Being ill [1] means that while you have time do do some bits of housekeeping (like updating your blog) you are not actually capable of doing so. After I had finished both the website for a local cinema and the Centrum Judaicum I spent most part of the last week caring for the girlfriend, contracting the girlfriend’s flu and being cared for by the girlfriend. There are much worse ways to spend a week.
I sometimes wonder if there is a switch in every MS Windows version to make it obsolete as soon as a new version is out. After the last update I cannot send e-mails anymore. Apparently the error code means that some firewall is blocking outgoing mails, although I have no idea why now or why at all or how to fix this. Since I have already checked that Outlook is allowed to communicate through the firewall (it is) I will now check if it is still illegal to hit Microsoft employees with a mallet (probably yes, I’m afraid) because their stuff is seriously getting on my nerves (and I used to like Windows quite a lot in pre-Vista (and pre-Ribbon as far as Office is concerned) times). I will eventually buy Windows 7, but it feels a lot like throwing good money after bad.
What else have I done these days? For one thing I’ve started playing with the symfony framework. This is a much different thing than Joomla or Drupal, both of which claim to be “frameworks” as well and provide APIs to write extensions or are extensible by backend configuration. Symfony introduced me to a mode of PHP developement that is new to me – generating applications on the command line [2]. I’m not yet sure what to think of it – it has a steep learning curve [3] and requires much more control over the server than I usually have (many of my clients are on cheap shared hosting accounts) and a rather recent version of PHP (which, again, is not always available on shared hosting accounts). On the other hand it looks like it could be a timesaver if you actually get fluent in symfony developement.
And finally for today let’s have a bit of advertising. Yesterday some friends of mine launched Trabayo, a new job exchange platform. The main difference to other such platforms is, of course, that I actually know and like some of the people behind this. If you want to learn something a bit more substantiall about Trabayo you can read their ‘philosophy‘ or visit the main site (all german).
Enough for today. A number of people have sent enhancements and fixes for the mod_placehere module ( I assume you are here for the module), and I hope that I will finally have a chance to integrate this into the ‘official’ distribution. No promises this time, but I’ll do my best.