Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

ORM Designer

Here is a tool that might help you with your MVC framework, like CakePHP, Symfony, and others – ORM Designer.  In essence, it is a graphical user interface for drawing a visual representation of your project (such as an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)) and than converting it into the code.  You can specify which framework and which  ORM you want to use and it will generate the appropriate bits and pieces.  What’s even more interesting is that it has import functionality, which means that you can start using it with an existing project.  Here is the video that shows and explains more.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNlmU6zX5Ug]

Of course, I got excited about it, downloaded and installed.   Two things that disappointed me were:

  1. It’s a native Windows application, which runs on Linux through the wine emulator.  While it works fine, I’d much prefer a native application that I could integrate with the rest of my development environment.
  2. CakePHP import is not supported at this time.

Other than that though, it looks very promising.  I’ve seen quite a few applications that help with database design, and ORM Designer stands well in that row.  You can create entities, define fields, specify indexes, and associate entities with each other using relationships.  Many-to-many relationships are supported, as are entity inheritance.  While inheritance does make it for a bit more complicated structure of the project (with app/models/base/ folder for CakePHP), it’s very nice to have such support for bigger, more complex projects.

The project is commercial, with a 14 days evaluation version available for download. If you like it enough to buy, the price is very reasonable – 99 EUR per license.

Try and see if you like it, and provide some feedback to the guys who are developing it.  ORM Designer has all the chances of becoming an extremely useful tool and since it is still in its early development, your feedback would be of the most value.

Amazon charges WiFi Kindle users for 3G roaming via books

As per this post over at Download Squad, it seems that Amazon is charging all international Kindle users, including WiFi-only Kindle owners for 3G roaming, using their book prices.

I decided to start with the classics – for example, Moby Dick. Yes, I know it’s available for free online, but this edition is typeset for the Kindle so I figured it must be worth the modest sum Amazon asks for it ($2.95, as you see in the screenshot above).

When I sent the link to my friend, who has an Amazon account with a Canadian billing address, we were amazed to discover that Amazon list the same exact item at $0.95 when she’s looking at it.

[…]

The rep said, “yes, I understand it is WiFi only, but there are roaming charges because AT&T is the service provider”. Upon which I proceeded to explain yet again that I do not have a 3G chip in my device, physically. This intelligent exchange went on for a few minutes, until I finally asked to speak to her manager.

Upon getting the team leader, he basically told me the same thing. I would be required to pay for a roaming charge, even though Amazon advertises its 3G as free and that my device is WiFi only.

I then emailed them to [email protected], and got the same exact reply.

Now that’s pretty silly on the Amazon part.  But being the smart guys as they are, I’m sure they will notice and fix the issue soon.  Let me know if you hear of any developments in this area.  (Yes, I am planning to get myself the Amazon Kindle)

Front page design is overrated

I was looking through my website statistics yesterday and I arrived to this decision – front page design is overrated.  There are, of course, different circumstances and such, but overall, I think this should be true for pretty much every content-based website, except the monsters like CNN.  If you are CNN, then, I guess, people just come to your front page to check up on things.  But if you are not CNN, or some other huge news outlet, chances are, you’ll get most of your visitors from the search engines.  And if that’s true, then I bet your front-page won’t be the landing page for all those visitors.  They will come directly to content pages, like articles, products, and so on.

Consider an example.  Yesterday, this blog saw 593 unique visitors.  The front page was seen by only 46.  That’s less than 8%!  Of course, days are different, and each website is different in its own way.  But I think that in general the correlation between the numbers will be somewhere there.  Around 10% of visitors will check your front page.  Most of them will check the landing page and leave (what’s your bounce rate?  70-80%?).  Some will continue to “Contact Us”, “Related Posts”, “Similar Products”, or search.  And then more of them will leave.  A few of those, who are still there, will probably check the front page by now.  By which time they probably already got what they wanted out of your website or lost all hopes.  No matter how beautiful your front page is, they are likely to leave now.  Dont’ think so?  What’s the average pages per visit metric for your website?  1.5-2?  There you go.

So, don’t bother too much about the front page.  Yes, it is nice to have a cool one.  Yes, it might be important for those direct visitors.  But if you are on a tight schedule or budget, concentrate on improving your content pages.

Installing Google Talk plugin for voice and video on Fedora Linux

With recent news of Google adding support for telephone calls from GTalk, I thought it was time to finally setup voice and video plugin on my system.  The good thing is that Google provides the Linux version of the browser plugin.  The bad news are that the plugin is only packaged for Debian-based systems, while I am a Fedora Linux user.  But thanks to a couple of Google searches, the solution is known and is quite simple in fact.  Here is what I had to do.

  1. Download the browser plugin-in (.deb file, 6 MB).
  2. Extract the content of the google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb file, using ark, or file-roller, or, like me, using Midnight Commander.
  3. In the extracted files, you’ll see data.tar.gz .   Extract it to your system folders (/opt, /usr, /etc).  In fact, you can skip /etc part that sets up a cron job to update the plugin daily.  It relies on apt, which you probably won’t have installed and configured on your Fedora system.
  4. Try running the plugin in command line, using: /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
  5. If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by creating a symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0a libssl.so.0.9.8
  6. If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by installing Adobe Reader: yum install AdobeReader_enu-9.3.3-1.i486 , and then creating the symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 .  If you don’t have adobe repo configured or want an alternative to having Adobe Reader on your system, examine the output of “yum provides libcrypto.so.0.9.8“, which will tell you which other packages have the required library.
  7. Restart your browser.
  8. Check that the plugin is installed and enabled by looking at “about:plugins” or a similar page of your browser.

Now you should be able to use voice and video chat in GTalk.  Here is a screenshot I made of a video chat after I did all of the above steps.

If your browser still complains about not having the plugin installed, or plugin crashes for some reason, just run it from the command line (step 4).  Examine the output and act accordingly.  Usually everything should just work, and pretty much the only scenario when it doesn’t is when you don’t have required libraries installed on your system, or you have them installed in a different path than the plugin expects them.  Symbolic links should fix the path issue.  Yum should help you with locating any missing library.

Enjoy!

Oracle’s next acquisition poll results are in

A couple of weeks ago I linked to the poll about Oracle’s next acquisition.  This is a quick update to let you all know, that the results are in.  Go and have a look, and make sure to check the comments – there are some interesting discussions.