{Coding, Life}

今年の5月にロンドンから東京に移住しました。 創造的、積極的で明るい雰囲気の東京の会社でのウェブ系プログラマーとしての仕事を探しています.
ウェブ系プログラマーとしては5年以上の実務経験　(Java, JSP, PHP, MVC, Zend Framework,Kohana)があり、ソフトウェア開発プログラマーとしても2年以上の実務経験があります(C/C++ .Net)。

もし御社で、才能とやる気のあるプログラマーを募集していらっしゃいましたらこのリンクからご連絡いただくか、履歴書 (167.63 KB)のダウンロードをよろしくお願いいたします。

I am in Tokyo and looking for a position as Web Application Developer in an innovative, bright and forward-thinking company based in Tokyo.

I have over 5 years of experience in Web Application Development (Java, JSP, PHP, MVC, Zend Framework,Kohana), and more than 2 years of experience in Software Development (C/C++ .Net).

If you are a small to medium size company based in Tokyo in need of a talented, hard working developer please contact me or download my resume (167.63 KB) for more information.

This is a php5 library (two classes) I wrote to convert TrueType Font text into an image, using the GD library.
Download here: Text Image Converter (213.33 KB) (includes an example, documentation and some free fonts).
or from svn (read only): svn co svn://byteset.com/tic
Documentation is also available online here: http://www.andreabelvedere.com/docs/tic/

See the library in action here: http://whatshouldidonow.eu/ (The site is still a work in progress)

To extend the library to add support for other Font types just extend the TIC abstract class and implement the create and dimension methods.

See example below on how to use it:

<?php
/**
 * @file image.php
 */
require_once 'lib/tic.php';
 
TIC::factory('fonts/AAJAX.TTF')
    ->setText('Hello World !')
    ->setBackground(0x00, 0xff, 0xff)
    ->setColor(0x00, 0x00, 0x00)
    ->setSize(24)->create(true);

Than in your html:

<img src="image.php" alt="TIC" />

That will output the following image:

The library is under the LGPL license, which means you can freely use it for commercial and non commercial applications, please post a comment for feedbacks, bugs, or links of projects where you have use it.

This is a quick self-reminder on propset svn:ignore command.

To ignore all content in directory foo but not the directory:
svn propset svn:ignore '*' foo
To ignore the directory and its content:
svn propset svn:ignore 'foo' .

Italy is an amazing country, and despite not being a huge country, geographically speaking it has every thing, amazing beaches, breath taking mountains, beautiful hills (i.e. Tuscany).

Many cities and small towns are so packed with history and art that if taken as a whole and placed in a museum people would pay to see them.

Of course I cannot talk about Italy and not mention how good and relatively inexpensive food is. And the reason why food is so good is that Italians are obsess about it, while we are having breakfast we are thinking what should we eat for lunch, and during lunch we often discuss with friends what we ate the night before and probably what we are going to eat for dinner.

While in England people have their local pub, Italians have their favorite Bar (Cafe), this is the Bar that makes the best cappuccino.
In London I have taken so many “Cafe Nero” and “Starbucks” that for me in Italy whichever Bar makes a great cappuccino.

So why I don’t want to go back and live in Italy ?
Well for me the following are the biggest problems: More »

Few days ago my wife and I made the important decision of moving out of London.
In May this year a new era of our life will start in Tokyo.

I think I know why I want to go to Japan as apposed to stay in London or going back home to Italy but I want to put my reasons in writing as the process of writing will help formalize my thinking and if in the future, I happen to forget how I end up in Tokyo I can refer back to this pages.

I intend to write 3 posts loosely comparing the 3 countries I know best, focusing in each post on one country. I will start tomorrow with Italy the country where I lived for the first 22 years and 10 months of my life and the country that I travel to the most as my family and friends are there.

This example focuses on 3 aspects of the Zend Framework (v1.6):
the Zend_Layout mechanism, modules and helpers, including the ActionStack helper and a custom helper. (Please note that there is no Smarty involved in this example).

The main objective of this post is to demonstrate how components of ZF work together to produce a simple application, for this reason I will focus on the code that holds things together rather than going through line by line.

If you have any questions or things are not clear please leave a comment.

As in the previous posts in the series you can download the full working example here: zend_layout_example.zip (3.36 MB). (Note: the compressed file includes the ZF library hence about 3MB)
Please glance at the previous post on this series for hints on how to set up this example on your working server.

Lets start where all begins: bootstrap.php More »

I am developing a site and on one of the pages I added an updateable (from a custom CMS) scrolling text banner.
The client was really impressed and asked me to make one on the front page as well.

I thought of sharing this because although to make a scrolling text banner in javascript is quite easy is still producing a good effect (when not overused) specially when the text can be updated at will from a CMS.

Here is the code that does most of the work:

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/**
 * @param elem Element (div) containing the text to scroll
 */
function scrollText(elem)
{
    if (elem) {
        var str = elem.innerHTML;
        // get the first character of the string
        var firstChar = str.substr(0,1);
        // get the whole text except the first character
        var sub = elem.innerHTML.substr(1);
        // attach the first character at the end of the string and replace the element content
        elem.innerHTML = sub.concat(firstChar);
    }
}

The above function is called at regular intervals using the following line of code:

setInterval('scrollText(document.getElementById("text-to-scroll"))', 333);

Unzip the following file: scrolling.html.zip (999 bytes) to see the complete example.

I always listen to Japanese radio on-line, specially if I am doing some routine coding.

I often listen to: http://www.japanaradio.com/ I think is really good and if you have never listen to it and you like J-Pop, than you should try it.

However while I was looking at some alternatives I came across this listing: http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio-japanese.html#about.

Is a good list with a lot of choices and the links seems up to date.

And this is the one I like most so far: http://www.mumix.net/radio/m3u/mumixradio.m3u

Since the first post on this series I have been working with the Zend Framework and Smarty extensively and I have greatly improved my previous integration between Smarty template engine and ZF.

I have prepared and example that you can download from the following link:
zend.zip (3.5 MB) the compressed file includes the ZF and Smarty packages.
The zip file should unpack as follow: More »