December 11th, 2008 | published by Tine
06.12.2008 Berlin at the newthinking store
“Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of ‘open’. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It’s about thinking, doing and being open.”
So that’s the definition, and what did I expect? Well, besides sympathy for the whole idea and being curious I had no idea what might happen. It started off with Open Basics (Overview, conceptual thoughts + established initiatives, as Free Software, Creative Commons, freifunk …). Nothing extremely new, but it was good to have them put all the bits and pieces of knowledge together so you are prepared for the speed geeking.
This was really cool:
Cecilia Palmer, Open Fashion, Pamoyo Here you can download the patterns, make your own clothes, modify and share the pattern again. If you don’t feel like sewing: Their prices are totally reasonable.
Ronen Kadushin, Open Design same thing here: Designs for lamps, chairs, bowls and stuff shared. On top of that he had a very entertaining way to present. Check out the rest of the presentations and sessions. It was pretty interesting and motivating.
Unfortunately I had to leave earlier to catch the bus from Berlin to Hamburg but sometimes I also have a private life. And in this case it meant to show up and take photos on a friends birthday party.
December 4th, 2008 | published by Tine
Germany: You need to take the card, after that the machine will give you the money
China: Take your money and then tell the machine to give you the card
Because I’m German I might like the German concept better, but it both makes sense. If you loose your card in Germany you have to go trough a lot of bureaucracy in order to get the card back, so please make sure you have your card. In China you will get a new card within minutes (Yes of cause I forgot my card and had to test the prosedure) so better make sure you have your huge bundle of – hopefully not fake – 100 RMB notes with you.
Bottom line is: Yes, there is some sort of best practice, which can be really helpful but for your own unique case common sense and testing might work a lot better. China might sometimes be like Germany but you are better off to test…
Chinglish
December 4th, 2008 | published by Alvaro
The default behavior in symfony is that if an exception arises and is not handled then it will redirect the user to the error500.php page or show a stack trace. Even if is possible to override the error500.php page, we were in the need to provide custom messages to the user and also keep him inside the symfony application.
Multiple factors can make this problem to happen, like when the database server refuse our connection attempts or just because something went wrong in our php application. To overcome this issue we developed a plugin that tells the symfony exception handling mechanism to forward the user to a module/action specified in the configuration files.
In this way, we can keep with us all the benefits of the symfony rendering engine, all it’s helpers, etc.
The handler is made in such a way that we can specify a global default error action, or more detailed per module/action handlers. We can have all this coolness by just typing a few lines in the module.yml file or in the app.yml file :).
If you want to see the details of the usage please check the plugin page on the symfony website.
