Blog

A nice little article by Bernard. I think one important thing with all this, is that the technology is used to improve the user experience, not for the sake of having the latest features to look good in comparison charts, code quality (site performance and stability) can suffer and if these technologies are not well designed in, can make for a worse user experience.

Also the other interesting thing is that Bernard mentioned Ruby On Rails, which I happen to have a Job interview for in a few days

Bernard has worked hard to update the YACS website, it is now looking far more modern and professional, check out www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com .

I have not posted for a while, due to being busy at work, getting Linux working correct (more me learning than problems with Linux itself).

Anyhow there should be a series of blog updates on my Linux experience, a new website launched very soon (the design is complete and the html is nearly complete).

Then I have another website in the pipeline - things are very busy.

I successfully installed Linux on my server at the weekend.

I am running the Caos distro, was a painless install.

There are no official drivers for my laser printer, just some open source ones in beta, my friend had to package them up. Turns out that they give better colour matching (on default settings than the windows drivers, which I am really happy about as I print a number of flyers and price lists every month for my wife's business and was the main worry for me swapping over to Linux.

The default file system is XFS, but we could get it to work as a boot partition so had to create a boot partition in EXT3.

I'm running Gnome (its a 700mhz Duron with 512mb ram), Open Office, Firefox and Amule are the main apps, that's all I need, as the machine will run mainly as a file/print server.

Took me a while to juggle data off the other drives in the machine (NTFS), also remember how to do all the command line stuff to partition, mount format etc the drives and add entries to the etc/fstab file.

When I get time I will be swapping my laptop over to Linux as well, but it will be good to move away from Windows (well I still have to use Windows for my .net development at work, but I hope that will change as well).

Buster (Aaron (from the selfprotection.com forum)), has just got himself a brand spanking new site: crossfit clinic

He is a recently qualified Crossfit instructor and a jolly nice and helpful chap with fitness and Self Defence, I hope this new venture goes well !

The C2 Foundations course was great, (c2 foundation elements seminar), but I was surprised at how much information was presented, Mick really does go into detail and explanations of how and why he does things (and really does show he is very knowledgeable on the subject)- and its all down to common sense and simplicity. The flip side of this was the intensity of the physical training - the practising of what we learnt (or in some cases we already knew, Mick is simply pointing them out to us), was on the low to moderate side (and also we only practised on our dominant side), Mick emphasises that we can go away and practice later, the course is for getting it right at low speeds. I came away feeling far more confident of my abilities (as someone with minimal combatives experience - just a chunk of Martial Arts) - just in the 6 approx 6 hours of the course I felt I improve noticeable (especially as I was used as the demonstration guy quite a lot Smile)

I also feel that the information I have learnt can be used to improve/refine the existing skill set I have from the Muay Thai / FMA that I do - as JK says, distil the techniques into the Art/sport specific techniques and those that will work on the street.

This is a new blog by Nick Hughes who is a real self defense expert with many years experience and he has just started up a new blog (if having his own section on the selfprotectio.com forum wasn't enough - Self-Protection.Com - Q & A with Nick Hughes).

I suppose the only thing left to do is give you the link: Charlotte Self Defense

Here are some good examples of YACS in action that I thought would share.

http://www.apneequebec.com http://www.zaniroli.com

Also there has been a big effort to get internationalisation completed - check the The localization factory out. I have been helping out by checking the English for typos and consistency of language using poedit and I think it will be ready soon.

YACS has been bi-lingual for sometime so already has appropriate places in the code for adding the i8n module which uses gettext very neatly, Bernard has written his own code for reading the catalogs (.po files).

Spotted this cool tool, http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp on lifehacker. What is really useful is that it registers as its own service in windows AND does rsync.

I know one of my friends has been looking for something just like this.

Spotted this link on Drupal.org, whilst I was checking how drupal is progressing.

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site

Even though its Drupal specific, it is an interesting read.