Paul M. Jones

As you can see, the default theme is not really working for me. Have not figured out the problem yet, looks like a CSS thing.

Update: Had a mismatched anchor tag in an earlier post. Glad it was just me. :-)

For more information, please visit the related PEAR pages:

DB_Table

Text_Wiki

If I don't get any new (critical) bug reports for the next week or so, I can release them as "stable" and check them off my to-do list. While Text_Wiki could still use some add-ons (more renderers, more parsing rulesets) the core is complete. These two projects are each 18-24 months old at this point, so it's nice to be able to say "done!" to them.

Now all I have to do is finish the respective documentation. With any luck, the addition of YaWiki to the PEAR website will aid in that (then I can keep everything related to those two projects in one place; i.e., at PEAR).

You can download, view the API docs, and join the mailing list from the official site (solarphp.com).

The change notes are:

* Converted all __hive() calls to __solar() instead.

* Added email and initial description to Solar_Cell_Bugs columns, removed reference to Solar_Cell_Talk (should be handled by the application object, not the bugs entity)

* Converted all 'dt' (date-time) abbreviations to 'ts' (timestamp) for consistency with Solar_Sql_Entity column type naming

* Multiple changes to Solar_Sql_Entity array keys ('ent' ==> 'tbl', 'seqname' ==> 'sequence', 'valid' ==> 'validate', 'message' ==> 'feedback'

* Added Solar_Form class (aggregates element-building instructions and validation)

* Added "None.php" drivers for Solar_User_Auth and Solar_User_Role (to facilitate having no backend for those services)

----

There were some internal changes to the Solar_Cell classes for Bugs and Talk (the bug and comment table entities, respectively). The biggest addition is the Solar_Form class, which is kind of like HTML_QuickForm, except it's not. ;-)

I really do have to start on at least some outline documentation; YaWiki will be perfect for it when I find the time between my MBA projects and my day job.

Ryan King links to this great essay.

Anyway, I babbled at Nat along these lines for a while, predicting that, while I was sure that anyone he talked to in a corporation would tell him, "free groupware, yes, awesome!", there was really no reason to even bother releasing something like that as open source, because there was going to be absolutely no buy-in from the "itch-scratching" crowd. With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf. But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.

And there you have it in a nutshell. No **organization** ever wrote or used a program. **Individuals** write and use programs. If you want people to love your software, it has to appeal to individuals.

As a corollary, if your program sucks for individuals, it will suck for the organization. This goes along with the complex adaptive systems and emergent behavior issues I rant about from time to time.

Good idea for a project at the end of the article, too: server-less calendar sharing. Cool.

Courtesy of Ben Carter, graphic design wunderkind, we have a a logo now. You can view it at solarphp.com.

Carter did the original work in PhotoShop, but because I am a freak I re-created it, vectorized, in Macromedia Fireworks. Any flaws you may discover are mine.

It used to be called Hive; now it's Solar, the "Simple Object Library and Application Repository" for PHP5. This is only a development release. You can pick up the PEAR tarball here:

http://solarphp.com/Solar-0.0.2.tgz

No real documentation yet, but you can read the auto-generated API reference here:

http://solarphp.com/api/

Next set of tasks is to get the Solar_Cell_Bugs component working properly, and I can write up a quick app to do bug tracking. Also need a mailing list, and need to set up YaWiki installation for real documentation (although Solar will have a wiki component of its own, and at that point it can be self-hosted / autonomous / internally-dependent / eat its own dog food / whatever).

Revision control is going through Subversion now instead of CVS, provided by the kind folks at TextDrive, who are the web hosts for solarphp.com as well. For $12/month, it's a sweet deal; my thanks to Ryan King for pointing them out.

When I heard lat year that Sci-Fi channel was re-making Battlestar Galactica, my reaction was "eh." The original was a lot of fun for a 10-year old, but seeing re-runs of it, as an adult, were not very exciting.

Flipping through TV channels a few weeks ago, I happened upon an over-the-air broadcast on NBC of last year's 3-hours pilot episode. At first, I didn't recognize it; all I saw was a space panorama and some really good camera work, zooming in from a distance onto a far battle scene. It was an amazing shot, communicating the vast distances of space and the dynamic of the dogfight at the same time. Although I had stumbled across it by accident and the story was already half over, I was hooked immediately.

This new Battlestar Galactica is a very, very smart piece of work in too many ways to detail in one sitting. I cannot begin to describe how exceptionally well-done this series is: the characters are well developed and have distinct and conflicting personalities and motivations, the effects are amazing, the physics is really quite decent, the backstory is believable, and the bad guys have religion (really!).

Above all, the plotlines are not stupid; the writers assume you can figure things out yourself, and then hint you along so you can keep up. They don't use technical jargon and pseudo-science as deus ex machina (*cough*startrek*cough*). There are some great surprises, little touches that you would not have guessed but are funny and realistic and enjoyable.

Not to wax too enthusiastic (although I am very enthusiastic about this series now) but the effects are spectacular. The attention to detail is superb. To take one element, look at the Viper combat spacecraft. When a Viper is shooting out of a launch tube, you can see its counterweight-driver racing backwards beneath the track; while maneuvering, you see the attitude jets firing; and the maneuvering itself is three-dimensional -- it looks very like space combat should, with a full sphere of action, not just a plane, and arcs of fire, not just straight lines.

The camera work, even though a lot of it is CGI, is both believable and engrossing; you just cant take your eyes off it. The interior shots are shaky, as if it were a documentary. There are lots of little homages to other science fiction films in the set work; in particular, the interior design of the President's ship reminds me a great deal of the Pan-Am LEO shuttle from 2001. The first time I saw the blonde Cylon agent, all I could think of was Maria from Metropolis.

A friend of mine snagged the entire first season and passed it over to me last night. I have now lost all productivity as I watch "just one more epsiode". I watched two last night, and three this morning, ignoring homework, domestic duties, and programming. Get your hands on it as soon as you can, and then set aside a weekend to watch it (or five sequential evenings). It's just that good.

I want to use Subversion for the Solar project, not CVS, but I can't find a shared host that has it. I use pair.com for absolutely everything, but they won't let me run svnserve on a shared host (which is reasonable) and the Apache2 track is not an option for me.

Anybody know of a reliable web host that has Subversion installed for remote use?

(UPDATE 2005-02-17) I ended up going with TextDrive.

Inspiration struck this morning. I wanted to get across the idea that this library is essentially a collection of simple, straightforward objects that are all related to each other and share common development principles; in addition, it would come with common application pieces pre-built. An ant hive seemed a good metaphor to use in that case. But as we have learned, the name Hive is already taken, so that's out.

However, I think I have a good replacement name: the Simple Object Library and Application Repository for PHP, or Solar. It is short, highly descriptive, lends itself to a logo and a catchphrase, and is sufficiently specific that you know what it is without being so generic that it has no meaning by itself. And nobody else is using it. :-)

So the domains are registered, all that remains is to rename the class structures and re-commit to CVS.

UPDATE (2005-02-21): You can visit http://solarphp.com/ for more information; and, of course, check back on this blog periodically.

Robert Janeczek notes that his project, also called Hive, won an award in the Zend PHP5 coding contest last year. It's obvious he has first dibs on the name; it's also obvious that I didn't search hard enough for other PHP5 projects using that name.

So what to do now, seeing as I already went and bought the domain name "phphive.com"? :-(