Last Friday, Amir mentioned that he wrote a bash completion script for the pear cli. I’ve used it a bit since then and the tab completions that it provides makes using pear at the command line much easier. Thanks Amir!
Now – is there any chance to get it installed with pear by default? That would be good!
Archive for July, 2008
pear tab completion
Monday, July 28th, 2008Andrii Nikitin’s son Needs Help – ASAP
Monday, July 14th, 2008(Reposted from Zack Urlocker’s blog, via Vidyut Luther and planet MySQL. I don’t usually repost such things but a 2.5 year old’s health is at stake so I’m making an exception. If you use mysql at all – and even if you don’t – please dig deep.)
Andrii and his son Ivan
Andrii Nikitin, one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and so I’m sharing this information to the community at large. Andrii’s son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation. This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance. So Andrii has asked to see if we could help raise funds. The cost is expected to be €150,000 – €250,000. A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover. But a small amount by many people could make a big difference.
Many MySQLers have kicked in to help out, but more is needed. Ivan’s health has taken a turn for the worse recently and the issue is now quite pressing. Even a small donation could mean the difference between life and death for Ivan.
I hope some of you who use MySQL or have young kids will join me in making a donation today. You can do so by using Paypal, by sending a cheque to MySQL, or via wire transfer.
Paypal:
Paypal
Or
by check payable to:
MySQL, Inc. Mail to: MySQL, Inc. Attn: Linda Dong 20450 Stevens Creek Blvd #350 Cupertino, CA 95014 or US wire transfer: MySQL Inc: 7396643001 SWIFT: NDEAUS3N or International wire transfer in any currency: Bank: Nordea Bank Bank address: Stockholm, Sweden Bank account: 3259 17 03868 IBAN: SE27 3000 0000 0325 9170 3868 SWIFT: NDEASESS
Thanks to those who have donated already. A child’s life is precious and I hope we can give Ivan a chance.
LinkedIn Usability Woes (or “How come there are two Irish Linux Users Groups?”)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008One of my fellow members of the Irish Linux Users Group posted a link to a newly created LinkedIn Group so that members could connect to each other using the Group as a reference point.
It’s a shame that LinkedIn don’t [yet] provide a search facility for locating such groups as I had already created such a group for ILUG back in October last year – however it does prove a point that it hadn’t been getting much publicity for ILUG members to make use of it.
To prevent this from happening again I’ve placed prominent links for the linkedin and facebook groups on the linux.ie website.
Thankfully there were only a handful of people that joined the second group before we noticed this gaff but it does highlight yet another usability issue with linkedin, which is this:
- Importing a CSV file requires you to have firstname, lastname and email address in the file. Why? The people you reference in the file must already be on linkedin so just providing their email address should suffice.
- Manually entering this data on the linkedin website can only be done one record at a time; and again you must provide the persons firstname, surname and email address – heaven help you if you enter Thom E. Gemcitty rather than Thom E Gemcitty for example – round trips to the server for adding such data is so web 0.1; I would expect this data to be entered in a spreadsheet-like-grid that the user then verifies and saves.
Book Review: Learning jQuery
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Packt sent me a copy of “Learning jQuery” by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.
With a tag-line of “Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques” and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.
From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.
Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn’t make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP – it should be trivial to rework them for any language.
The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality – you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.
If you haven’t already been turned on to jQuery by it’s excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.
There is one caveat though: “Learning jQuery” was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn’t matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn’t cover what’s available in v1.2 but until there’s a second edition of this book (and wouldn’t that be great?) you won’t find a better book on the subject.
