I’ve spent the bulk of the day getting CakePHP up and running on the www-side of the amodernfable.com domain. Why? Because I wanted to use a framework to handle things like integrating a database-driven portfolio with some static content and learn more PHP (and the Cake framework, which I’ve heard nothing but great things about) in the process.

The CakePHP installation here on Dreamhost was a snap. No real configuration necessary other than setting up my database config file to point to the right spot. I was expecting worse (I know I’ve seen some nasty stuff happen when I tried to get Ruby on Rails up and running before, but this was simple and easy).

Overall thoughts on the framework (from a couple hours’ use): if you’re used to Rails, you’ll know how things work or where they go right off the bat (there are some differences that will catch you, such as default layouts being enforced right off the bat, and I like the RoR approach better that way). Setting up routing was a bit easier than my last Rails attempt. Documentation is easy to find with the right Google search. My object oriented PHP is a bit on the slim side, but, when you’ve programmed enough, PHP is a quick learn; hopefully, the controllers and models will give me more experience there.

It’s nice to have a framework in place to speed things up. Also, I’ve built in Cushy CMS support right into my views, which should make it a snap to update things. I really dig Cushy for doing one thing (managing small blocks of content) very well. Let’s see how well it plays with Cake. (And, there’s two plugs in a single post!)

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

Google App Engine - Google Code

Well, this is just excellent. I wonder how well it performs versus Amazon’s S3/EC2?

Tags: webapps, hosting

Rainbow Hash Cracking

Coding Horror: Rainbow Hash Cracking

Always salt your hash.

technorati tags:rainbowtable, hash, salt

I’ve been trying to find an open source or free Adobe Flex IDE, mainly so that I can avoid dropping hundreds of dollars on FlexBuilder. Why not just write mxml files by hand? Because I don’t know very many of the tags and I’m a sucker for code complete.

I think FlashDevelop might fit the bill nicely.

technorati tags:adobe, flex, oss, ide

I’ve been cranking out a bunch of presentations at work lately. That demands that I have a lot of stock imagery on tap. (Plain old words and bullets get boring after a while.) The best place for it? Flickr, of course.

I needed an easy way to do an advanced search that would let me fetch images open for commercial use under that Creative Commons license. So, I wrote Mozilla search plugin that accomplishes it. I creatively named it “Flickr CC+C” for “Creative Commons & Commercial.” (Choose the second one; the first one’s broken, but there’s no way to get it down.)

Technorati Tags: mozilla, search, flickr, firefox