Introducing envelopa.com

For the past year, Matej and I have been working hard on a new startup. We have revolutionized printing as you know it. Just kidding. We did this in two weeks. Just kidding. Matej did it in one week; I’m just stealing a breath of bragging right.

Envelopa.com is a super-simple utility for printing addresses on an envelope. It’s old school — we know — but it was one of those problems that we couldn’t find a simple and free solution for. It was also something that fit into our “if it can’t be done in a week, we won’t do it” mantra.
(Note: our next one’s a real whopper so that mantra dies now.)

Envelopa is pretty basic in its current form. You sign up, paste contacts from a spreadsheet or create new ones manually, and generate formatted PDFs for each of those contacts. You can then take those PDF files and (using only an Inkjet printer as odd as that might sound) print them directly onto your envelope. We’re, rather Matej’s, busy with adding support for importing contacts via Google and a CSV file-upload utility.

It might just save you a few minutes of time; we find that pretty darned useful. Check it out.

Gitolite with friends on server and such

I’m mainly a lone-wolf developer but sometimes (and more and more so) I need to work with other people outside of my dungeon. I have one el-cheapo box acting as the ssh, web, git, and backup server. I think this is a fairly typical setup. I wanted to take an existing project, add it to git, and share it with other dudes while still being able to code directly (when necessary) on the server itself. The solution turned out not to be so obvious. Well, not to me at least.

Here’s how I set up git on that box; thanks to Ubuntu, Gitolite and specifically Silas Sewell’s quick guide.
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A man walks into a bar …

… and finds a colleague he hasn’t seen out for a while. The colleague invites him to a night of drinks but his wife is expecting him home soon for dinner.

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Ptuj (reads like 1987)

I was in the process of moving some of my wife’s archives from position X to position Y when I stumbled across this jewel. It’s a tourist pamphlet of Ptuj circa 1987. I found it interesting enough to warrant a quick scan-and-post.

The cover page is actually quite nice. Could be reused. Hint. Hint.

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Decisions. Decisions.

Was just going through some PR texts and stumbled on:

Water the birds

We have a few bird feeders around the house. I do my best to make sure the bowls are always full — the local birds seem to really enjoy sunflower seeds.

It never occurred to me that they’d probably also enjoy some fresh water. Odd how obvious things escape me sometimes. It’s food for thought.

Up yours Telligent.

Here’s a screenshot (format matters) of an email I received this week from Telligent.  There’s no pretext, just a boot and a bunch of self-promotion.

I wasn’t a user so I’m not so offended, I just find this message a tad brutal. If I need a social network for my enterprise-of-one, I’d probably use theflowr.

Up yours Telligent.

Warm regards,

Dennis

The smartest thing I’ve done all day

Started this command this afternoon on a recently restored system:

find / -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Still waiting for it to complete before I beerelebrate.

I hate subversion.

Note: is prolly an inappropriate command for a system-wide death. Don’t care.

Magento’s ungood.

Back in the early 00′s, I had the responsibility of cleaning up a project that was way off track. At the time, I was working for EYC out of Brussels; our client was a specialty steel company who’s problem was simple: for each new order, find existing scrap from previous orders that could be used to fulfill the new order. It was a simple problem; the solution (in print) filled about 4 large binders. They (the code monkeys) had built a rocket to Mars.

My last remaining (ever!) PHP project is for the implementation of a Magento shop. The owners are friends of mine so it was with great pleasure that I offered my services. Now, a few weeks into it, I can’t help but draw comparisons with that recycled-steel/rocket-to-mars project.

Magento is overly complex. So much so that typically trivial things such as moving hosts, changing basic configuration, importing and exporting data, theming and extending, etc require heavy doses of sedatives and near-Papal patience.  Here’s just a few specific examples:

1. Themes. Themes and styles are in completely different locations making customisation a real pain in the ass. There’s no easy way around this; structure is in app/design/frontend/design/default/YOURTHEME with styles hunkered down in skin/frontend/default/YOURTHEME.  Even using Nautilus’ tabs, this is a nightmare.
2. Extensions. Want to include custom XML layout in your CMS WYSIWYG editor? Magento’s got that mastered.
3. Configuration. This one rocks! Configuration is completely obscured (app/etc/config.xml and app/etc/local.xml) and is mystically merged together with other configuration settings from dis-joined locations; yes, including configuration from the DB. If you’re not a fan of simple configuration, Magento’s for you!
4. MagentoConnect. Fans of WordPress’ cool remote installation feature might like this for about 10 seconds. It’s a built in extension-manager that sorta works. I’m not entirely sure who the audience is for this feature but if it’s for the site’s non-technical staff, prepare your diapers and stiff drinks for support calls.
5. A class called Object. Oh my!

I could go on an on about how ungood Magento is. In their defense, I can tell they had two primary motivations (aka: they’re not stupid folks) for this architecture:

1. Build a consultancy out of an open-source solution.
2. Maximize flexibility.

Finally, I’d be completely idiotic to not mention that once everything is in place and you’re bald from the learning curve, things work. For an open source solution, that’s already something ain’t it?

Break Like the Wind – On Fart Jokes

When I was in high school I came up with a great way for institutions to deal with flatulence. No longer would there be shame in passing gas, and banished would be the reputation-ruining accusations that killed your chances of getting a girlfriend. Gone would be the standard accusation of “He who smelt it, dealt it,” and the tinny rebuttal of “He who denied it, applied it.”

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