So I told my friends and started looking. I went to 2 interview sessions but both companies end up being too far away. I had to say no because, after much consideration… the only reason I want to leave my current place is because of the distance.

I can’t quite go headfirst into freelancing considering I’m not yet prepared to do so. I don’t even have my own code-machine. Luckily two things came along.

Part time job with my friend, Nasril. And potentially a freelancing kickstart from Amir.
If things go well, I get 6 months pay worth of job. I get to work from home and get to crash his partner’s office in Bangi which is close by. So that’s a pretty sweet deal.

With both of these support, in 6 months I would be able to get myself a machine and some extra moolah to start adventuring. It’s scary and all but hey… changes are always scary, no?

With these good friends, it’s less scary. I thank Allah for giving me such good friends.

So here’s to good friends and for less time spent on the road.

in the meantime i better start blogging more often , setup a portfolio somewhere here and do more stuffs!

and no this is not april fool :p

We’re planning a PHP Malaysian Meetup 20Ten and these are the draft for the event so far
timing: around the 6th or 7th month
place: MIMOS malaysia (because they are the best!)
the volunteers so far: amran@sameon, me@zam3858, jasdy@aku_tak_tau

the first discussion for the meetup will be when sameon is coming down to KL. Whoever that are interested to praise us, give money, give out sweat to make this meetup a success, u can tell us that you’re interested at the forum page http://www.php.net.my/forum/php-meetup-20ten. tell us you’re interested and dont miss the first meeting when it happens.

we’re also looking for companie who wants to promote stuffs to the local developers. stuffs like coffee, soap, books or ticket to hometown for raya. Or just want to promote yourself and open up a booth there. Headhunters are welcome!

last but not least: anybody wanting to share knowledge… tell us what you want to talk about!

may this be the best meetup like ever! ishaAllah.

If you’re good in PHP(we’re using cakephp here) and the usual javascript (extjs and jquery is cool), send in your resume to me.

KIC Oil & Gas is looking for someone to help build apps for internal use. this includes apps for office administrative, operations and even R&D projects you might think we could use and enjoy. If you’re a junior, you’ll work under me. If you’re a super cool deathstar programmer, i’ll work under you.

There’s a whole bunch of stuffs we need to do here and it’s a relatively new company (but really growing. less than 20 to 400 in 5 years) -edited on 21 Oct 2009.

Ah cancel that and just say we’re looking for new blood.

Right now these are the tools we use:

PHP (cakephp as framework)
mysql database
svn
trac
linux servers… if you’re on windows, we’ll ask you *politely* to use linux

Good stuff:
– you get to work with me.

Bad stuff:
– you get to work with me.

Extra Cocurricular activities we do and you might want to join in:
– yearly Maulid Rasul.
– support school for special kids.
– and other stuffs they didn’t bother telling me.

Just send in you resume/questions and whatnots to me: zam3858*gmail.com

<?php if($complaint['Complaint']['status'] == 'accepted') {?>
        by <?php echo $complaint['AssignedTo']['name']; ?>
 
<?php } if($complaint['Complaint']['status'] == 'decline') {?>
        by <?php echo $complaint['AssignedTo']['name']; ?>
 
<?php } if($complaint['Complaint']['status'] == 'updated') {?>
        by <?php echo $complaint['AssignedTo']['name']; ?>
 
<?php } if($complaint['Complaint']['status'] == 'closed') {?>
        by <?php echo $complaint['AssignedTo']['name']; ?>
 
<?php
        }
?>

Funny but nearly gave me a heart attack.

Stumbling upon postConditions, this flipped what I felt about creating a filter function.

So here’s what we are going to try, we’ll create a filter function for messages as example. Let’s assume you have the table, model, controller and some CRUD done and working for messages.

Let us begin by creating the view first since we’re getting the filter conditions from the form. It’s this file: ‘app/views/messages/filter_messages.ctp’.

 
<h2>Filter Messages</h2>
<?php
echo $form->create('Message', array('action' => 'filter_messages'));
echo $form->input('message');
echo $form->input('from');
echo $form->end('Submit Filter');
?>
<hr />
<h2>Filter Results: </h2>
<?php
//display apa kita jumpa kat sini
foreach($messages as $message):
    echo $message['Message']['message'] ;
    echo "<hr />";
endforeach;
?>

Then add the filter function to the app/controllers/messages_controller.php.

 
function filter_messages() {
        //simple initialization for the variable that'll carry the result
        $messages = array();
        //checks if we sent something to filter via the form (remember sent items go to $this->data)
        if($this->data) {
 
            /*
             * here comes postConditions
             * first parameter is the posted value,
             * 
             * the second parameter (array('message' => 'LIKE'))
             * tells postCondition for the fields we're looking at and what type of
             * condition we want to use for that field item. So in this case, we want to use 'LIKE' for field 'message'
             * therefore the sql generated will look similar to "SELECT * FROM messages as Message WHERE Message.message LIKE '%whatever%' "
             * 
             * the third parameter, will tell what is the boolean condition among each
             * condition we set for the find (you know like if we want 'message' is like 'b' AND the message came from 'dude')
             * 
             * last and quite least (heh), if we set true, only the fields we set in the second parameter will be considered. 
             * if false, any field in $this->data will be used. nifty huh.
             */
            $conditions = $this->postConditions( $this->data,
                                                 array('message' => 'LIKE'),
                                                 'OR',
                                                 false
                                               );
 
            //the usual find() function.
            $messages = $this->Message->find('all', array('conditions'=> $conditions));
        }
 
        //sends result to the view.
        $this->set('messages', $messages);
 
    }
?>

That’s it!

An additional note: Controller::postConditions() doesn’t mean you have to use the data posted but you can also ready your own array in the usual $myarray['Model']['field1'] format and use that as parameter.

<?php
 $tobefiltered = array('Message' => (
                        array(
                               'message'=>'this is my message',
                               'created' => '2009-09-09 21:09:09',
                               'from' => '013xxxxxxxxxx'
                              )
                       );
 $condition_generated = $this->postConditions($tobefiltered);
 
?>

The module is simply to allow a student to send in queries to a panel of teachers. A registered student submits a question, the panel gets a notification via email that a question was submitted and then the panel would answer if they want to. Quite a simple module but since I’m just starting to do it the Drupal way, it would take more time than the usuals.

Maybe.

After a day of going through the tutorials, API and whatnot, I think I’ve got enough to get the module up and running. But patience is a virtue and over-confidence is the fall of many many men. So let’s just study more of this so that we can do this properly and avoid problems later on.

note: Considering to just mutilate Drupal’s comment module to add in what I need.

The smarter way is using what people already done and make it run with your needs. So we’re trying out Pinax for python.org.my. I got it running fine on my machine but for some reason it just wouldn’t start on the server.

Currently python.org.my is on diamanda, a django forum (we decided to stick to django apps since it’s something we want to learn and work on) and since Pinax is also running on django, I figured it would work out of the box. Of course it would, just make sure to get the requirements right.

I spent half a day on the console trying to figure out why pinax was giving me the ‘OperationalError: unable to open database file’. I googled and there was someone there who had the same problem but the solution they gave him doesn’t seem to work on my case.

Then it hit me… the server was running on python2.4. I guess pinax wants version 2.5. That’s the only thing I can think of that is causing the problem. Lets see if I can get the server owner or Misbah to upgrade….

But it was worth losing. There were really good people there.

I was assigned to TextPattern cms and the code structure was pretty easy to understand. They didn’t have (yet) any db abstraction and looking at the code didn’t feel like doing any until later. The unstable code in subversion seems to point out that they want to provide this. Or… it could be just to support some mysql forks.

So I started with putting in the DB layer from their newer version into the stable one. Then after several mishaps later, I had a broken MSSQL support and basically gave up after, in my opinion, lobotomising good code. So in the end I lost.

It was good fun. Quite a while since I had to juggle stuffs in my life and this is good practice.

Sometimes I’m not sure what I’m doing and I have to tell you that this is one of them. I registered for the Lamp2Win contest to extend a selected application into a php/IIS/MSSQL environment. I’ve never done IIS. I don’t know anything about MSSQL. Luckily I have some experience in php.

I’m counting on that to help me get through.

Gee… the acronym is WIMP (Windows IIS MSSQL PHP).

After registration I noticed that people will vote for their favourite and this will be 40% mark. Darn. I’m not exactly Mr Popular material.

Oh well, maybe I’ll get new friends around the community of whatever application they’ll assign me to.

So from a Toshiba Tecra S2 (that occasionally wouldn’t even start sometimes. Possible fix below) to a Compaq nw9440. Sweet.

Since I have to setup a new OS anyway, I decided to give Fedora 10 a try since my first Linux experience back in 2001 was on a Red Hat. At first Fedora 10 was cool. It starts up nicely, didn’t like how they did the gdm login though. There was a minor update manager upgrade hiccup at first but I got that fixed by changing the repositories (I think).

After a month of use, Ubuntu 9.04 was released and I guess I’m just a Ubuntu fan. So I downloaded Ubuntu, installed it last night and left the laptop on for the updates, extra application installation and copying my old home directory to this new one.

In the morning, I have a fresh Ubuntu 9.04 ready for playfulity productivity.

And then for some reason I couldn’t update/install because the repository http://my.archive.ubuntu.com keeps on timing out. So I edited the source.list file to get the files from archive.ubuntu.com, reload the package manager and that managed to get it working.

Anyway, I guess I’m close to getting development environment up and running again. Just needs to load up xampp (love you guys because all I need to do is copy over the lampp folder to my new /opt/ ).

//Toshiba Tecra s2 possible no-start fix. Possibly could ruin your life forever too so beware!
1. Try taking out the battery and just use the power supply.
2. Syukri of QIPMC mentioned that he opened up his machine and found that the screw near the keyboard or heatsink was loose. Tightening that up seems to make the problem go away.
3. Go change the motherboard. This was what I did twice.
//endOfToshiba Tecra s2 possible no-start fix.

So let see what happens after a month of using Ubuntu.