Feb8
It’s been ages since my last blog post, luckily I’m the only one reading them 
Quite a bit has happened, in summary:
We’ve set a date for our wedding:
Jackie and I have found our wedding venue, Le Franschhoek, and set the date for 21st November 2009. That took about 2 months of driving on weekends to wine farms (which I quite enjoyed) in Stellenbosch, Paarl and Franschhoek. Le Franschhoek was able to offer us everything in one place and the setting is awesome.
We flew up to Joburg for Morne and Liezel’s wedding:
With GPS in hand we flew into Joburg (Lanseria) and made our way to Avianto for Morne’s wedding. The venue was awesome, tuscan villa style and was great to share their special day with them. After that we headed over to continue reading »
Oct15
In my youth I experienced a car accident at high speed whilst driving my Dad’s Audi A4 1.8T. I hit a wall at around 120kph and was saved by airbags and the quality of the car. It wasn’t funny at the time and I was thankful I didn’t hit another car but since then I have been very aware of how important it is to know how to handle a car at high speed.
Earlier this year, I took ownership of a Golf 5 GTi. (my other girlfriend). The handling in the GTi is phenomenal, it sticks to the road and goes through corners like it’s on rails. It’s a lot of fun, pretty much every other Golf 5 Gti, Subaru, ST, S3 you see on the road is immediately up for a dice. (Not something I was used to before)
In August, Jackie’s friend Nicholas Slabbert (who used to race at Killarney) forwarded me this flyer:
I knew about these courses but last time I checked they were based in Gauteng. They were coming to Cape Town
continue reading »
Sep17
It’s been a while since I wrote Part 1. I left off as we were cruizing out of the English Channel. I decided I would try and combat the all-you-can-eat with some running in the morning. I hit the treadmill the first morning at sea which was very good but sadly that was the first and last time I would see the gym. Not quite sure where that 3 x 7km runs a week willpower went from 4 years ago…? It was okay though, I had found an alternative which was a lot more fun – The Flowrider!
The Flowrider is an artificial standing wave and Independence had one on the back deck. The nice thing is it’s REALLY tough to stand up and you spend most of your spare time trying to! The average time for a rookie is 1.5 seconds. Even surfers, snowboarders, skateboarders hit the deck first time. The Flowrider uses the same amount of electricity in 3 hours that all the lifts onboard (16 of them) use in one weeks so it’s only swtiched on twice a day. Dean (Jackie’s brother) and I spent most days trying to master it. You start off with the bodyboard then work your way up to drop-knee and then give the stand up a go.
continue reading »
Aug11
I like making food that I can spend 15 minutes on and then leave for 1 or 2 hours while I get other things done. The Lamb Shank recipe and this one are exactly that. This chicken curry recipe will serve 3-4 people and is good for the next few days if refrigerated. Jackie is obsessed with this curry She makes top quality Basmati rice to go with this but I haven’t included that recipe as you can have it over any rice or even mash or toast.
continue reading »
Aug3
The Gift Company approached Jackie and I to help them with a complete makeover of their (now archived) old site. The old site had served the previous owners of The Gift Company well but the new owners, Graham and Michelle, wanted to carry through the new branding onto the website.
The new site needed to allow engaged couples to register and create an online Bridal Registry by adding products from the website. Each couple would have their own unique url (eg. www.thegiftcompany.co.za/amanda-and-dave) for their registry, friends and family could then visit this page and purchase items off their bridal list. Visitors to the site would need to be able to purchase products seperately too.
I built the site using Zend Framework. I chose ZF because of it’s flexibility, power, speed and potential to scale if need be. For the ecommerce part of the site, I recommended PayGate. I have worked with PayGate about 4 times now but this was the first time I’ve worked with their new SecureCode option. Their documentation is really good and it’s not much different other than the extra verifcation step. I went through some of the code I had written on previous PayGate solutions and then wrote one for ZF. I wrote a PaymentGateway ‘factory’ to use as a loader and then wrote the PayGatePayXML class. The cart system uses AJAX and I wrote a ‘mini-api’ in the CartController to allow for more secure ajax requests and to plug into flash (if need be). I built an indexed search for Products and Bridal lists but had a lot of issues with this during launch thanks to a certain automated script. The ZF search class has to create an index lock for each search. It turns out Hetzner (hosting company) have a script which runs at 10pm each night altering ownership of files (including index.lock). So each morning we’d be getting errors thrown on search. Solution was a cron job at Hetzner resetting ownership back but debugging that wasn’t fun!
I am very happy with The Gift Company website from every angle. ZF ensures that the code you write is reusable and I hope to publish the PayGate v4 class once I’ve refined it a bit more.
