SitePoint Books: The Bushfire Relief Sale

Get 5 books (PDF) for the price of 1 and get to help the victims of the recent bushfires in Australia.

SitePoint is well known for their book: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

More details on The Bushfire Relief Sale site.

COM Scripting and Groovy

While I was reading my copy of Groovy in Action which I won from JavaRanch, I came across an interesting tool called Scriptom.

This is the same tool that the authors used to insert the Groovy code samples into the book's draft written as an MS Word document.

You can read more about COM Scripting and Groovy from Codehaus.

Agile Modeling and Einstein

Last week, a friend of mine asked me about my opinion about keeping design documents simple. What follows is a quote from the Agile Modeling article he sent me over Skype.

One of the more controversial concepts in Agile Modeling is that agile models and agile documents are sufficient for the task at hand, or as I like to say they are "just barely good enough (JBGE)". In this article I make the following critical points about a model or document (an artifact) being just barely good enough

This reminded me of a quote from Einstein which says "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".

This Einstein Wiki Quote entry also mentions that it is likely that the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) Agile methodology principle also originated from the same idea.

I didn't get to read the whole article, but overall I agree with the concept.

Zend Framework Large File Upload Issues

I tried modifying this Zend_Form_Element_File example to support larger file uploads but noticed that I've been getting "Undefined index" errors when my uploads are bigger than 8MB.

Notice: Undefined index: tmp_name in C:\quickstart\library\Zend\File\Transfer\Adapter\Abstract.php on line 589

Notice: Undefined index: name in C:\quickstart\library\Zend\Validate\File\Size.php on line 398

Notice: Undefined index: tmp_name in C:\quickstart\library\Zend\File\Transfer\Adapter\Abstract.php on line 589

Notice: Undefined index: name in C:\quickstart\library\Zend\Validate\File\Extension.php on line 228

Being a PHP and Zend Framework newbie, I wanted to put the blame on Zend but in the end I found the reason for the upload and validation errors after much googling.

The solution requires updating two properties in php.ini:

upload_max_filesize = 32M
post_max_size = 32M

With these changes you can now upload relatively bigger files!

Just make sure that your hosting provider supports your file upload size settings.