You see, at Madgex, we’re a bit fond of tropical fruit. Last hack day, a group of us worked on Mango, a .NET implementation of the Django templating language, which we’ll soon be using in our production websites.

Perhaps it’s a subconscious effort to offset all the cake we eat, or perhaps we’ve just taken the five-a-day campaign to heart, but now Jane and I are working on Papaya.

Another perk of working at Madgex is that we are allowed to spend up to 15% of our time working on our own projects and learning, and this is in addition to any training required for our jobs. This scheme is called Ideas and Learnings Projects (ILP) (photos, tweets).

On the learnings side, fellow Madgexians have been running sessions on areas they are knowledgeable about (ranging from unit testing to time management to neuro-linguistic programming). We’ve also had external speakers. Dan Webb spoke about Metaprogramming JavaScript and Simon Willison introduced us to Comet (and he’s coming back soon to talk about OpenID). Equally, people can spend time on traditional learning courses such as professional accreditation.

There are a plethora of projects being worked on too. Some people are assessing new technologies (for example, Adobe AIR). Others are working on internal tools. Still others are working on projects which may see the light of day in our Job Boards. The projects are the part of ILP that excite me the most. I’ve got several on the go at the moment, which I will be blogging about, and one coming up that I’m especially excited about.

So, what’s all this Papaya business?

Papaya will be a tool which allows us to version our databases and to ensure that they remain in a consistent state across schema and procedure changes. This comes out of the investigation Jane and I did into DBVerse. When writing change scripts, you will add information about the changes to a XML file. This file will group sets of changes into releases with version identifiers and single change scripts with version identifiers. Each change or release will state the previous versions it depends on so that the tool can ensure change scripts are only applied to the database when it is safe to do so.

While the premise of Papaya doesn’t sound that exciting, it will hopefully be a really useful tool and it’s a great opportunity to polish my SQL skills.

This is everything that a boutique hotel should be: small, perfectly formed and oozing personality. O’Fabulous indeed.

Click below to see the full article [jpg]:

Was it possible that I could use Pipes to convert from Atom to RSS? The answer is yes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/bruceboughton/atom_to_rss

It’s sites like this that make me proud to work with all the great people at Madgex. Well done guys!

My initially skeptical girlfriend fell in love with it the moment I turned it on and she discovered Photo Booth. By the time I showed her Front Row she was begging me to swap my PC back in exchange for the Mac!

There are a few things I’m finding a bit funky but it’s probably just a case of inexperience. For example, the button I presume is “Home” on the super-thin super-easy keyboard doesn’t behave as IBM-PC home does. Shift-home selects all text to the left, but Home alone doesn’t move the caret to the far left? Same jive with Ctrl-delete and Ctrl-backspace: no word-at-a-time deletion for you, matey. Also, I would be grateful if someone could point out to me what the mysterious key above the “7″, left of “=” on the number pad does?

Also, I’m kinda out of the loop with which software to go for. For example, for an office suite (for occasional letters and presentations): iWork, Office 2004 for Mac, or OpenOffice? For coding, TextMate? Or BBedit? Or something else? For email, I chucked .Mail for Thunderbird. I was in love with Thunderbird on the PC despite it’s Ugly Betty looks but on Mac it’s just gorgeous, naturally!

All in all, a great purchase—I heartily recommend anyone considering the switch to jump in feet first!

1. ask business questions, get feedback on ideas
2. announce new services we’re offering and talk about what we’re doing
3. post things we want to celebrate e.g. new clients, possible collaborations etc
4. focus on business rather than programming

All in all, BrightonDigital seems well worth joining if your business is digital.

Here’s what I came up with:

[ftf def="php.xml" w="400"]
function &Singleton($type, $value = null)
{
return Multiton($type, 0, $value);
}

function &Multiton($type, $key, $value = null)
{
static $Multitons = array();

if ($value != null) {
// Setting multiton
if (!isset($Multitons[$type])) {
$Multitons[$type] = array();
}
if (isset($Multitons[$type][$key])) {
die(‘Multiton for type ‘ . $type . ‘, key ‘ . $key . ‘ already set’);
}
else if (!is_a($value, $type)) {
die(‘Multiton cannot be set for type ‘ . $type
. ‘, key ‘ . $key . ‘ as value is not of expected type’);
}
else {
$Multitons[$type][$key] = $value;
return $Multitons[$type][$key];
}
}
else {
if (!isset($Multitons[$type]) || !isset($Multitons[$type][$key])) {
return null;
}
else {
return $Multitons[$type][$key];
}
}
}
[/ftf]

You set a singleton by calling the Singleton function with the type name and the value. For example:

[ftf def="php.xml" w="400" h="80"]
Singleton(‘DB’, &new DB(‘localhost’, ‘user’, ‘pass’, ‘db’));
[/ftf]

You retrieve a singleton by calling the Singleton with just the type name:

[ftf def="php.xml" w="400" h="80"]
$db = Singleton(‘DB’);
[/ftf]

Multitons work similarly but the second required parameter is the key:

[ftf def="php.xml" w="400" h="160"]
Multiton(‘Account’, 435, &new Account(435));

//…

$acc = Multiton(‘Account’, 435);
[/ftf]

There are some oddities which are due to the shortcomings of PHP4. First of all, function parameters with default values cannot be declared to be passed by reference in the function signature, so the pass-by-reference & must be included on the set-call to Singleton/Multiton. Secondly, static variables in functions cannot be assigned by reference. I’m not sure if this means that my singletons and multitons are not stored by reference. If it does, maybe the references could be wrapped so that the wrapper is stored by value but the reference is not? Naughty PHP!

NB: I realise this isn’t exactly a true rendition of the traditional Singleton pattern, but PHP4 isn’t really a proper object oriented language, so I had to bend the pattern a little bit. Could someone remind me exactly why I’m wasting my time in PHP?!

PS: The second best thing about the iPhone is that it’s now available for purchase, so the hype might finally die down.