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Time to get started with Zend Framework

February 18, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 3

I have been developing with PHP for a while now and as I am learning more and more about OOP with C# I got interested in more OOP based programming with PHP. I picked up a few books on more advanced PHP programming which explains how to use classes and the like with PHP and it seems fairly similar to C# in its most basic form at least. While doing more research on PHP I stumbled across Zend Framework, I had heard about it before and I sort of knew what it was but I had never considered using it. But upon further reading of the documentation and what others had to say it really got me interested. So since I was learning more advanced PHP i figured why not throw in something like Zend Framework as well? I have not gotten very far but I am making and testing out some initial applications but progress is slow since I am also doing OOP C# and Discrete Mathematics at the same time.

Learning more about Zend got me interested in possibly switching to something better than dreamweaver for my PHP coding, yes I know it’s bad but I never felt that I needed anything better. At the moment I have started using NetBeans which seems pretty nice. I have yet to take a look at other IDE’s like something Eclipse based. But switching to NetBeans also got me thinking that I should probably clean up my work environment and get a bit more organized with my projects. Currently my projects are almost all always hosted, yes even during development, I like hosting the actual site in the main directory and then in another private directory I will have a duplicate of the site and database that I work on. I of course keep backups of my projects on external drives I have laying around. Anyways since I already have PHP on my Macs I figured I should just keep most of my projects in my NetBeans project folder and work on them locally, should be easier and faster right? We will see how it works out.

Other than that there is not much going on. Progress is steadily being made with BilligaApan.se, the swedish webshop me and a friend started about 6 months ago. I have a meeting with GoPlus coming up which seems interesting, just got to find time for it. I should also be heading over to PingDom soon, seems like a real interesting company to visit. I also met a new company I hadn’t heard about before called Diadrom which as far as I could understand the software to control various systems of cars and trucks and probably more, this might be a nice company where I could potentially take my “Ex-work” for college.

Another cool company I spoke to was Student Competitions, check them out and let me know what you think http://studentcompetitions.com

Spina – Premium WordPress Admin Template

January 26, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 17

Recently stumbled across this super sleek admin theme for WordPress. I can see lots of uses for this. Personally it’s great for my own company blog, where I can make it more stylish and sleek to show off to clients and friends. You basically end up hiding the whole WordPress part and making your site really unique. This is also the perfect theme for a web host who wants to provide wordpress with a custom look for their users.

Get The Theme Here For Only $18

Anonymous – Good or Bad?

January 23, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 15

I have been following anonymous for quite a while now and I find what they are and what they are doing pretty interesting. But is it the right thing to do and should they be doing it? There are many different ways to look at it but first let me explain what anonymous is and what they have done.

Anonymous is a group of hackers with no leader who claim they represent the people or the 99%. They are famous for using the V for Vendetta mask in protests. The name anonymous comes from being anonymous when on the internet as in you don’t really know who is behind the forum komments or the twitter account someone is running. They stand for many things and have been responsible for many hacker related incidents, especially recently. Their goal seems to be to protect free speech and privacy online. However sometimes Anonymous gives out a mixed message and it can be hard to tell what is true and what is false, this is due to the fact that the group has no leader which is a great weakness while still at the same time being one of their greatest strengths.

Recently Anonymous has really gained a lot of support and notice in their retaliation to the FBI and Department of Justice’s take down of a large file sharing website called MegaUpload.com. They used DDoS attacks on many government and corporate websites temporarily shutting down sites like the DOJ, RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music, US Copyright Office, EMI, HADOPI, and the FBI. The full story can be found here at Gizmodo.com. Later Anonymous also took down CBS.com and claimed to have deleted all files on their servers, however some claim that it was simply DNS poisoning which is still pretty bad. Either way CBS.com was up again in about 20 minutes. At this time UniversalMusic.com also went down once more. Read the full story at Gizmodo.com. Reading tweets on twitter further attacks and hacking are happening, as I am writing this post justice.gov is once again down thanks to Anonymous. Anonymous also leaked hacked emails from Stratfor.com, use twitter and search for #Stratfor to find these. More rumors say that Anonymous will try to DDoS or somehow shutdown Facebook on January 28th. I personally believe these rumors to be false, why would Anonymous want to shut down a social network which is against SOPA and PIPA.

Going back to the FBI and DOJ’s shutdown of MegaUpload.com which seems to have come at the perfect time for the FBI and DOJ to use the expected retaliation of the shutdown to gain support for SOPA and PIPA. Many speculated that the Anonymous attacks were expected and that what Anonymous is doing will only hurt us more, I guess we will see. Personally I believe that the MegaUpload.com shutdown was a very bad thing, it hurt more than it helped. Sure there may have been illegal file sharing going on but MegaUpload was usually fairly quick to deal with this and there was no search function on MegaUpload to make it easy to find these files. But many users used MegaUpload for perfectly legal purposes like backing up data, sharing home videos and pictures with family and friends, sharing school notes, upcoming artist shared their own music here, maybe even stored their music. The loss of data for normal users who were doing nothing illegal was immense and this is why I feel that the shutdown was wrong. Read more about the affects at PCMAG.

So if I had to pick sides here I would go with Anonymous.

Beware of MacKeeper – My Review

January 22, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 18

I downloaded MacKeeper to give it a try, to see if it was as useful as they claimed it to be. I ran a system scan and found some issues, most seemed to be uncleared caches for programs and it seemed fine to let MacKeeper get rid of the almost 1 GB I had stored up over time. Right after that is when the problems started. All my fonts, about 500 or so, were gone and all my bookmarks, saved passwords and sessions were also missing. This got me pretty mad but I contacted support and asked them nicely if they could help me with the issue. They told me to restart my computer and that that would fix the issues. I didn’t see how it would help but I did and nothing changed. I got back with the same support guy and he would not respond now when I asked for more suggestions, a few other support guys seemed to join the session and finally someone gave me a 10 step guide on how I should duplicate the problem and record it with screenshots as well. They also needed a bunch of my log files and system info which I did not feel like sending this company. I checked the log files myself but they didn’t tell me much more than that my cache had been cleared for a bunch of programs.

At this point I also went ahead and uninstalled MacKeeper which was much easier than I thought it would be. However to my surprise after uninstalling MacKeeper still had 6 or so files still left on my system that I had to delete manually. After doing more research I found others complaining about these files in addition to other issues where MacKeeper would prevent Mail or Skype from even launching. MacKeeper are also very unethical when it comes to their advertising, using popups and pop under ads that alert users to risks on their system, this program almost seems like some kind of malware. I would think twice before even trying this software on your Mac.

So how did I fix my issues? Well I was able to recover a backup profile for my firefox which I create daily so almost nothing was lost there. All my fonts have been reinstalled again but for some reason Photoshop still gives me alerts telling me that the fonts are not available all though I can use them. So thanks to MacKeeper I am still having issues with my fonts.

Don’t even try MacKeeper!

Maybe it’s time for some affiliate marekting? Or…

January 16, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 17

I have been thinking about what I really want to do lately and I am not fully sure. At first I thought it was web design which I feel that I am pretty good at and I have had many clients who loved my work both when I worked as a freelancer and from what I have done and still do through Markspixel.com. At the moment I am leaning more towards programming which I am learning more and more about through my school. Before I went to MDH I already knew some PHP but now that I am taking the Computer Science in Software Development courses I am learning more and more about PHP, C#, Objective C and other languages.

But do I want to program for clients, do I want to program my own scripts and sell them, or do I want to work and program for a company at regular hours?

My dream would probably to do neither, but it’s hard to explain why, however I would probably enjoy doing either of the three. Programming for clients would be an interesting experience but very similar to what I have already done with web design and I don’t see it being exciting and demanding enough in the long term. The second choice is what I am sort of doing with Markspixel.com but I am complimenting the scripts I sell with some affiliate scripts from other sites/programmers that I feel are at a good quality. This would not be bad at all but I am not sure I have the time at the moment and I am afraid I would run out of ideas or maybe start to find it boring. The third choice is of course working, why can’t I just get a job? Well first of all I have school to deal with which limits the amount of hours I can work. I also don’t like having a fixed set of hours when I have to work, I enjoy the luxury of being able to work until 6 am and then get up at 1pm if I want to and sometimes that works well for me. However if I was not in school and I found a job which was demanding and challenging where I could see myself learning more I would definitely deal with the 9 to 5 hours and get started. A job which requires me to do the same programming or design tasks over and over again is not something I am looking for.

One thing I actually enjoy is developing something someone needs, showing it to them, and getting feedback (especially when it’s mostly good). This goes into developing my own scripts, which I do as a hobby at the moment. Me and some friends have FIFA (soccer) tournaments on the PS3 where we have to keep track of scores, points, and rankings for every person/team. This used to be done on paper but I thought, why can’t this be done with a simple PHP program? So I spent about 8 hours putting some code together and got a basic script with no real design working and tested it out last night during a tournament. The results were pretty good, although it had some bugs during the game creation. Everyone seemed to enjoy the automatic rankings that showed who was currently in what place throughout the tournament, something that is a bit harder to do on paper every time someone plays a game. During the process I also added a goals to goals against ratio used for rankings which was also fun to see. Number of completed games was another feature I quickly implemented which was useful. All in all I believe my script handled about 56 games with very few bugs which I would call a success. Many of the people playing gave me some great feedback and new ideas on additional features to implement. I will continue working on the script in my spare time and hopefully I could launch a website so others can use it.

Which get’s me to the title of this post, affiliate marketing, maybe this is something I should get into more? I have a CJ.com account that is deactiveted for inactivity and I was considering activating it tomorrow when there support is back online. My success with SEO of billigaapan.se (my swedish company) may be a sign that I should simply make a store of affiliate products and promote it. I believe that I could make it work and it really doesn’t require much of my time when I have to focus on school and such. The products are always there and if I want to earn more money all I have to do is build some links by blog posting or maybe forums. Since Markspixel.com is magento based it could host any additional sites I may need for selling affiliate products.

Now all I need to do is find my niche, we will see how this goes

EDIT: Maybe commission junction has decided not to answer their phones.

Valuable Image Effects Pack

January 4, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 26

I decided to write about this pack of jquery image effects I recently got from codecanyon.

You can get the Image Effects Pack here

This sample and the code they give you is pretty awesome, I stumbled across it while looking for a garage door effect for a website I was working on and changed my mind about which effect to use when I saw what this guy had done with the images. I really liked the effect of splitting the initial image on hover and showing either a second image or text beneath it. Actually it will let you do both, anything you can fit in a div will work.

Here is an example of me using it on a swedish site I was working on http://server1.blurple.net/~dolce/

To get the Image Effects Pack click here

Markspixel.com gets a new look too!

January 3, 2012 / By Markus Tenghamn / in Blog Posts / 0 24

Yesterday we launched a completely new design with a new client system and many more products (which we are still in the process of adding) will now be available! If you are an existing client of Markspixel.com you will have received an email about this new change. All existing services such as web hosting remain the same. Swedish clients will be moved later in January. http://Markspixel.com/

New layout for my blog!