“kakoii” is obviously a japanese word that means something like “cool”, or “to the point”. It is also the name of a small but fine graphics design & consulting agency in Berlin and, as I am their resident freelancer, today we launched a new version of their web site.
Naturally they did their own design; CMS is Wordpress with a number of plugins (XHTML Video embed , the fantastic More Fields plugin , All in One SEO and XML Sitemap, and yes, I regularly do donate a bit to plugin authors).
The javascript frame work used for a few simple but nice effects is mootools. We had planned for much more features, but at some point is seemed wiser to go online with what is already finished and add the missing bits over the time to come.
I’m very happy with this site – I think the design looks great, and the project offered an interesting variety of frontend and backend tasks. There’re still some bits of fine-tuning to do tonight (and probably won’t work on the more exotic browsers; please excuse that I won’t bother with Kazoo 0.2 on Slackware for Atari or something like that) but all in all it’s a job well done, even if I say so myself.
Ein deutschsprachiger Ausflug in die Vergangenheit…. der Text ist von 2004, entstanden zum damaligen Out-of-this-world-Kongress. Mit sanfter Befriedigung stelle ich fest dass ich die meisten Aussagen auch heute noch so stehen lassen kann, insofern kann ich ihn ja auch hier veröffentlichen. (more…)
I’m not so sure this is a good book. The blurb says “community experience distilled” – I think it could have used some more distilling.
“Mastering Joomla! 1.5″ by James Kennard is an introduction to extension- and framework developement with the 1.5 branch of Joomla. In twelve chapters it covers component, module and plugin design, the Joomla HTML library, templates, error handling and web services with J!.
According to the subtitle this is a “professionals guide” and indeed you need to be familiar with Joomla and know something about OOP in PHP to put the book to good use. Problem is, if you’re a professional, or a not-quite-professional with some patience and an internet connection you might as well save the money. It’s not like you get much more out of the book than you can have for free from the Joomla documentation pages.
The book is a nice-to-have for people like me who prefer paper and read programming books in the bathtub subway, but if you think some 35 Euro should entitle you to some more information than you can get for free in the web then you might want to avoid it [1].
- But then you might want to buy it to support the author of a potentially useful extension, especially since he donates a part of the proceeds to the Joomla project
Version 1.2.1 of the placehere module did not work for some people – it would not show new articles. That’s because I had introduced a stupid error in the sql query that messed with the timezone settings. This is fixed in the latest version.
Also I added a template called “beez with article parameters”. That’s a tableless template that ignores the paramaters from the module settings pane (pdf+mail icons etc) and uses those from the article manager or from the article itself. Please note that the included templates are more or less suggestions, with basic HTML you can build you own (leave the stuff inside the php tags alone and change the surrounding HTML). If youve done something clever with a template I’ll be happy to include it in the ‘official’ release of the module.
I also changed the default values for some module parameters to more sensible values.
If you have a previous version of the module installed it will be enough to overwrite the files to update (better yet delete the old files and upload the new ones).
Click here to go to the download page
In the comment section of a post in the Pharyngula science blog I found an entry where a man rather emphatically stated “If you think that Hitler was democratically elected you should buy a good history book“. I do have a good history book (in fact, I have a lot of good history books), so I feel rather comfortable when I say that, yes, Hitler had been elected democratically.
People who say that Hitler wasn’t really elected are usually germanophiles who search for excuses for crimes of the german people in the “Third Reich” (the argument is that a small undemocratic minority oppressed the good people of germany). But since Pharyngula is an american blog the case here might be a lot less sinister. The idea that Hitler wasn’t elected democratically is probably an allusion to the fact that he never got more than 50% of the votes (th e best result was some 44%). Americans, with their “the winner takes it all”-system tend to forget that you can win a german election without winning a majority.
The problem with this is that, without a majority, you have to form either a coalition with other parties, or form a minority goverment, or both, and in fact that was the problem that had plagued the Republic from the beginning. To put the results into perspective, the 43,9% for the NSDAP in the 1933 election was the best result any party had ever had in the Republic of Weimar from 1919 to 1933 (second best was 37,8% for the Social Democrats immediately after WWI). Governments were habitually formed without any democratic basis at all, so the result of the 1933 election might have looked like a step forward.
It turned out that there is yet another way to govern without a majority – in March 1933 the german parliament passed what is known as „Ermächtigungsgesetz“ (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich), a law that allowed the Nazi/Deutschnationale Coalition to govern without the consent of the parliament. That this was in fact an unconstitutional law is a mere technicality – it was passed with a vast majority that would have allowed to change the constitution in any case, so the parliament skipped a step.
So,since Hitler and the NSDAP had more votes than any other party during the Republic of Weimar and governed on the basis of a law that had been passed by the absolute majority of the parliament is seems reasonable to conclude that he was indeed democratically elected.
The more important point is that this question is not as such relevant. I’m not sure you can blame the german people for electing or not electing Hitler – after all he didn’t went into the election with the promise of perpetrating a holocaust, and his programme was not much more radical or antisemitic than that of some other parties. The pretty much collective crime of the german people was that they supported Hitler and his party even after they had started comitting unspeakable crimes and that a sizable fraction of the population supported him in comitting those crimes.The difficult thing about democracy is that majorities (pluralities) are sometimes wrong and that you have to decide if and when it is your moral duty to follow the wrong decisions many, or when to fight them.
[1] Dang, I can’t seem to find the post I’m refering to – no wonder, Prof. Myers writes more blog posts per month than I do in a year. In the post he was (again) adressing the silly contention that Darwinism inevitably results in genocide (actually it doesn’t).
[2] As a technicality “Hitler” wasn’t elected at all – the Republic of Weimar had a system of proportional representation where citizens elected parties, not persons. In practial terms the NSDAP was in some conservative parts of the electorate probably more a liabilty than an asset to Hitler. The german head of state Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor only after he was reassured that the actual affairs of government would be run by the conservative Deutschnationale (German National) Party.
[3] Sautter, Udo „Deutsche Geschichte seit 1815: Daten, Fakten, Dokumente“ Tübingen 2004, p.166f
[4] Incidentally, counted in percentages the NSDAP had a better democratic legitimation than any party in the Federal Republic of Germany for at last 20 years – the best result in this time was 44,3% for the conservative „Union“ in the 1987 election and as the name suggests even this is a (permanent) coalition of two parties (CDU/CSU). For comparison, the elecorate in the Republic of Weimar was about 45 million voters, in the FRG it’s about 60 million.
[5] To the members of the Weimar parliament such a law looked propably less portentous than to a modern-day democrat; after all there had been already two previous „Ermächtigungsgesetze“ during the term of Friedrich Ebert .
[6] If anything it is strange that people elected a person who had already served a term for high treason.
[7] Yes, I know that phrase won’t make me any friends.
[8] The distinction between a majority and a plurality is much harder to make in german
The place here-module version 1.2.1 didn’t quite work for some people and while I suspected it might be some simple problem I had no idea what actually was going on. It turned out, as it is often the case, that I was being stupid.
Between the previous and current version I had changed the sql query in the module to avoid a problem with date calculations that was not originally caused by my code (so if with future versions you get an error message that involves the words “JFactory::getDate()” please note that I won’t be able to help you). As a result the query failed (unless your server happened to be somewhere in my timezone).
I’m working on some items from the feature requests, so I haven’t released a new version yet, but be assured that there will be a patched version by the end of the week.
The latest version of “mod_placehere” (content item module for J!1.5) apparently does not work for a number of people (for production you can still use the previous version), and I have to say that I do not know why. I’ve spent the day with attempts to find the flaw, but didn’t find it.
So if you download the module I would ask you to first try the latest version; if this doesn’t work please write a comment or a mail with your Joomla Version, PHP Version and MySql Version. A Screenshot of your module settings would be nice, too.
In 2008 I did two large frontend jobs: as a freelancer for Neue Digitale/Razorfish GmbH I worked on the website for the german branch of the McDonalds-Franchise. And working for Panorama 3000 I did the frontend programming for the new website for Sony Music (Germany), which was launched today.
I have to say I’ much more proud of the Sony site; while it’s in many respects less sophisticated than the McDonalds site my own responsibilites were far greater – I was actually the man in charge as far as frontend developement was concerned, and I was allowed to make decisions about the markup at my own discretion and leave it to the people at Sony to integrate my stuff with their CMS.
Even so, and even with a somewhat generous budget, there were compromises, things that didn’t work as planned, or that I could have done better, or stuff that was added somewhat as an afterthought (and as of now there are some minor glitches resulting from the transition from staging server to live server). And there were delays – while we were working Sony Music was heavily reorganised (when we started it was still Sony-BMG), so we launched a couple of months later than planned.
But the nice thing is that in the end everybody was happy. The project manager at Sony Music is happy, my employers at Panorama 3000 are happy, and that much happiness makes me a happy show-off man myself.
Hi all,
here’s one of my famous apologies…. I’m sorry for the lack of updates and bigfixes bugfixes (holy Freud…) for the Joomla module, but my notebook (Asus Z53, cursed be thy name) choose to spontaneously disassemble itself, so I’m now in the process of backing up data, finding an affordable replacement and generally being annoyed that computers these days last only little more than a year. I hope I’m back on my feet by middle/end next week.
I caught the flu and at the moment I consider to admit myself to the hospital, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear anything from me for a couple of days.
