For those people that are following me already on Twitter will know that I'm working with the amazing CakePHP framework on my webdevelopment / webdesign job.

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

This tutorial will give you a good start in the world of CakePHP, just to learn the basics of the framework. The official CakePHP Blog tutorial (For Cake 1.1) gives you a good idea, but this tutorial will take it a couple of steps further (and in the next parts way beyond the official tutorial). Don't worry: This article will perfectly guide to making your first steps on baking some code.

Download the source code I created directly if you don't want to write anything yourself, but still want to learn. I do recommend you to read the full article to understand the whole code. Take note that this tutorial is written for Cake version 1.2 (Using 1.2.0.7692 RC3 to be precise).

There we go! Strap on your cooks hat; We're going to bake some delicious Blog-cake.

A while ago I placed an article about the colours of game heroes. That article showed the colour schemes of several game heroes, from Crash Bandicoot untill Yoshi.

Today, we're finding inspiration in the colour schemes of TV toons (cartoons). Did you know that Avatar Aang, Stewie Griffin or Homer Simpson could give you some nice inspiration too?

You could surely try out one of the following colour schemes in your next design project or artwork. I picked the most colourful toons that are (or recently were) on the TV. If you feel nostalgic, you can also watch (some of) these series online.

Flash is one of the most common platform to create an internet game. These games can be really fun to do (lot's more fun than plain old bingo) and are great to get some distraction from the regular things.

Here a small list with real time wasters: 15 addictive (but fun) Flash games.

Don't get to addicted to these games, otherwise you'll get fired when playing at work! Note that the list is in no particular order. Get ready to take a "2 minute break" that'll instantly change into a hour of gaming.

A couple of days ago, I presented the Unique website for your Twitter updates Reloaded. The script was based on another one TutorialBlog released earlier.

Now I'm using the same idea but converting it for another site. Today, you'll be able to show a Unique website for your Digg updates.

I'm not going into the PHP details this time (only some explanation on the configuration), but you can download the page from the download section.

  

Almost everything is loaded from Digg using the Digg API. If you (or your friends) Dugg something, the page will be updated automatically. Oh, and while you're at it: Why don't you add me on Digg? The demo page will show your avatar immediately. If you like the script, don't forget to Digg it!

The first international SOA Symposium was held on the 7th and 8th of October in the Amsterdam ArenA. Ironically enough, the abbreviation "SOA" in The Netherlands is the translation of a STD (Sexually transmitted disease). But at the symposium, everyone knew what a SOA ment for programmers: a Service-oriented architecture.

A little background on this article: As some of you already know, I'm a student at the College of Arnhem and Nijmegen Computer science Communication. I'm doing my minor right now, which is about EAD (Enterprise Application Development). Not going into further details here, but a SOA is one part of the EAD. This is the main reason why my fellow students, teachers and myself were present at the symposium.

This post is a review about my personal impressions of each speaker session and the overall symposium, just in case you're planning to visit the next International SOA Symposium and sharing my thoughts. This are the speaker sessions that I've been following.

7th of October, 2008

1. Art Ligthart, Thomas Erl, Sandy Carter - Opening Keynotes*
2. Thomas Erl - The Architecture of Service-Orientation*
3. Sandy Carter - Understanding SOA and Web 2.0*
4. Umit Yalcinalp - Enterprise Mashups with SOA*
5. Mark Little - Using REST and WS-* Together for SOA*
6. Thomas Erl - Introducing Design Patterns

8th of October, 2008

1. Art Ligthart, Dennis Wisnosky, David Chappell - Opening Keynotes
2. Prakash Narayan - Developing Killer SOA Apps with Java EE*
3. Chris Riley - Design Patterns for Web Service Contract Versioning*
4. Andre Tost - Implementing Service Models with Java
5. Mark Little - Web Services and Transactions*
6. Brian Loesgen - A Preview of Microsoft Oslo: How Oslo will Help Build More Sophisticated SOA Solutions

Sessions marked with an asterisk (*) are explained in further details below.