Time for another update – not the weekly one but just about the catalog manager refactoring.

The last few days I finally had a serious stab at getting this to work and I think I’ve got the basics done (screenshot at the end).
Things do not look spectacularly different from the old code, so don’t expect too much right now. However, it looks like we’ll be able to get the main layout done properly in the next week or two.

Finally, I’ve just added the task ‘Create standalone admin installer’ to my list and I’d like to mention that to hopefully get some feedback on that.

Since the new admin UI is completely separate, it is absolutely possible to run that without any other storefront/templating code. I wonder if that would be attractive as a first step to migrate to ZenMagick (should someone wish to do so). Also, no matter what, the more the merrier, so even if people would just use the admin app it would mean a lot more exposure (and finding bugs

It’s good to finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. The trip is far from being over, but at least there is now a degree of certainty about whether things will work or not.

Once the admin is stable (not complete, just everything working) it will be a lot easier to work on adding features, etc. Also, at that point there will be some more changes to the store code to catch up with all the good stuff that got created to make admin (and the MVC code in general) better.

And, once all that is done it really is time for a 1.0 release! Way to go, but it doesn’t look as impossible as, say, 6 month ago.

I have done some searching online, but despite multiple tries I can’t find a decent SQL (MySQL) parser in PHP. If anyone knows one I’d love to hear about that…

After almost 9 years I am today leaving my current job at the Noel Leeming Group. It’s been a good time and something that took me a long time to decide. I’ve met a bunch of great people there and I sure will miss them.

NLG has been a great place to work at and the support when the kids were born was phenomenal.

Now I am looking forward to starting at SLI. It will be a different style, different work but still a lot of people I know from my first job in New Zealand.

Work will still be mostly Java, but this time with some official bis of PHP on top, so just what I want. Not sure how that is going to affect ZenMagick, but development might slow down for a while…

Just a little note about my last VirtualBox upgrade to 3.1.4. After the upgrade and upgading the Guest Additions, the guest (Windows XP) became painfully slow.
The reason was very very bad disc performance. Eventually I removed all shared folders and that helped. I can’t remember if a reboot was necessary or not, but now things are almost back to normal (network is still slow and external stuff that is not GET in a browser will just timeout!).

If anyone has more about how to fix this I’d really appreciate to hear that…

Having just read the (very) last post on Joel on Software I decided to follow Joels advice to talk about more than just my *product*. I do that occasionally anyway and every time I am surprised how many hits posts unrelated to ZenMagick (but related to programming) actually get.

But today to something completely different: Chess. If you’ve browsed this site you might have found to Greasemonkey scripts that I’ve written that implement some sort of a practice board for online correspondence chess. I do play Correspondence Chess on two sites: chessworld.net and atlanticgames.net.

When I started, both sites where about even with features, perhaps with a slight advantage to chessworld.net. Now things have evolved a bit and chessworld.net is clearly richer in both game quality (ie. stronger opponents) and features. [Not that I need particularly strong opponents!]

One of my favourite thing, though, is to watch KingsCrusher, the guy running chessworld.net, play and comment! 5 minute chess.

If you don’t know what 5 minute Chess is, it’s Chess with a clock where each player has 5 minutes for all his moves. Together with his mostly insightful comments, watching KingsCrusher play International and even Grand Masters is a lot of fun, so if you want to improve your blitz and bullet chess, you should really try this.

Since I started using git (and github), i’ve struggled with the fact there wasn’t a single client that could matchexisting svn or hg clients.

I tried TortoiseGit – hoping that it would be up to par with TortoiseSVN, but that was not the case (I thingk that would have been somewhere around version 1.2.??).
So, I ended up using mysysgit like most of the other windows users, looking at the number of posts about that particular topic.

Then, recently I thought it might be interesting to see how TortoiseGit has improved. And I was impressed. Pretty much everything (at least the stuff I use) seems to be working. However, there still was the issue with using ssh. I didn’t really have the patience to get to the bottom right away, so ended up using TortoiseGit locally and mysysgit (bash) to push and pull.

Today I did some more research and while there is lots of stuff about how to download putty et al, there isn’t really a lot about TortoiseGit. Then, there is also the issue that the default is plink instead of openssl, which means different keystore structure etc.

Eventually, I figured I  should perhaps look at the help – and lo and behold – there it was. All I needed was:

1. To use puttygen.exe (comes with TortoiseGit) to convert my openssl private key to a .ppk file
2. Configure the remote with the newly created .ppk file

And now there isn’t a single reason to use anything else! After using TortoiseSVN for so long I feels instantly at home. Beside the push and pull I can use it pretty much the same like SVN. It’s perhaps not that simple, but it makes migrating from SVN to git a lot less painful.

I’ve got some ZenMagick money to spend on Google Adwords. It’s a voucher that expires March 31, so there still a bit of time. Perhaps I’ll get 0.9.9 ready until then and we could try to do ’some’ adverts in combination with the release. Any suggestions welcome…

I finally felt brave enough to release ZenMagick 0.9.8. I think it is a good time to do a release, seeing that there are so many new ideas coming from users and developers.

As usual there are release notes and also the beautified changelog. I think I’ve written enough about what is is in the release and so I’ll leave it at that for now.

One note about pugins, though. If you feel that a plugin is really missing (not all plugins have been released yet), drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

The freshmeat announcement will have to wait until tomorrow or perhaps even Tuesday, but I am sure will do it. Other things still to do are updating the apidocs (done!) and the demo store (which is still on 0.9.6, I think…) (done, except for the pretty links plugin)

I finally managed to repair the database and get the wiki running again. Should there be still issues, please let me know.

The wiki is currently unavailable due to some database issues. Unfortunately, I can’t login to the management panel as the ISP decided to blacklist my IP!
I’ll write a update once things are back to normal. Sorry for any trouble this should cause.