Michael Flanagan

Enjoying some Ian Brown at the moment. My Way is a great album. This isn”t from it, but this is great too.

Ian Brown – F.E.A.R.

…working with Dave and Ronan in WebTogether.

It’s my first time working together with a group in an office, as opposed to the usual freelancing routine of one man alone in his sitting room. This aspect alone – despite some initial reservation – is definitely something I’ve appreciated over the course of the year. It’s good to get out there, it’s great to share and bounce ideas around with smart people who, between them, know much more about visual design and the business side of business than I’d ever want to ;-), and it’s invaluable knowing that those other aspects are in such capable hands – while I get all excited over my codes.

Over the course of the past six months or so, I’ve expanded upon my knowledge of Codeigniter to build a powerful multi-site CMS system for our clients, launched websites for clients such as McGovern Surveyors, DBASS Accountants, ETAG Signs and the classifieds ads website, Fetch.ie. And at the back of it all has been the project which arguably brought us together, Octopied.

And Then?

For the new year I’m hoping to enjoy a good deal of the same, while shifting more of my time and attention over to Octopied. Over the Christmas break (my first real “time off work” all year) I’ve been reading extensively on the Symfony PHP framework, and I like what I see. Compared to CodeIgniter, it feels a bit like getting the kid-gloves off, and 2010 might just be the year for that. Here’s to it!

Happy new year!

I have, of course, listened to an awful lot more music than this in the past twelve months – but I don’t scrobble all the time. Apart from the numbers though, this list is probably accurate enough.

So, according to my Last.fm profile, this is what I have been mostly listening to in the past 12 months.

Pos. – ARTIST – # Tracks Played

1 – Kings of Leon – 286
2 – The Beatles – 229
3 – Radiohead – 219
4 – Vangelis – 214
5 – The American Analog Set – 86
6 – Philip Glass – 82
7 – Beirut – 75
8 – Rage Against the Machine – 43
9 – Led Zeppelin – 37
10 – The Flaming Lips – 32
11 – The Redneck Manifesto – 31
12 – Calexico – 29
13 – Nirvana – 27
14 – R.E.M. – 26
15 – Air – 23

I just “pwned” / jailbroke my iPhone.

I can now mount the phone wirelessly over SSH in Ubuntu (or anything else) and drag + drop my tunes, videos, files, etc. over to it :-D

The Ubuntu User Guide has instructions for getting this done.

…there also seems to be instructions there for getting iPhone2.2 working with ‘normal’ syncing apps on Ubuntu. Going to try that out now.

Not *too* much else of interest from the jailbroken app store, to be honest… though InteliScreen is good — displays upcoming calendar events and new mail summary on the lock screen…. but wireless transfer was the killer app for me. My fenestraphobia has kept me from changing my tunes for too damn long.

Written, directed and produced by Adam Curtis, ‘The Trap’ consists of three one-hour documentarys which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”

Originally aired on the BBC in March 2007, you can now watch the programmes via Google Video below.

The style, and quality, is very similar to Curtis’ previous — and equally brilliant — documentary series “The Power of Nightmares”. Curtis seems to have an ability to look at our world as though he were examining a colony of ants… avoiding preconceptions, sweeping statements and black and white judgement, and instead offering a largely unbiased (though inevitably somewhat anti-establishment) overview of the systems of the society we live in.

These are the documentaries that Zeitgeist, Loose Change, et al, can only wish they were.

Part One : “Fuck You Buddy” :

Part Two : “The Lonely Robot” :

Part Three : “We Will Force You To Be Free” :

Keeping it simple, and taking full advantage of -moz-border-radius / -webkit-border-radius to give some nice rounded corners in Firefox, Safari and other compatible browsers, while still looking pretty good in others.

Must fix up the frontpage to suit.

Having previously struggled with the documentation (or lack thereof) for the CakePHP Framework, looked briefly at Zend and even dabbled with Ruby On Rails (not knowing much about the underlying language – Ruby – I decided this wasn’t my best in-road to MVC), it was finally CodeIgniter which served as my first real introduction to web frameworks and the Model/View/Controller way of doing things.

I’m naturally hesitant to put something on a pedestal and evangelise without having truly sampled the alternatives – maybe Cake starts to teach itself after the first hurdle… perhaps it really is worth learning a new language to unlock the power of Rails… and Zend? It could be worth more than a cursory glance – but in the past few months at least, CodeIgniter has been good to me.

After a lot of mucking about, a couple of false starts and much reading up on the excellent User Guide and wiki, CodeIgniter became the framework of choice for the latest project – Crewger.

Crewger is a networking, project management, and exhibition site tailored towards both traditional and what we like to call ‘new’ Irish filmmakers – those that, like us, see the Internet a great opportunity for film.

With this specific target, what I didn’t want to do is what I’ve done for more general online communities in the past and mould the website around a pre-built Content Management System. This certainly works in a lot of cases (I remain on good terms with the humble CMS) but for Crewger I wanted something much more flexible. I wanted to create the tool or resource which I knew should exist, not simply re-iterate whatever I can find that’s out there already.

And at the same time, why reinvent the wheel?

The nature of a framework like CodeIgniter, Rails or CakePHP, means it makes light work of the more common tasks while not holding your hand all the way to a finished website. Common tasks taken care of, you’re free to use your programming skills to concentrate on the not so common… all those cool things that make your application special. For someone with more imagination than patience when it comes to building new things, this one’s a no brainier.

And while I may in future look elsewhere for my framework fix — perhaps to the recent ‘more open’ fork from the CodeIgniter project, KohanaPHP — for now at least, and for Crewger, CodeIgniter is kicking ass.

The CMS is dead? Long live the Framework.

This fix was harder to find that it probably should have been, so I’ll reiterate…

The Problem : The headphone / earphone jack is being ignored by Ubuntu 8.04 (‘Hardy Heron’) on the Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21S. Sound continues to play exclusively through the lap-top speakers whether or not headphones or earphones are plugged in.

The Solution :

Edit the file :

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

To include this line at the end :

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio

Save the file and reboot your machine.

Mad props to these guys for providing me with the solution. And this fix should also work in Ubuntu 7.10.

Now I can get back to Battlestar Galactica, without pissing off the neighbours :)

An update on the lack of updates : busy working on a couple of very cool projects at the moment. One of which I’ve had on my mind for the past year, and it’s great to be finally getting something done. Hopefully some more news on the two of them soon enough.

A lot of this recent work I’ve been doing using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. After looking at a few different frameworks in the past number of months, I think I’ve settled on this one. Thanks in no small part to the rather excellent documentation.