Sadly, not everything was perfect. In October my grandmother and one of my uncles passed away. Around the same time my Dad’s shop was robbed, twice. That was a tough period for my parents and the entire family, still not over it completely, but not giving up either! We love and support each other and will get out stronger than ever.

Now that the bad part is out, let’s jump to the awesome part ;)

Life changing decisions

In 2011 I actually had three life changing decisions.

First one in March, when I decided to finally quit smoking. And I did it! After 11 years I finally threw that shit away. Gave me a nice self-confidence boost, gained much needed weight – around 10kgs (now just to prevent that turning into fat and into muscles instead) – and I feel much, much better overall.

For the second one I owe a lot to my parents and to Srdjan Vranac, for their continuos support and making it possible to happen. In May I handed over my resignation at my previous job and in June I started my own company, Hex, and joined up with Vranac. Just this one thing changed my life to better in so many ways that I can’t thank Vranac enough for all he did, and is still doing! Thank you :)

The third decision happened in August when I cut my hair. And nope, I didn’t regret it :)

Friends and conferences

This year I spoke at two conferences, DORS/CLUC in May in Zagreb, and Webkonf in October in Budapest. My talks didn’t turn out that good (heck, the second one was pure horror), but I did make new friends which trumps bad talks any day!

In Zagreb I had the honor to meet fellow hacker Nikola Plejić, who kindly offered me a place to stay during the conference and showed me around the city. Now waiting for him to come to Novi Sad so I can return the favor. :)

In Budapest I met fellow hackers Ferenc Kovács and Dubravszky József. Great people with whom I’d like to grab a beer or two this year :)

Open source and hacking

Contributed to web2project and Zend Framework throughout the year, but somewhere in September got really close to a burn out so I decided to back up a little and have a break. I’m trying to ease my way back in to contributing and general hacking now. Need to be careful though, don’t want to get this close to a burn out again, next time might not see the line.

Started to learn C just for fun. Don’t know what to do with it yet, can’t hurt learning/knowing it.

All in all, awesome year which set the bar high for 2012, but with all this positive energy it will be a piece of cake to fly over it!

Happy hackin’ and a happy new year!

So, I got a haircut after 8 years.

This is the result. If you want, have a look at the whole album here: There, I fix’d it

I think it turned out pretty damn good.

The plan is simple and that’s to continue to work on things I love: work with PHP and contribute to open source. The rest will be figured out along the way.

I’ve teamed up with my good friend Vranac and his company Code4Hire to do what we’re both good at – writing software. If you need some good programmers, don’t hesitate to contact Vranac or me.

Happy hackin’!

Guide to Web Scraping with PHP

My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I’m really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them. The chapter on HTTP at the beginning and a chapter with some tips and tricks at the end of the book, fit in great with the rest of the chapters, which are full of code examples. For the first reading, I’d recommend reading the book cover to cover, to get an overall view of all the tools presented, but later the chapters can be read independently.

As I said, the first chapter (actually, the second one, the first one is the introductory chapter :p), deals with the HTTP, especially with the parts of it which are needed for understanding, using and creating web scrapers.

The book then continues on different client libraries we can use to send HTTP requests and receive responses. Libraries like cURL or Zend_Http_Client are explained, but it is also explained how one can create his own using streams (the author does note that you’d be better of with an existing one!). For each of the tools it is described, how to handle things like authentication, redirects and timeouts, amongst others…

The second part of the book deals with preparing the documents for, and with the actual parsing of the data from these documents. Again, different tools are presented and explained, which one to use when and why. If none of the parsing tools can help, a most essential overview of the PCRE extension is given, too.

The book is finished with a nice “Tips and Tricks” chapter, which discusses real-time vs batch job scrapers, how to work with forms, the importance of unit testing… IMHO, without this last chapter, the book would not be finished.

I’m thinking hard right now, what bad things could I say about this book, but I can’t think of any. It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that’s exactly what I wanted to know.

Yep, I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in web scraping with PHP :)

Why? I don’t like the road the leadership of the company has taken (if this can be called a road at all…), the amount of energy the whole team is wasting on some small and silly things, the fact that extra effort is not recognised, thanked or paid and that there’s currently 8 of us in a roughly 25 m^2 room.

I know, there are bad moments everywhere when one just have to suck it up and deal with it for the whole team/company, but I’ve been doing that for quite some time and I had enough of that.

The only thing that makes me sad about this decision is that I’ll be leaving @milosija on his own here, a great mentor and friend from whom I’ve learnt a lot.

On the other hand, as of June 25th I’ll be starting my own company, which should be an exciting new experience. Still need to wrap my head around that one, so more on that in some future post…

Until then,
happy hackin’!

First step was to change the nameservers of the domain. I thought it’s gonna take a while, so I took my time with moving the files and the database, but (at least on my end) the dns changes were alive and kickin’ under an hour.

My original idea was to run everything on nginx, but that soon turned out to be a bad idea cause there was no way I could setup properly the rewriting – if PHP was working right, CSS was broken. If CSS was working right, PHP was broken. At one point I broke everything. Hooray for me. Then I just took down nginx and all that php-fastcgi stuff and installed apache. Everything is lovely once again, the world is all shiny and pink and full of rainbows and unicorns. But fear not, I will not let nginx beat me in this mad game of rewrites! Just have to do that somewhere else, not on a live server.

Now to setup the emails and my job here is done. Oh, and the sidebar is a tad broken. Sorry bout that.

Carry on now, nothing left to see here.

Hope I won’t forget to make backups.

I graduated on June 26th, the topic was a Python desktop application that communicates with a web service; both sending and receiving data is possible. Started working on July 1st at Online Solutions as a PHP dev and started to “officially” give back to the Open Source community by joining the ZF Bug Hunt Days – so far few minor patches submitted and applied. Wrote a review on a ZF book and another one on jQuery and PHP is in the drafts.

I ain’t making plans for this year, cause I have failed miserably to realize my most important plan for 2009; I’ll just improvise throughout the year.

Dear 2009 – up yours. 2010 – bring it on.

Happy new year!

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.

Cause I don’t own (yet!) a netbook, I installed it under VirtualBox (VB from now on). The image is 666 MB big and it comes not in an .iso, but in a .img format. But, VB, a really awesome software, had no troubles booting from it. As with the majority of Linux distros nowadays, Moblin image is also a Live CD, which means you can run it, without installing it.

Installing Moblin

The preinstall process is made up from 6-7 steps: choosing the language, the keyboard layout, the timezone and, of course, the partitioning. Basically, it’s just another boring “Next-Next” process. The installation itself took around 6 minutes to finish. When it’s done, it asks for a username and a password.

The first boot went pretty quickly, considering that booting under VB takes longer than booting under regular installations. The thing about VB is that it needs, the so called “Guest Additions” installed on the guest machine, so that the guest machine can be used normally. In this case, I failed to install it: Moblin comes with one version of the Linux kernel and the additions are for another version of the kernel. This prevented me in my quest to test Moblin fully. Anyway, I’ve managed to take a few screenshots of it, all are uploaded to my Picasa profile.

The m_zone

There was one thing that was strange. It has a “Status panel”, from which you can update your profiles on social networks. A really useful stuff. I just opened it up and updated my Twitter profile. Almost. I wasn’t logged in to Twitter from it and Moblin didn’t say a word about it. It just happily said that my status is updated. Once I found the “Web services” panel I logged in and this time I was really updating my Twitter stream.

I really was hoping to test it normally and write a detailed review of it, but this guest additions thingy thought otherwise. Moblin is a great distro, even in this beta stage I believe it’s useful. What do you think? Did you test it already, saw it in action?

One thing’s for sure: when I’ll get myself a netbook, it’ll run on Moblin.

Cheers!

P.S.: Check out the Moblin intro, too!

I was having a couple of beers with a friend of mine, with whom I go to college. After the 3rd beer or so, we came to an idea of submitting a paper to this year’s SISY conference. All I will say for now, that it will include Python, Assembly, microcontrollers, electric motors and lots of other geeky stuff. This project, even while the idea is still only in my head, got my mind running again and might be the way out of this state of indifference. Why? Well, to be able to start this project, I first need to finish my current project, my graduate work. To finish my grad work, I needed to start working on it again (which I did, honest!). I’ll even spend my whole Saturday this week in the college to write/test/debug my app there. If all goes well, the app will be finished this week and I can go onto writing the documentation for the grad work. Everything will go fine, right?

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop a few days ago. Loving it! Had only 2 minor issues with the hardware upon the installation. First, the graphic card was messing around, it didn’t want to enable all those funky visual effects. That got sorted out, thanks to @firusvg who suggested to install compiz and @ivan86 who pointed me to this article. Second, when plugged in the headphones, the sound was still coming out on the speakers. @Asgrim sent me this link which helped me to sort this out. Apart from this, everything else works out-of-box. Even the wifi!

OK, enough for now. Here’s to hoping that the bad times are over and the good times are coming. Cheers!