Noetica

My new blog is now up and running. It's content will all just be web design and development related, leaving this blog for everything else. Here's the link: http://stacy.dawkins.iblogger.org/blog/.

My lastest creation is now up online. It is a launcher for all my other projects, with the ability for me to add new ones, delete old ones etc. All data is loaded in dynamically using Ajax.

This project is hosted on a new sub-domain of this site http://stacy.dawkins.iblogger.org/home/. I'll be putting a blog on that address too shortly but have yet to decide if it will be a replacement to this on or a companion.

Today I downloaded Zend Framework 1.6, which was released recently. To be honest I've been in no rush to get it but today I noticed they've added a class called Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug which got my complete attention immediately.

Before the Firebug plugin for the Firefox browser came along I had taken early retirement from Javascript and had instead decided to concentrate on PHP, but thanks to Firebug and jQuery I'm back loving it again. Anyway, Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug works in pretty much the same way for PHP as console.log() works for javascript, once you have downloaded another Firefox plugin that extends Firebug called firePHP.

After a few hours play I created an event log system that uses firebug, as well as logging into a file on the server. It's the first time I've used the Zend log classes and I love the fact that in using Zend_Log you can set a filter as to what gets logged, so just changing one line of code means you don't have to go through, and comment out, all the eventually superfluous debug code, it'll just be ignored.

Here is a code snippit I wrote that is inside my controller class that uses firebug logging to see if a new, daily created log file exists on the server, then if not it creates one using a GMT datestamp for part of its name. Once the file is created or verified a new writer object is added to the log class so logging events go to both firebug and the server file.

 
// create log and add firebug writer.
$this->fireWriter = new Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug();
$this->logger = new Zend_Log($this->fireWriter);

// set the path and name of the log file to be used.
$this->logFilePath = "../homeApplication/logs/";
$this->logFileName = 'index' . gmdate("Ymd") . '.log';
	$this->logger->debug('log file address:' 
	. $this->logFilePath . $this->logFileName);

// check to see if a log file exists for today.
// if not attempt to create one.
if (file_exists($this->logFilePath . $this->logFileName)) {
    $this->logger->notice('The log file already exists');
} else {
    $this->logger->warn('The log file does not exist');
	$ourFileName = $this->logFilePath . $this->logFileName;
	$ourFileHandle = fopen($ourFileName, 'w') 
		or die("can't create log file.");
	$this->logger->notice('Log file for today created.');
	fclose($ourFileHandle);
}

// add a new writer to logger, targeting log file.
$this->logWriter = new 
	Zend_Log_Writer_Stream($this->logFilePath . $this->logFileName);
$this->logger->addWriter($this->logWriter);
	$this->logger->debug('File logWriter added to logger.');
	// filter out any message below NOTICE level.
$this->logFilter = new Zend_Log_Filter_Priority(Zend_Log::NOTICE);
$this->logger->addFilter($this->logFilter);
 

Here is an image of it working in Firebug:

Last month this blog turned one and I missed it. Actually, its days are numbered as I've started writing its successor, which will probably be hosted on a new sub-domain, although it may not, we'll see.

Recently, while I was hacking my way through the RSS feeds I subscribe to, I came across a link to download a little desktop clock application that displayed the time in a binary format, yet rather than download it I thought I'd create one for the internet.

As applications go, they really do not come any more useless than this, however the few hours spent creating it was an altogether enjoyable experience. Here is an image of it, followed by a link.

Link: Binary Clock 1.0

Here is a search engine that I just discovered that looks pretty cool. It's called Searchme.com. The number of sites in its index seems pretty limited so far compared to the big-boys, however its well worth playing around with as this image testifies: