I have always been searching, and still am, for the perfect way to keep all my notes about projects i'm working on. Especially, to keep the todo's and bugs. I have tried different system: going from pieces of paper to systems like dotProject, but none of them completely suited my needs. dotProject needs to many clicks and pieces of paper can get lost.

Since about half a year now i use my wiki for this purpose (amongst other uses). But yesterday i got the idea to try some Bug Tracking Systems. Although these BTS's are generally specifically designed to manage bugs (duh!) they can also be used to manage todo's etc. That's by example how mozilla uses bugzilla, then not only keep their bugs in it, but also complete discussions about their website and marketing etc.

So i started searching for some good BTS's, since i think bugzilla is a bit difficult. I wanted something that looks nice, has support for multiple projects and doesn't scare normal computer users when …

Bush wins the elections in America and to me, that's yet another black day in the history of the USA. What will the world look like in 2008? a total mess? Will we be in the middle of worldwar III?

*sigh*

My devblog will stay in this black color for a few days to reflect my feelings about this..

Although i'm still reading CSS, The definitive Guide, i bought Essential CVS, also from O'Reilly. This book explains the essential commands to use CVS, as well as how to manage repositories etc.

While i was testing Eclipse (at school we use IntelliJ, but hey, that's not Open Source ;) ), I came accross PHPEclipse. As you know (or don't know) Eclipse is more then just a Java IDE. It is a complete Platform and Framework to create IDE's. The PHPEclipse uses Eclipse to create a complete IDE for (you can't guess it ;) ) PHP. When I was reading the install-docs for PHPEclipse they mentioned WAMPP in it, as the distribution for Apache+PHP+MySQL. After searching a bit I found it: XAMPP (WAMPP was the previous name for the windows specific distro)

XAMPP is a distribution, available for Linux, Windows and Solaris for people that want to run Apache with PHP and MySQL (and other things like filezilla FTP etc), but don't like configuring all the different apps.

Using XAMPP (on windows) is really easy:

• first download the zip or, like i prefer the 7-zip file (44Meg for the zip while only 19Meg for the 7-zip clearly proves the quality of 7-zip imho).
• Unzip it …

Yesterday, while after playing with the php.ini files etc to write my previous article i decided to play some more. This time to get my pages served with content-type UTF-8, which is a lot better then serving it as, by example, ISO-8859-1. I already knew this could be done by adding AddDefaultCharset utf-8 to your .htaccess file, but on my server this resulted in an internal server error. But since my ISP changed some of the settings on the server a few days ago (it now uses phpsuexec) i hoped it would work. Besides i leanerd that i could also try to use a php.ini file.

To test things i wrote 4 little testcases that should all display some special characters, that are just as plain text in the files (so whithout using character entities):

• TestCase1: This page is served without any information about the character encoding so it uses the default of the browser. In Firefox this is ISO-8859-1, so you'll get some ugly characters instead of …

When a php script requires write access to a file or directory (like Nucleus does for the 'media'-directory if you want to be able to upload pictures etc), you have to chmod that directory (or file) to 777 (or 666 for files) on most servers. This gives world write access to this folder (file). This is because on most servers apache (and php) runs as user 'nobody'.
Although giving world write access will make it possible to use the script, it also means a security hole, which can be used by hackers and other riff-raff.

To avoid this security hole some ISP's install phpsuexec on their servers (like mine did a few days ago). Using phpsuexec php runs under your own username on the server. This removes the necessity to make files and folders world writable. Instead you can just use 755 for folders (the default) and 644 for files (also the default).

But using phpsuexec has some other consequences: some statements in your .htaccess file will result in an …

Yesterday i bougth Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition written by Eric Meyer. Now i can finally learn how to create a good stylesheet :-)

see also http://budts.be/weblog/item/376

Today i had my first schoolday. Seems like it will be another very interesting year :-) (and hopefully my very last year at school :-))

Today i started wondering if it would be better to rename the 'numerical' optionmeta (currently in CVS) to something like 'datatype' to make it easier to add other types in the future, by reusing the same option meta.
By example: when an option currently must be numerical it uses: numerical=true. Suppose in the feature we want to add the possibility to create options taht only accept dates. Then we shouldadd yet another optionmeta: datetime=true. So wouldn't it be better to rename 'numerical' to 'datatype' and set this to 'numerical' for numerical options? Doing it this way we could in the future simply add new datatypes: dataype=numerical , datatype=datetime , datatype=url ...

After a little delay (because i'm working now (holiday-tasks unpacking X-Mas stuff...)) I have released version 1.2 of MyNewsletter

New features:

• Errors are now handled by the doError()-method, thus they use a part of your skin, while for successfully (un)subscriptions you can set up a page to which the subscribers will be redirected
  
• Completely new admin area to manage subscriptions (see who's on the lists, add, delete)
  

• Language Selector: you can now simply select the language you want the plugin to use, from the pluginoptions-screen. Adding a new language is as simple as dropping a new folder in the 'lang'-dir, select 'edit options', refresh the page in your browser and there you go!

I also added a plugin to upgrade your current installation of MyNewsletter (in the extra-folder), to make upgrading as easy as possible.

Download: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/nucleusplugs/NP_MyNewsletter-v1.2.zip?download
Documentation: http://wiki.budts.be/NpMyNewsletter

Now that this is done, i'm going to finnish the readonly-meta for options and also add …