The block party is over, and the concert
went reasonably well: rain on monday, rain on wednesday, and
nice weather on tuesday, just when we played !Next concert: "Immeubles en fête"
"Immeubles en fête" is a yearly block party held everywhere in France.
Come and hear us at the Villebon event, on 2007-05-29 19:00 to 22:00 !
Some designers will never learn
It's 2007, people ! Rejecting Opera for its lack of standards compliance and advocating MSIE and Netscape Navigator instead is just ... well, you know what.
Can't but wonder whether they heard about the Acid test, or about that small, relatively unknown browser named Firefox.
New release system for OSInet contributions
The "heavy" modules OSInet contributes to Drupal (G2, Helpdesk, Zeitgeist) have now been placed under the new release system.
Branches and releases have been created where applicable:
Floating menu in Mediawiki 1.7
Just a quick note about Mediawiki today, because I noticed I hadn't been writing about software for quite some time.
I just installed Mediawiki 1.7 on a server, and was annoyed by its table of contents (TOC) being in the normal HTML flow under the default "Monobook" skin, unlike Dokuwiki, for which the default skin neatly places the TOC on the top right of the main area. Of course, you can always use per-page directives to define this, like {{TOCright}}, but this is tedious to do on every page.
After considering alternative skins, I figured it might not be that much to tweak, and indeed it is quite simple once you know where rules are located. so here we go:
SOAP box: accessing VIES from PHP-GTK
With OSInet having a large part of its business with suppliers and customers within the EU at large, I often find myself having to check the validity of the VAT information for third parties, and the EU VIES database comes in handy.
However,
although I had been discussing remote access
using XML-RPC or SOAP as early at 2004 with the database
administrators, the UI had remained web 1.0-only until quite
recently (apparently march 2007), when an
AXIS
SOAP service went online, just as I had suggested three years
ago. So I figured I really couldn't let the occasion pass, and did a
PHP-GTK client to VIES, which happens to be my first production
SOAP application in PHP-GTK, previous ones having always been
done in Pascal using Delphi or Kylix.
Let's see how this can be done... (code updated 2010-09-21)
String gauge and metric units
For some reason, I had never bothered to pursue the relationship between string gauge and actual string diameter. However, when I sorted my stash of old strings after putting brand new Elixir medium strings in order to sound best at next week's concert, I found several strings for which I didn't know the gauge, meaning they would be next to useless in case of an emergency (which is typically the only situation under which I'd put on a used string). And I only had a metric vernier caliper available...
Servon concert flyer
See the → driving directions.
As usual, there will be several bands playing. The concert is set up by french charity Portes Ouvertes. This nonprofit exists to help people with social difficulties by providing them with a way to meet others through art events, graphical or musical.
Multiple entries with Zend_Config_XML
I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the
PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI
for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated
between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various
frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.
Since
Zend Framework appears
to be well on its way to becoming a standard for professional
PHP developers, I figured I'd give it a spin :