About me
Mike van Riel is a Senior Software Developer at Unet BV, an ISP for the corporate segment based in the Netherlands.
With a passion for industry standards and Quality Assurance he loves nothing more than to discuss methods to improve code and ways to 'Do-It-Better'™ in general.
Aside from the regular talk about PHP and web-based technologies he also occasionally tends to write about his personal life, opinions and hobbies.
phpStorm, a true delight to work with
During my career as a PHP developer (hobbyist and professional) I have tried a multitude of IDEs and tools to write code in.
Every IDE I have found thus far did great things but had their downsides. It is with phpStorm that I can send at least some of those problems to the past
pman, a unix command line PHP Manual
Yesterday I read a blog post by Hannes Magnusson titled Unix Manual pages for PHP functions.
Unknowingly had Hannes done me a great favor by posting the exact instruction on installing pman, a commandline tool which acts as the unix man command. Every so often I am busy working and noticed how easy it would be to have such a Unix / Linux tool, unknowing that it already existed.
The year of change
I usually do not make new year’s resolutions, but this year is going to be different. This year will be the year of change!
In the past year I have done and experienced a lot of wonderful things but some things were left undone or have been given a lower priority than all the other great things.
To compensate I have made a TO-DO list of things that I want to change or improve this year and which I want to share with you.
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Released a new version of sfPropelRowLevelAccessBehaviorPlugin
After discovering a somewhat annoying bug had I removed the previous release of my plugin; I could not allow people to download and install a version of which I knew such a bug existed.
Thus after some recoding and bug fixing I am proud to present version 1.1 of sfPropelRowLevelAccessBehaviorPlugin!
You can find it in the symfony plugin repository (http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfPropelRowLevelAccessBehaviorPlugin) and install it with the symfony plugin:install command.
Please examine the README for details about implementing Row Level Access with this plugin and if you have any questions, please mail me.
Thank you for listening
Symfony plugin released!
A few days ago I blogged about the lack of Row Level Access control in symfony. Although I still have too little time I was seduced to try and tackle this problem.
The result is clear! A new plugin was born and it is available for all to enjoy at http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfPropelRowLevelAccessBehaviorPlugin.
It is very easy to use, the details of which you can find on the plugin page and in the README file.
All that remains is to wish you heaps of fun coding!
Row level ACL on symfony
Even though sfGuardPlugin is a great ACL plug-in; it unfortunately cannot handle Row Level Access. In most of my personal projects I require such a level of control and the solutions chosen always feel a bit ..hackish..
Using Symfony’s Lime in phpUnderControl
Do you know phpUnderControl?
Do you know and use Lime?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to the questions above then you will likely have tried to integrate Lime into phpUnderControl. So have I..
What I discovered was that there are 3 ways in which this problem can be solved.
- Use Lime’s xUnit output mechanism, only available in Symfony 1.3 and higher (or so I have been told) available when Lime 2 is released (which is usable in symfony versions earlier than 1.3).
- Use Stefan Koopmanschap’s symfonyUnderControl plugin (http://www.leftontheweb.com/message/symfonyUnderControl_lime_integration_with_phpUnderControl), I only know for sure that it can be run in Symfony 1.2. Other versions of the framework might work as well.
- Or, and this is the subject of this post, directly use Lime from phpUnderControl
The order above is (in my opinion) from best to less best, xUnit xml output is always preferred above the direct inclusion in phpUnderControl.
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Changed theming to use Crossbrand
I have not blogged in a while due to personal circumstances, like having started on a new job which keeps intensifying, but also because I was unsatisfied with the way my sites handle templating.
Let me explain, I have a shared webhosting account and run multiple domains and subdomains. Some (actually most) of them require the same theme but have different theming mechanisms.
What I needed was a cross-(sub)domain branding solution!
Having looked around on the internet and coming to the conclusion there are none out of the box, I decided to build one myself.
Now, a month later (don’t have much spare time and more hobbies and interests 
) I can say, I am almost done!
This blog is now officially running on Crossbrand. I will release it to the community once I have ironed out the last glitches and finished documentation.
Check back regularly if you are interested!
A new design!
It was long overdue but I have finally managed to finish the new design for the Naenius.com website. My intention is to use this design in all subparts of this website, as well as the new parts I am concocting in my brain.
With the implementation I did notice a few artifacts. For one, I did not implement a comments form. Actually I already knew about this but I was fed up with the old design and thus I decided to launch ‘prematurely’.
Aside from the above I noticed that the sidebar could use some additional styling. All bullets went missing in the design and this is not really my intent (specifically with the categories widget).
Aside from the things I mentioned above it has been a good launch! Now it is time to test this bird in Internet Explorer and hope all goes well
If you would like to comment on this design, either wait until I have added the comments form or send me an e-mail!
Installing Lotus Notes 8.5 on Kubuntu / Debian Linux KDE
I have recently switched from employer in search of new opportunities, a new challenge and more tech-savy colleagues. After just 2 days I can say that I have found at least the latter two. Although I never expected to find a challenge in the mail system used, namely IBM Lotus Notes.
After leaving my previous employer I had hoped to leave my windows days behind for I was bound to the demonic Windows due to proprietary applications. I have adopted Kubuntu as my new Ambrosium.
Yet the funniest thing happened, I have to use Lotus Notus. Another windows only application by IBM.
As you can imagine I was mortally terrified when I learned no Linux client was there and no IMAP connection could be made (I have been told it is next to impossible with Notes). But then I found the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Open Beta 2 for Linux client
(IBM Id needed but can be created for free during the process). This 460mb download is almost all that is needed to get it working.
Here are the steps that I have done to install Notes,
- Download the application from the link given in the previous paragraph, choose the Debian package
- Untar the downloaded file
tar -xvvf <filename>< - Install the notes debian package as root
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.deb - In order to run the application it needs several Gnome packages. If you try to run the application but it won’t start, then you are missing some. To find out which, start the application from Konsole and it will display what it misses. The binary can be found in /opt/ibm/notes.
I missed the libgnomeprint2.2-0 and libgnomeprintui2.2-0 packages - The installation has now created a folder lotus in your home folder as the user root. Since we will be starting the Lotus application with our own user we need to give it back from root to ourselves. Thus you execute
chown -R <youruser>:<youruser> /home/<youruser>/lotus - Run it and configure it just like you would do with the windows version
After figuring out the steps above I was seriously relieved that I could stop reading my mail over a Remote Desktop connection and enjoy all that Kubuntu has to give to me.
Enjoy!