27
December
2006
I trust everyone is doing ok over the holidays? I can imagine that to many people going through any kind of uncertainty the best gift you got this year was a tomorrow and may we live the whole of the coming year with that perspective.
There is a reason for this post, because just before the holidays I was invited to a radio interview about some extremely important news about later stage melanomas and how the cancer spreads. Although I was dialed in we ran out of air time for the story but the scientists are figuring it out. This is the story Cell protein holds key to melanoma spread, and here is an excerpt:
“When the level of this protein inside a melanoma cell drops, the cancer cell changes its behaviour: it stops growing and ‘blends in’ with its neighbours. This makes it less likely to be affected by chemotherapy drugs, which are designed to target fast-growing cells.”
It was a story of hope, but it did however send a bit of a shiver down my spine because not only am I in this boat, I know many people, many young people who are too and the general perspective the people around us have is that once the doctors cut the mole out the cancer is cured, that it’s happy days from there on. Whereas most of us know it’s only the start of an epic story, our own war on terror, because as suggested by this research the cancer almost knows it’s under attack and blends in, gets its head down and floats about as slowly as the original mole grew. I often thought of it as an ambush waiting to attack and it’s easy for anyone to say carry on with your life as normal but they aren’t living with this knowledge. Finally we all have some evidence to back up our concerns and finally the doctors are getting a grasp on why melanoma isn’t gone when it’s “gone”.
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8
December
2006
I do like to play around with things you know and even though wordpress allows me to create enclosures for my podcasts, I wanted to actually create my own podcast PHP scripts. This kind of stuff is fun!
For sometime now I’ve been working on a little project I’m calling podcreate, which is basically a set of quick and dirty scripts which actually get the job done very well indeed. The main aim is to loop around a directory looking for mp3 files, well in fact media files in general and build an array of items, which I can use to build RSS feeds with enclosure tags which hold information about the type and size of file and so on and can be used in podcatching software to automatically download those files. I cheated, the date of the podcast comes directly from the file name so there is a limitation on a file structure and that’s my excuse for not building ID3 tag reading in, which I know about.
The link below isn’t to my main podcast feed, because wordpress handles that for me:
Podcreate came about due to a couple of reasons, firstly a website which hosted audio downloads didn’t offer any podcast feeds, there was another site which didn’t offer any rss feeds at all so I set about screen scraping those sites and creating my own feeds, thus parsing their HTML and turning it into my XML, within the limits that has the scripts work well until the web master of one of those sites gets inconsistent with file names. Secondly I was recording episodes of Home and Away for one of my best friends on my PVR and I thought, hmm why not vidcast these episodes to him, save me buying some DVDs?
I have lots of fun doing stuff like this, take radioripper for example, which is a screen scraping script which will take a URL from the BBC listen again archives and produce some mplayer scripts for me, that will download a BBC radio show and transcode it to mp3. I love it!
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8
December
2006
Ok, ok this might be a post with a considerable amount of bias, but a great new book entitled “Practical PHP and MySQL” has been published by a talented author and friend.
The book guides the reader through eight web applications, looking at the issues surrounding each type of project. A useful resource for new and seasoned PHP developers if you are thinking about that new PHP book, then have a goosey-ganders at this one. Flicking through the book you’ll find references to close friends and the language style and presentation is quite relaxed and entertaining.
The book reminded me of how majorly into PHP we were at university. Jono had set up a PHP server at university so that we could write our final year projects in the language, at the time I was developing on and maintaining my own PHP server at our student house as was Jono. You’d often hear both myself and Jono SSHing into our Linux boxes, hosted on our 56k dial up connections back home, from within the uni lectures, compiling new features into our PHP installations, editing apache config files with really flaky versions of vi, and generally playing around with our code, when we should have been listening to something about Director or Lingo or something like that.
The whole LAMP ethos shows that the open source projects which fuel the system are viable technologies and have stood up well in the server market place. With the likes of ruby on rails and even PEAR and Smarty, PHP has become a major part of the web development environment, it still is remarkable how prevalent ASP is when you consider how less restrictive using a LAMP system is, puts cold fusion to shame anyway!
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