Category: Brian Layman

TheCodeCave.Com prepares for the D4PHP.COM launch!

Well, it’s been a Busy,  three weeks here.  Things are finally falling into place.

Sometimes that just happens. 

You swing into these intense periods where things go 90 mph.  

It all started when my wife’s latest commissions check on her book buys her a sweet tablet PC, gets me a motorcycle and now (if it ever stops raining and snowing) I’m back on two wheels after 11 years! (pics soon!!!).  (All you Delphi knitters go and buy her book please!  I know you are out there!) 

Then CodeRage goes into full swing and starts vying for my attention.   Oh, and I also signed the papers refinacing the house.  Then my yard collapses into a giant cess pool, only to be replaced by a mud bog the following week.  Then I’m approved as a Google Summer of Code WordPress mentor and suddenly I’m back to reviewing resumes and project propsals!   It’s like I’m back in my old role of Director of Software Development again.

And then I land the after-hours job of converting CodeGear’s 90 blogs over to WordPress MU.   Yes, you can pinch me, I’m working for the Borland Corporation. 

THEN on Friday the Delphi for PHP field test ends and D4P is been released!  (If you are interested in the product, you can download a 1 day trial here. )  Well, that means it’s time to announce something else I’ve had in the works for a while. 

Coinciding with the release of Delphi for PHP, I’m announing an upcoming community site called “Designed for PHP” at http://www.D4PHP.com.  The tagline for the site is:

Designed for PHP – Bringing the Delphi mindset to PHP development.

This site, created using Delphi for PHP, will not only host a VBulletin  forum but will include articles, reviews, and product announcements pertinent to the soon to be thriving Delphi for PHP community.  I’m in the process of connecting with authors, moderators and administrators who are intersted in joining me in this venture.

 Now, obviously I’ve got some things that will be taking up my free time over the next couple weeks.  But I still hope to get some feed back from you all as to what you’d like to see at the site.  Some ideas from people I’ve already discussed this with include:

  1. Community forum – Software has been purchased, the forum is up and being configured.
  2. Integration with the NewsGroups – This idea fed off of a question from Serge Dosyukov and I know just how to pull it off.  The Delphi for PHP newsgroups will be part of the Forum and if all goes well (my host sometimes has restrictions on comunication with outside servers) they will be fully integraed with the ability to post to the groups directly from the site under your own login name.
  3. Component & Component package reviews
  4. Plenty of user created demo videos – it’s easy to do and free!
  5. ???

and THAT’s why I am announcing this before it is fully up and running.  I want to know what else YOU’D like to see out of the site.  Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?  I’ll be doing work off and on with the site over the next two weeks and working with some interested parties who can get the ball rolling, but we need ideas and a goal for when, in about a month, I can give it some dedicated attention.

 So, do you want to see on D4PHP.com?  Does anyone remember “The Delphi Super Page”?  If you do, what made THAT page so great?  Pre-2000, there was no where else a Delphi programmer needed to go.   Why was that?  Any thoughts?

 Jot them down here or wander over to http://www.D4PHP.com/forum and express yourself!  Let’s see what this can turn into!

Blogs.CodeGear.com to convert to WordPress MU

CodeGear Blogs  

A WordPress Explosion

That’s right folks there are gonna be about 90 new WordPress blogs out there. Blogs.CodeGear.com, Borland’s home for Employee Blogs, and Blogs.TeamB.com, home for a sqad of volunteers who support the CodeGear community,  are leaving the open source .Text  solution behind forever.  And they are moving to WordPress MU, baby! 

What the heck are .Text and WordPress MU (Myooo? Moo?) anyway????

.Text is a .NET 1.1 blogging software package said to be at the top of the heap back before 2004 ended.  2004 was the year of it’s last update.  Meanwhile WordPress MU is a Multi User wrapper around the current source code for the very popular WordPress blogging softare.

WordPress MU

OK… Spill the beans…

“How do I know all this juicy gossip?”, you might well ask.  Well, it just so happens that those 90 or so blogs are going to be converted by none other than YOURS TRUELY! 

That’s right, as of today, a goal I had dreamed about back in 1987, as I helped my highschool computer teacher figure out how to use Turbo Pascal (and supplied the school’s pirated copy of Fortran 77 too SHHH!!!) has finally been met: I am now a Borland CodeGear (contract) Programmer.  How cool is that???

I pitched this project to Allen Bauer back in February.  Their current implementation of .Text seemed somewhat dated and limited in its ablities, from a readers perspective.  I knew that even just working evening hours and weekends, I could quickly turn their site around and give them something MUCH more robust.  I’d not heard anything back from Allen.  So, I’m not certain if my original suggestion had anything at all to do with the fact that John Kaster went looking for a WordPress developer or not.  Either way, I saw a post by John asking for someone experienced in WordPress, and I leapt at the opportunity.  Well, as of tonight, it’s official.  The “Please welcome Brian Layman” email has gone out to the powers that be.  And after a few conversations,  I’m now set up with all sorts of CodeGear goodness that I can tell you absolutely nothing about! MWAHAHAHAHAAHA!

Seriously though, this is gonna be a great project to work on and I’m going to be enjoying every moment of it. I’ve done my share of blogs and sites, (I actually should be anouncing another new site tomorrow btw), but an 88 site conversion is certainly exciting enough to raise an eyebrow or two on any WordPress developer’s face.   I just want to thank John Kaster for allowing me the opportunity to participate in this project.

So, keep your eyes out for the switch over sometime in the not too very distant future.   I’ve just begun work tonight, learning the ins and outs of their current infrastructure.  If all goes well… well, actually, I’ll leave the end of that sentence up to the fine folks at CodeGear.

“chipmunk psychotherapist”

Sorry, just got a spam email with that title.  It was so good I had to share… “chipmunk psychotherapist” just inspires such visions…

 Does anyone remember the song from the Dr. Demento show about the squirrel/chipmonk crossing the road?  Oooo that’s gonna bug me all day..  Hmmm there was something about his squirrely girlfriend not making it across and he was going to rescue her or something…  It was sort of a love ballad I guess…  hmmm, it’ll come to me…

The Code Cave’s 1 year Blogaversary: Confessions of a Code Monkey

     (#)
    (oo)
   (—–)
    >0<

It was one year ago, Feb 28, 2006 to completely precise, that TheCodeCave.com first came on line.  A week later I had a fairly functional website, running WordPress with a theme I was satisfied with and a bunch of great ideas. 

This site was mostly meant for my own convenience as a place where I could put Delphi and PHP code fragments  that I knew I could find later.  I have used it for that again and again and again.  It is a MUCH better resource than Microsoft Outlook’s sent folder.  Plus, now that someone named Meagan works at the office, every time I simply type ME in the To: address of an email, I send stuff to her instead of my home account.  (Sorry, Meagan, for all of those meaningless code fragments in your email account.)

Anyway,  my wife first suggested the name The Code Cave.  Since I liked caving and coding, it made sense to her.  Since it had multiple meanings, I, of course loved, it.  (A code cave, you know, is empty space in an executiple where all sorts of neat treasures can be hidden.)  So it worked.  

A year later, the site has a google rank of 357,000, which is not to shabby in my book.  Especially since I had a couple dry spells of 1 post per month.  I’ve just gotten my first Adsense check deposited and that pays for next year of hosting in full.  So, the site is self sufficient.   I’ve also been told that I’ve helped loads of people (Sweet).  And my life is enriched by coming to know loads of new people I’ve met through the site.

Not a bad year…   Her sites have done well too.  She hosts KnitChat.com of course (where I’d been doing php and WordPress for a whole year before TheCodeCave. came around), and Loom Out Loud, and now  a new knitting magazine site: Loom Knitter’s Circle.

 I plan to do a number of “Posts that never made it” posts, the first one of which was the Delphi source code for turning any 1and1 account into a Dyn DNS server posted yesterday.  I had a whole series of web automation posts planned, but I never put them up.  I hope to get a number of them up. I’ve found that when I stop using this site a repository, and start using it as a blog, I get less code up here and less posts up here. So, the posts will get up here when they get up here.

So, for an old Borland Turbo Prolog/Turbo C/Turbo Pascal coder, my venture into the web has been a good experience…  And I can’t wait to tell you all some of the good stuff that I’ve got going on right now…  I’m juggling a few nifty things right now and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share as a result. I’m smilin’ just thinkin’ about it.

code monkey – noun –

Download link

1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team. 2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer. 3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a management decision, or of complaining about having to live with such decisions. As in “Don’t ask me why we need to write a compiler in COBOL, I’m just a code monkey.”      — The Jargon File

Giving coffee to Goldfish…

Goldfish from PatrickSwayze.org is getting a large Café Voltaire from my local coffee Arabica Coffee House, or equal funds towards an other beverage that might be more to taste. ;).


The cozy café down the street...
Thanks Goldfish!
Now go check your paypal account! 😉

Goldfish gave me some patient assistance with the RegEx statements required for the EasyWPUpdate script. Without that help, the script would have been weeks away from completion! So, I am going to do my duty and giving thanks, by taking Goldfish out for a drink.

I came across Goldfish and several other helpful characters on the #sed IRC channel on the IRC Freenode network. Now, I’ll admit, that the first thing that comes to mind when I think “IRC” is “IRC?!?!? That SOOOOOOO nineties!”

It was back in the early ninenties that my wife and I spent a lot of time on IRC. We were mostly in the #adoption channel, looking for clues to help find her birth parents (which we did and they are now a very important part of our life). Heck, I used to join the IRC channels back on ARPANet. Anyway I hadn’t touched IRC since then… until three weeks ago.

That’s when Goldfish helped me with the SED stuff. The next night, Goldfish helped bunches more even though I was brain dead from a weary week. There were several other people on the channel who gave me assistence as well. Prec was GREAT and gave me a review of the script and caught some errors with my “Strip CR/LF” routine I’d posted on the website. They suggested that I bounce over to the #bash channel and once there lhunath, jp-_ and the rest of that crew on FreeNode #bash gave great line by line suggestions.

I then had a problem with getting System Shock2 ( a game from the late nineties) working on Windows XP and getting multiplayer going, but then I joined the #SS2 IRC channel and again, there were helpful people there with solutions. So, frankly, I’m once again an IRC fan. All thanks to the Goldfish!

Hey – if you’ve had someone help you lately (not me someone else) consider doing the same… A virtual cup of coffee, a McDonald’s icecream cone, any in expensive little gift can help turn someone’s day around. Give it some thought!

Oh, my gosh…

These people must be absolutely insane! I’ve jump off bridges, rafted advanced white water, free climbed 500ft in the air, gone bumsliding through rivers that have carved gouges into rock so that you just let the river push you where you will. That’s all trusting nature. Nature is dangerous in predictable ways… This is trusting something man made and makes my skin crawl…


Download link 
(DivX is required)

Been really busy lately

I’m still at at work after 15 hours for the third day this week.

So I’ve been scarce lately.

I’m still trying to get time to post something about the 2.1 release and mention the fixes I put into my script…

But I obviously haven’t yet. I typed a reply two or three times to someone in the code cave’s forums (which I haven’t yet announced either) and managed each time to be pulled away onto something and ended up closing the browser…

Plus I had to take my dog in for surgery… Plus the refinance of the house is happening this week….

I’ll catch up one of these days.

RE: the script, I did fix some stuff and put it out in time for the 2.1 release. So, I got the important part done. I just need to write it up…

Hmmm also need to turn in an expense report and pay the garbage bill so they’ll pick up next week… And my nephew’s birthay is Saturday… Oh dagnabbit, it’s 30 minutes till Friday and I haven’t started Sunday school preparations… Hmmm and I’ve got to get the Goldfish some coffee…. At least that I can do tonight…

Sunday, scary Sunday

I stumbled across this one weeks ago, and saw it again yesterday. I though I would share:

Warning:
This could bother very young kids even with an explanation of what’s happened…* It certainly bothered the peole in the park that day… but my 10, 8 & 5 year olds watched it. It’s not gruesome.

I give you, The MindFreak
Continue reading Sunday, scary Sunday