Tweets for 2009-03-06

• Woo hoo! Finally got the AppleScript solution I was working on to create new Mail.app mails with a random signature. Guess I stay with Mail! #

Tweets for 2009-03-05

• Finally, (sort of) ready to get back to work on the things I do on a daily-basis instead of trying migrate data over or find a new app 🙂 #
• Trying my hand at AppleScript to get a dynamic signature which comes from fortune-mod … Got most of it working, just need HTML support now #

Tweets for 2009-02-19

• Test message from PHP class! #
• Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog by Fahim Farook (Book) in Science Fiction & Fantasy http://lulu.com/content/213630 #
• Got my first revenue cheque for my book today. But guess I won’t give up my day job … oh wait, I don’t have a day job 😀 #
• Watching “Socha Na Tha” and enjoying it immensely – the story is so fluid and flows so effortlessly that it’s a pleasure to watch 🙂 #

Tweets for 2009-02-09

• The last few days have been really busy with me coding about 10 hours a day or so. Today’s much better. I like calmer days 🙂 #

Tweets for 2009-01-24

• I love it when prospective clients say “I don’t know how to do this but it should only take an hour”. How do they know how long it’ll take? #
• And then there are the people who want a complete social networking site coded for US$ 3,000. Good luck 🙂 #
• Watched the latest “Lost” episodes and then began watching the second half of “Kyle XY” season 2 on DVD. So lots of TV watching today 🙂 #

Tweets for 2009-01-23

• Still have an issue with the Twitter Tools modifications I made – but only on my production server, not the test one. I hate that! 🙂 #
• This new PHP framework I’m working with is brilliant for most types of code work. Took me a couple of days to get upto speed though 🙂 #

Tweets for 2009-01-21

• OK, went through applying for a bunch of possible programming gigs. That part of the daily ritual is done. Now on to the daily sites list 🙂 #
• A quick day out shopping and dining 🙂 Got a few more DVDs of TV series to watch but didn’t get the two I wanted msot – “Dexter” & “Heroes” in reply to theretrometro #
• If you as a client are very vague and say something like “I want MySpace duplicated”, I as developer will quote something like 30-40K 😀 #
• “City of Ember” was very highly recommended by a friend. We’re about to watch it and see if the recommendation holds true 🙂 #
• “City of Ember” wasn’t bad but not as good as I thought it would be either. Massive reality holes regarding building stuff to last 🙂 #
• Website design where you just create a single image, slice it up, and then put the slices up as the entire page is the stupidest thing ever. #

Tweets for 2009-01-20

• Hmm … looks as if some of my changes to Twitter Tools aren’t working as they should. I guess I’ll actually have to debug 😀 #
• More Joomla work … I do enjoy working with Joomla and WordPress but sometimes I can’t help wanting other stuff 🙂 #
• Just got done hunting through an interesting PHP framework in trying to get a job. The client wanted a demo done using it with no docs 🙂 #
• “Dostana” is funny but not funny 😀 They’re trying so hard pretending to be gay and Indians trying to be gay is funny in and of itself … #
• Priyanka Chopra’s making every type of dress look cheap – even a sari. Man, I don’t know why they put out this kind of trash …. #
• “Dostana” is funny and annoying in turns 🙂 There are some good bits but then there are the really, really annoying and boring bits … #

Tweets for 2009-01-09

• Kind of a grey day here. Might just be that the sun hasn’t dawned yet but that’s how the day feels … #
• It’s a slow day. Didn’t get much done except for tinkering around with Delphi Prism and VS.NET … Trying to figure the future of #Birdie .. #

What’s Aptana Up to?

Ever since they first appeared on the scene, I’ve kept an eye on Aptana. First, because I like knowing about the IDE options available to me for the various languages and technologies I work with but also because they had taken on one of the few Ruby IDEs that I had been comfortable with, RadRails.

Of course, I haven’t been using Aptana recently since most of my recent work has been in PHP and with ExtJS and I hadn’t been really happy with Aptana’s support (as I’d last seen it) for either. So I was excited to hear that there was a new beta version of Aptana available that had better PHP support. And when I checked out the news, I was even more excited to learn that there was also something called Aptana Cloud in the new release!

I did some further checking and all that I read seemed to indicate that this was something that I’d be really interested in 🙂 So I went ahead and applied to be a beta tester yesterday and today in the morning, when I checked my e-mail, there was my invitation to join the beta. Talk about fast!

I was busy most of the morning doing other stuff but just got time to start doing a little work with Aptana. And so far, I like what I see 🙂 There is a new home screen which looks sparkly and pretty and there’s lots of new stuff to discover and explore. Of course, the first thing I did was to create a project based on an existing application that I was working on and then create a Cloud for it. And let me tell you, the Cloud creation couldn’t be any simpler (or faster) even if they tried 🙂

I had my Cloud, and a blank website, up in less than a couple of minutes. Then I used the project synchronization feature in Aptana to upload all my project files to the server. Two or three mouse clicks and the project synchronization was underway. Once the synchronization completed, I took a look at the various server status information displays which are accessible from within Aptana itself. Pretty nifty. I could check on server status, browse the databases on the server and do several other things from one centralized interface!

I then changed one of the project files externally by overwriting the version in the project directory with a different one and tried synchronizing again. Aptana did a comparison of the two sets of files and let me know that the changed file needed to be synchronized again. So far so good! But when I checked, it turns out that Aptana had downloaded the version on the server down to my local machine because the local version was older. Ah well, guess I can’t expect it to be a mind reader :p

There’s a lot of other stuff to explore in the new version of Aptana that I still haven’t gotten around to because the evening’s coming to a close and I have to get going. Hopefully, when I have a spare moment, I’ll be able to come up with another blog entry detailing my further adventures with Aptana Studio …

[pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana01.png” caption=”Aptana Home Page”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana02.png” caption=”My First Cloud Site”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana03.png” caption=”Synchronizing Project”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana04.png” caption=”Server Status”]