So I’ve been playing around with Python and the Django Framework and found that the official binaries provided on the PIL site are incompatible with the 64bit editions of Windows. In case you don’t know what PIL is all about:
The Python Imaging Library (PIL) adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter. This library supports many file formats, and provides powerful image processing and graphics capabilities.
After a couple of minutes sniffing into StackOverflow I’ve found this custom compiled binary and it just works perfectly! Special thanks to Bill Mummert for providing it.
PS. If the download link doesn’t work, Download it here Directly.
Introducing Google Font.
The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers
Now that’s a nice little gift for us Web Designers and Developers. The next time you’re looking for fonts for the web but don’t want to spend a dollar or lurk into technical stuffs, be sure to checkout Google Fonts (They have a sleek preview tool too).
Also worth mentioning, TypeKit and Google recently announced some sort of partnership regarding this matter, you can read it on TypeKit’s official blog entry here.
Photoshop product manager Bryan O’neil Hughes give a sneak peek on “Content Aware Fill” feature for Adobe CS5 (launching this Apr 12) and just like the iPad, CS5 will change our work-flow definitely (and some people are just not happy about it).
Hey its been a while! Here’s some interesting links:
Coffee. No more.
Is exited about Microsoft’s newest bet on the ongoing Browser Wars. HTML5, WinVista+, SVG?, CSS3 Goodness, and etc. Hopefully I could install the developer preview on our test machines and see how it really performs. More info IEBlog or Download the preview
Will do some post about later this week.
Facebook again pushes the boundaries of PHP by introducing yet another tool, just one week after announcing HipHop. This time, they introduce a new way of writing php code- XHP, the one they used on the Facebook Lite front-end.
XHP does this by making PHP understand XML document fragments, similar to what E4X does for ECMAScript (JavaScript). While PHP is typically used to write front-end code, by itself it isn’t a very good language for generating HTML (as evidenced by the popularity of templating engines like Smarty). XHP is something between a programmatic UI library and a full templating system…
…One last feature of XHP, which has been invaluable to us at Facebook, is that you can define your own elements which can condense a complex component into a simple XHP tag. XHP has a rich collection of declarations which let you define new elements, configure their expected attributes, as well as describe their content model. These features turn XHP into a powerful templating engine which is capable of simplifying complicated pages into easy to read high-level markup, but it’s up to you to create your own elements from the primitives that XHP defines…
A thumbs up for Facebook, constraint really drives innovation.
You can read more about the official announcement here, the documentation. Also, here’s a quick link to their open source repos on GitHub
Update: Rasmus Lerdurf, the creator of PHP posted a quick note on using XHP.
Chance is if you’re working on a source controlled project, you’ll have this annoying garbage files somewhere. Its no big deal at first but over time, it can kill your productivity, especially when you’re isolating some changes whenever you commit. In my case since I’m working on a CakePHP application, that would be the tmp folder.
So here’s what I did:
- Set VIM as editor for svn property files by running export SVN_EDITOR=vim on the terminal
- then run svn propedit svn:ignore ./tmp
- Insert * (asterisk) in the VIM editor, to “Ignore everything insider the tmp folder”
- Save it, Commit and that’s it!
I think VIM is really a handy editor for cases like this, I actually failed to set Coda, TextEdit, and TextMate as my SVN editor. So it really saved me a lot of time.
Update: It seems I still have to manually ignore each directory inside tmp for it to work.
Now calling all PHP fanboys to rejoice finally.
Facebook’s new toy is not a new compiler nor an engine, according to its creator it is a “source code transformer“, really funky right? After all its a crank from their previous hackaton around 2 years ago.
So how does it work?
The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It’s more likely that you see if (...) {...} else {..} than it is to see function foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory…
And what does it mean to web developers?
I think it’s pretty exciting! 50% performance increase is too good to be true! (90% of Facebook is running on Hiphop now) and for such a large scale deployment in just 6 months its really amazing. Now you can forget purchasing that Zend Server and instead create a github account and consider following Facebook’s Official GitHub Account where they commit their open source projects.
You can read more about the Official Announcement from the geek who made it.
Update: While it is indeed exciting, there are a few caveats that every web developer should know before diving into HipHop. Here’s an in depth explanation by Terry Chay, He was invited by Facebook along with the biggest names on the PHP world to attend a super-secret conference a week before HPHP was announced.
If you’re interested, you might want to check the official developer mailing list of the project on Google Groups.
