Recently we’ve bought DVD player SONY-NS32. Unfortunatelly, the shop didn’t give us English of Russian manual. It’s not a big problem till you have some truble with device. The player started play some DVDs with black and white picture. So, I decided to get the manual from Internet.
The best point to start is site of SONY. I spent about hour and didn’t find any useful information. The usability of the site is terrible! But anyway after some time of searching in Google I found sonydigital-link.com which contains manuals for many languages, knowledge base, firmwares and other useful stuff for happy owners of SONY devices. Have a look it. Hope it save much your time 
As PHP programmers know it’s very easy to profile and debug PHP applications using Zend Studio. When I saw it first time I decided to buy it if I’ll develop on PHP seriously.
Recently I’ve found an extension for Firefox to communicate with Zend Studio from the browser. It’s useful when it’s needed to debug site with an authentication of users .
You can easily to download and install it from here. But this note this version is compatible with Firefox 0.9 – 1.1.
As practice shows the best approach to describe something is tagging i.e. describing some objects by tags. One of the best excamples can be del.icio.us which describes user’s bookmarks using tags or flickr where tags used to describe pictures.
Some time ago livejournal started to use tags. I’ve described all my posts. But one thing was left by developers. They didn’t allow to display tag clouds.
Also, today I found out O’Reilly uses tags to describe thier stuff! So, tags are come in our digit life
Good news. Opera has released preview of version 9.0. I’ve already downloaded and installed it on my work computer. The first impression: new Opera is much faster! It took about 2 minutes to load Opera 8.5 with 10 – 12 open tabs. Opera 9.0 loads during 5 seconds.
Some of the new features include:
- support for XSLT, Canvas 2D, and Web Forms 2.0
- rich-text editing on Web pages
- site-specific preferences
- a new IMAP back-end
- access to Opera’s preferences via opera:config
Opera 9.0 Preview 1 for Linux can be downloaded here, for Windows – here, for Mac – here.
Updated: I found a small bug in Linux version. The file browser doesn’t remember directory from where a file was pickuped last time. It opens always home directory. Anyway the speed of browser is amazing!
During implementing an integration between RT2 and SugarCRM I improved date module – RT::Date. I’ve added possibility to display dates according to predefined format. Currently there is a method
AsString()
which simple returns scalar from
localtime()
:
scalar(localtime()); #Thu Nov 24 10:13:54 2005 for now, for example
I’ve added a new method –
AsFormattedString()
which get the format as parameter and returns a date according format definition:
sub AsFormattedString {
my $self = shift;
my $format = shift || 'br';
my($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($self->Unix);
$year += 1900;
$mon = sprintf("%02d", $mon + 1);
$mday = sprintf("%02d", $mday);
$hour = sprintf("%02d", $hour);
$min = sprintf("%02d", $min);
$sec = sprintf("%02d", $sec);
return eval($DATE_FORMATS{$format});
}
Also, I’ve defined some formats (currently there are onlyfour but you can add others if you need):
%DATE_FORMATS = (
br => ‘”$year-$mon-$mday $hour:$min:$sec”‘,
d_br => ‘”$year-$mon-$mday”‘,
su => “$day/$mon/$year $hour:$min:$sec”,
d_su => “$day/$mon/$year”,
);
A full patch available here.
As SugarCRM developer I have to use PHP although I don’t like it. Today I decided to add a custome error handler to hide actual errors from users. I found a good explanation how to do it but I faced with following problem. To catch critical errors I replaced
die()
by
trigger_error()
and specify
error_type
as
E_USER_ERROR
(I didn’t find Perl analog
eval
). It works find under PHP 5 but on PHP 4 error messages which pass to
trigger_error()
cut up 1024 symbols as it’s described in PHP documentation.
What I don’t understand why
trigger_error()
works with different results under PHP 4 and PHP 5? And is there some way to catch external
die()
? For example, in Perl I can use
eval
:
use SomeModule;
my $o = new SomeModule();
eval {
$o->do_something_with_die();
};
if($@) {
#We catch die()
warn “[Exception] $@!”;
}
PHP doesn’t provide such kind functionality. And if I use some external module like
PearDatabase.php
I cannot catch
die()
if database is not avalilable.
Today I was surprised when I went to CPAN to chek release of WWW::Yahoo::Movies. There is a new link on the module document page – Annotate this POD. I tried to follow by this link and I found oneself in the new Perl project site – AnnoCPAN. This project contains all POD documentation from CPAN modules and allows to registered users add some notice there. I think it’s good idea. It’ll force developers to write more accurate and detailed documentation.
For more information about AnnoCPAN refer to AnnoCPAN FAQ. To subscribe on AnnoCPAN RSS channel use this link.
I’d like to announce a new version of WWW::Yahoo::Movies – Perl extension to Yahoo! movie database. I’ve added possibility to split MPAA Rating by code and description, convert movie runtime to minutes, specify timeout and user agent for HTTP request. Also, I’ve improved tests.
I’m planning to add new features there like directors, writes and cast. Hope it’ll be done soon
You can get the latest version of WWW::Yahoo::Movies from CPAN as usual.
