!.

It would be expectable to have some great tutorials in Joomla! Developer Network but to be honest I’ve got to say that the ones that are available are a bit poor, and most of Documentation is written for the older versions.

After a lot of searches I’ve found these tutorials and they are great, at least for helping me out in these first steps.

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Content Management System (CMS)

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In the past few days I’ve been reading a lot of reviews about Content Management Systems (CMS) at OpenSourceCMS. Great site by the way, lots of useful informations in there.

Although the site above has a lot of informations it’s really hard to find a CMS that fits your needs, most of the people who use this kind of tools are regular users and their main goal is to install and manage the CMS with success.

That way most of the reviews that I’ve found are written without a developers perspective.

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Gnome took the weekend off…

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Last week I’ve been installing and uninstalling stuff from my laptop trying to enable my webcam on Linux, unfortunately with no success.

If anyone has some informations on it tell me something, it’s a Lifetech FlexCam 760MP.

In the meanwhile last Friday I went to Évora and turned my laptop off.

Yesterday I got back, turned my laptop on, and for my surprise Gnome was gone too.. maybe he decided to take the weekend off.

It seems that something got screwed up while I was trying to enable my webcam and I didn’t noticed it till then.

Test your web design in different browsers

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How many times have you thought: “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool where I could test my website layout, and see how it appears in different browsers..” ?

Well I’ve got news for you!

The tool you’ve been waiting for already exists, or at least something similar to what you (I) have expected.

It’s name is Browsershots and it’s main goal is to take screenshots of your website in different browsers running on different operating systems.

Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

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That’s right new version of Fedora is out, this time it’s codename is Sulphur.

Yesterday I’ve downloaded it and burned it into a DVD. A couple of minutes ago I tried to install it with no success, since it kept giving me kernel panic when booting:

VFS: Cannot open root device “<NULL>” or unknown-block(253,0)
Please append a correct “root=” boot option.

Since I haven’t much time to spend on this at the moment, I decided to re-install Fedora 8. For my surprise it kept crashing on /sbin/loader while booting from DVD.

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emesene

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Till a couple of minutes ago I was using aMSN, now I changed to emesene.

One thing that made me change was the annoying “titles”. If you are listing your contacts by group it will slow down your client, this only happends in 0.97 version, in older versions I didn’t noticed this reaction.

About emesene I’m happy with it, it has the regular features that an MSN client should have and a couple of new ones. I can say that it is a Windows MSN clone without the crappy features.

It’s also written in Python, and that means it is portable.

IEs4Linux

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One of the worst problems a developer can have while developing a web application is to make it compatible to the maximum browsers possible.

If you are running Linux and don’t have Microsoft Windows installed, or you have it but you don’t want to switch to it just for testing your application in Internet Explorer.

Happily you can use IEs4Linux to test your application, currently supported versions are 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 (beta).

You may read the installation instructions here.

An alternative to this is, if you have Microsoft Windows installed, it’s partition mounted and wine installed you may run the Internet Explorer that you have installed there.

Symfony Framework

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A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a PHP framework after a few searches I found one that fits my needs, and that is Symfony framework!

Some of the features are:

  • Built on top of PHP 5, for me that’s a plus since I’m only working with PHP 5 at the moment.
  • MVC support makes application building faster and easier.
  • CRUD generator will reduce code repetitions and useless boring time spent on building this tasks.
  • Lots of support, when you start learning something new, all the support available you can get is a plus.
  • And a lot of other features, such as: Ajax support, smart URL’s, cache management, multilingualism and l18N support, scaffolding, among others. You can check the features list at Symfony Project website.

The only thing I think it’s a bit hard, is the learning curve. What I mean is, you really have to “waste” some time to get to know how the application works, but I think in the end it will compensate.