This was sent to me today - it’s a classic

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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.

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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.

Snow is something we don’t see often in Cape Town so when Jackie and I spotted snow on the mountains by Franschoek, we decided to take a road trip. We arranged for Wes and Zelna to meet us on Sunday morning at our place. I had planned the trip - Ceres via Worcester - but had no idea where to drive to get close to the snow. Saturday night I was googling frantically for sites and directions/info on where to go. Here is the Ceres Tourism site (90’s flashback of a site) and the weather site wasn’t very detailed. As for finding a map with directions, I wasn’t holding my breath.

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The driver was Jim Mero and he was driving the 2008 Cheverolet Corvette ZR1 which looks like this:
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We booked to go on the Independence of the Seas in May 2007 so we had been waiting for our departure date of 25 May 2008 for a loooong time. I had also decided around December 2007 that it was time I took the next step (engagement) with Jackie and my relationship. Because we were going on the trip, I thought I may as well wait and make it a little more special by asking her overseas. I wanted to surprise her so everything was top secret, not even her family knew at this stage.

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On the boat we ate quite a bit of ‘Angus’ Sirloin, I also had it a few times in the UK - seems Sirloin is a more popular cut up north. I have never been a fan of pan-fried steaks having grown up around braai’s but they managed to get it tasting pretty damn good. So the other day Jackie and I were shopping and I grabbed a 2-pack of ‘matured sirloin’ (from Superspar @ Paddocks) which looked pretty good. I also grabbed some red onions, red wine and watercrest. I set out making my first pan-fried sirloin. I fried the steaks in a hot pan with a little oil and when we sat down to eat, the steaks were appalling. It was actually one of the worst steaks I had ever eaten and I was horrified that I had produced it. The only other pan-fried steaks I had attempted were rumps and those seemed to come out okay? So what went wrong? How could I have totally destroyed this cut of meat? I had to get this right.
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The website is built around Drupal 5.5 and is fairly generic. I find that Drupal works great for rapid development provided the company is not a startup (ie decisions are changing rapidly). I don’t find Drupal flexible enough but for some basic/freelance projects it’s perfect. The Nepad website was perfect for Drupal but I did face a challenge when they wanted to customize their newsletter interface. Certain Drupal Modules are written in a way that they are easy to customize without hacking into the core of the module. The newsletter module is not written this way. It’s an old module and we ended up adjusting the interface to work with it.

I can see myself using Drupal a lot more in future but primarily on freelance jobs. I find the CMS interface and functionality a bit chunky and quite cluttered. I like a CMS interface that is very clean and only has things you use on it. With Drupal this is not the case. I suppose if you are some sort of Drupal Wizard you can strip it down but this would have to be done very carefully so as to not hack the core.
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