Introducing Slippy - HTML Presentations

Slippy is a HTML Presentation library written with jQuery, it takes a html file in and plays it in any browser.

It is optimal for programming-related talks since it includes a syntax highlighter and is very easy to use since it's just standard html markup with a few classes to enable specific functions.

If you are making a talk about Javascript, it can even execute your code samples live and displays alert() boxes nicely instead of using the ugly browser dialog, which -I tried it today- works quite well to prove your point interactively.

You can find the sources on github, view the example slide deck which includes some documentation or view the slides for the small talk I gave today about Javascript Events on my Slippy slide repository.

Obviously feedback is very much welcome and even though it's not perfect yet, I hope it'll be useful to others. More docs and styling fixes (the dark grey background wasn't too visible on a projector, my bad) should come soon as I have more talks planned, and the slide repository page will receive some love as well when I have time.

June 03, 2010 // News, PHP, JavaScript // Post a comment

HTML5 my ads

First came Flash. Then came advertisers that thought it'd be great to abuse it. Then came Flashblock^tm and friends. The geeks don't like Flash, it's evil.

Now the iPhone & iPad don't have Flash, but they're the shit. Advertisers want a part of the shit of course, and they can put shiny ads in native apps, but not in the open apps that are websites. Thank god there is HTML5, geeks love it, it's all great. So you've got solutions like SmokeScreen developing. It's Flash without Flash, everyone should be happy right?

Have you looked at their demos? Ads. Yes. I'm not saying they won't do more one day, but for now the target market seems to be advertisers, so that they can put out Flash-like ads in HTML5, reach the iDevices and to kill two birds with one stone, they'll reach the geeks that run Flashblock. And all that while interpreting Flash content so it'll most likely be more of a resource hog than Flash is.

What's the solution? CanvasBlock? Noscript? In the end people will find ways to abuse anything.

Of course Apple could come back to the table and implement Flash in the next iPhone OS, instead of having us suck up some half-working slow Flash ersatz on top of completely broken sites.

June 02, 2010 // Web, JavaScript // Post a comment

Unpredictable hashes for humans

It is not uncommon for web developers to have to generate random ids or hashes, for instance large scale project or frameworks may want to implement their own PHP session handlers either completely abstracted in their API, or overloading PHP's internal API using session_set_save_handler(). If you do so, unless you want to entrust PHP's core to do it, one thing you will have to take care of is generating unique session ids to send as a cookie to your users, allowing the session to persist. Other common use cases for such unique hashes is to generate CSRF tokens to insert in forms or URLs, and finally authentication tokens for email validation or such.

Proceed to the article to learn more about it in a -hopefully- easy to grasp way, this wasn't written for security experts but rather any PHP coder out there that is remotely interested in security, and you really should.

Continue reading...

May 10, 2010 // PHP // Post a comment

Project management in PHP with Arbit

I would like to attract everyone's attention on the 0.3-alpha release of Arbit.

For those that do not know Arbit yet, it is a project management and issue tracker build in PHP. It uses CouchDB as a storage backend by default but work to support RDBMS via PDO is in progress.

Interestingly, it also provides experimental support for continuous integration, also fully PHP-based, unlike other popular solutions. This is not enabled by default in this release since it isn't fully ready but feel free to stop by the irc channel (#arbit on freenode) to know more.

The full announcement contains details about what we fixed and implemented in the 0.3.

Get involved!

As all open source projects, Arbit needs your help, I joined the project early this year and we have had a few contributions from other people since then, but we can always use more help. Therefore if you are interested and wish to take part by developing new features, fixing bugs or at least reporting them, please don't hesitate and get in touch! And as Elizabeth Naramore's article recently pointed out most people are afraid to contribute, I would like to say that no matter how skilled you are, contributions are welcomed. We will provide assistance if needed.

April 05, 2010 // News, PHP // Post a comment

New design

In recent news, this site got a new design, I thought I could make the content more readable and accessible, so I killed my old templates and style sheets and started from scratch, without photoshop this time.

There is also mobile browser (android/iphone) support which is by the way achieved with this very interesting CSS media instruction:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mobile.css" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 800px)" />

This means any device with a monitor less than or exactly 800px wide will load the mobile.css file on top of the default one. Note that using media="handheld" is not working for recent smartphones that consider themselves greater than old school internet-enabled cellphones, so this is the only way to do it.

Any feedback, especially bad, is appreciated.

April 03, 2010 // News // Post a comment

Including open source in the hiring process

We were discussing the difficulty of the hiring process from a company point of view last week at the github meetup in Paris, and more specifically how hard it is to get quality people without relying on test assignments, which most agree are total bullshit, or on a couple of interviews, which can also be very misleading since it depends a lot on the person's social skills, or lack thereof.

One big thing that is overlooked in my opinion is participation in open source projects, be it a single patch or long term commitment. As an employer you can see that the guy has enough interest in programming in general that he has taken the extra step to contribute something, and also that his work was accepted by a peer as valid. It is obviously not the full story and we all know some open source projects' code is utter crap (disclaimer, this also applies to closed source software, you just don't get to see it), but I still believe it gives you a better metric than just some code the guy did (or didn't) code and is presenting to you during an interview.

You can use ohloh to track your open-source-CV of sorts, and I would very much like it if more companies would push the open source involvement forward in their job ads, probably not as a requirement but at least as a big plus. It would benefit both companies that are trying to hire good people, and good people to be recognized. Of course it would also benefit the open source community at large if the work you do there gets you more recognition, pushing more people to take the leap to contribute. It is definitely helping already, if only for the contacts you get, which are always good when looking for a job, but increasing the perceived benefit of contributing to the open source world would be great, so I would very much like if all you HR people would give it a thought, and other readers please mention it to HR in your company, or your friends looking for work, your little brother starting to study, anyone can contribute.

Any other ideas on how to find great developers? Is your company using open source as a criteria? Did it help?

February 22, 2010 // PHP // Post a comment

Symfony Live 2010 - Symfony2, speaking and stuff

Overall the conference was pretty interesting since I don't have a lot of experience with symfony I learned quite a bunch of things about it's usage. I also met a lot of nice people, and ended the trip yesterday evening at the github meetup, after going for food with a couple phpBB guys who are really much nicer than the forum software they stand for. They were also very open to us bashing phpBB and seem to be headed towards a brighter future for the next version, which I'm sure nobody will complain about.

I also had my first session at a conference, accompanying Lukas though so I wasn't really flying by myself yet but it was still a nice and interesting (and stressful) experience that I will try to renew. We didn't get all that much feedback by the way so feel free to do so (also here if you are too lazy to register on joind.in), the organizers need it and obviously I wonder how the talk was received as well.

As for Symfony 2 (which now comes with a capital S please), I kind of saw the flexibility coming since we already implemented the dependency injection container in our Okapi framework at Liip, but I was still impressed by the jump away from symfony (1) Fabien conceded, many people would have tried to keep more BC at the cost of going forward, and I'm really glad he didn't, I think it will pay in the long run. The new version of the framework will basically be able to be totally ripped apart to fit your needs better if you have high performance requirements, which was the major pain point of symfony 1 as far as I'm concerned, and one of our reasons to keep working on Okapi which is pretty much a baseline micro-framework you can build upon. We will have to see if adopting Symfony in its place will make sense, but it sounds promising and it would offload some maintenance away from us which is always good.

Obviously Symfony 2 isn't going to be stable for a while, and there are some rough edges that still need to be discussed and improved, mostly in the way bundles are handled imo, but it looks very good already and I'll definitely give it a try asap. I would also encourage everyone to do so, especially framework developers, because the dependency injection is a pretty awesome thing to have, both for the testability of code and flexibility of the development process. Although if it's your only interest in it, checking out the Okapi 2 core (or the liip.to app ported to use it) is probably easier as there is less code to read, and we didn't add any of the abstraction to the dependency injection layer that Symfony 2 has.

February 18, 2010 // PHP // Post a comment