For almost two years now, I've been living in the grand metropolis of Santiago de Chile. My time here will soon be coming to an end, and before I depart, I'd like to share some of my observations regarding the particularities of life in this city and in this country – principally, as compared with life in my home town, Sydney Australia.
There are plenty of articles round and about the interwebz, aimed more at the practical side of coming to Chile: i.e. tips regarding how to get around; lists of rough prices of goods / services; and crash courses in Chilean Spanish. There are also a number of commentaries on the cultural / social differences between Chile and elsewhere – on the national psyche, and on the political / economic situation.
My endeavour is to avoid this article from falling neatly into either of those categories. That is, I'll be covering some eccentricities of Chile that aren't practical tips as such, although knowing about them may come in handy some day; and I'll be covering some anecdotes that certainly reflect on cultural themes, but that don't pretend to paint the Chilean landscape inside-out, either.
As of about two months ago, I am a very late and reluctant entrant into the world of smartphones. All that my friends and family could say to me, was: "What took you so long?!" Being a web developer, everyone expected that I'd already long since jumped on the bandwagon. However, I was actually in no hurry to make the switch.
Techomeanies: sad dinosaur. Image source:Sticky Comics.
Being now acquainted with my new toy, I believe I can safely say that my reluctance was not (entirely) based on my being a "phone dinosaur", an accusation that some have levelled at me. Apart from the fact that they offer "a tonne of features that I don't need", I'd assert that the current state-of-the-art in smartphones suffers some serious usability, accessibility, and convenience issues. In short: these babies ain't so smart as their purty name suggests. These babies still have a lotta growin' up to do.
I've been getting my hands dirty with Symfony2 of late. At the start of the year, I was introduced to it when I built an app using Silex (a Symfony2 distribution). The special feature of my app was that it allows integration between Silex and Drupal 7.
More recently, I finished another project, which I decided to implement using Symfony2 Standard Edition. Similar to my earlier project, it had the business requirement that it needed tight integration with a Drupal site; so, for this new project, I decided to write a Symfony2 Drupal integration bundle.
Overall, I'm quite impressed with Symfony2 (in its various flavours), and I enjoy coding in it. I've been struggling to enjoy coding in Drupal (and PHP in general) – the environment that I know best – for quite some time. That's why I've been increasingly turning to Django (and other Python frameworks, e.g. Flask), for my dev projects. Symfony2 is a very welcome breath of fresh air in the PHP world.
However, I can't help but think: is Symfony2 "as good as PHP gets"? By that, I mean: Symfony2 appears to have borrowed many of the best practices that have evolved in the non-PHP world, and to have implemented them about as well as they physically can be implemented in PHP (indeed, the same could be said of PHP itself of late). But, PHP being so inferior to most of its competitors in so many ways, PHP implementations are also doomed to being inferior to their alternatives.
In the late 19th century, the British-South-African personality Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a complete, uninterrupted railway stretching from Cape Town, South Africa, all the way to Cairo, Egypt. During Rhodes's lifetime, the railway extended as far north as modern-day Zimbabwe – which was in that era known by its colonial name Rhodesia (in honour of Rhodes, whose statesmanship and entrepreneurism made its founding possible). A railway traversing the entire north-south length of Africa was an ambitious dream, for an ambitious man.
Rhodes's dream remains unfulfilled to this day.
The famous "Rhodes Colossus", superimposed upon the present-day route of the Cape to Cairo Railway. "The Rhodes Colossus" illustration originally from Punch magazine, Vol. 103, 10 Dec 1892; image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Africa satellite image courtesy of Google Earth.
Nevertheless, significant additions have been made to Africa's rail network during the interluding century; and, in fact, only a surprisingly small section of the Cape to Cairo route remains bereft of the Iron Horse's footprint.
Although both information about – (a) the historical Cape to Cairo dream; and (b) the history / current state of the route's various railway segments – abound, I was unable to find any comprehensive study of the current state of the railway in its entirety.
This article, therefore, is an endeavour to examine the current state of the full Cape to Cairo Railway. As part of this study, I've prepared a detailed map of the route, which marks in-service sections, abandoned sections, and missing sections. The map has been generated from a series of KML files, which I've made publicly available on GitHub, and for which I welcome contributions in the form of corrections / tweaks to the route.
In this article, I'm going to solve all the monetary problems of the modern world.
Oh, you think that's funny? I'm being serious.
Alright, then. I'm going to try and solve them. Money is a concept, a product and a system that's been undergoing constant refinement since the dawn of civilisation; and, as the world's current financial woes are testament to, it's clear that we still haven't gotten it quite right. That's because getting financial systems right is hard. If it were easy, we'd have done it already.
I'm going to start with some background, discussing the basics such as: what is money, and where does it come from? What is credit? What's the history of money, and of credit? How do central banks operate? How do modern currencies attain value? And then I'm going to move on to the fun stuff: what can we do to improve the system? What's the next step in the ongoing evolution of money and finance?
Disclaimer: I am not an economist or a banker; I have no formal education in economics or finance; and I have no work experience in these fields. I'm just a regular bloke, who's been thinking about these big issues, and reading up on a lot of material, and who would like to share his understandings and his conclusions with the world.
There's a pretty good documentation page on how to configure Monolog to email errors in Symfony2. This, and all other documentation that I could find on the subject, works great if: (a) you're using the Symfony2 Standard Edition; and (b) you want to send emails with Swift Mailer. However, I couldn't find anything for my use case, in which: (a) I'm using Silex; and (b) I want to send mail with PHP's native mail handler (Swift Mailer is overkill for me).
Turns out that, after a bit of digging and poking around, it's not so hard to cobble together a solution that meets this use case. I'm sharing it here, in case anyone else finds themselves with similar needs in the future.
I build quite a few Drupal sites that use embedded YouTube videos, and my module of choice for handling this is Media: YouTube, which is built upon the popular Media module. The Media: YouTube module generally works great; but on one site that I recently built, I discovered one of its shortcomings. It doesn't let you display a YouTube video's duration.
I thought up a quick, performant and relatively easy way to solve this. With just a few snippets of custom code, and the help of the Computed Field module, showing video duration (in hours / minutes / seconds) for a Media: YouTube managed asset, is a walk in the park.
Every now and again, Mother Nature reminds us that despite all of our modern technological and cultural progress, we remain mere mortals, vulnerable as always to her wrath. Human lives and human infrastructure continue to regularly fall victim to natural disasters such as floods, storms, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and droughts. At times, these catastrophes can even strike indiscriminately at our largest and most heavily-populated cities, including where we least expect them.
This article is a listing and an analysis of the world's largest cities (those with a population exceeding 10 million), and of their natural disaster risk level in a variety of categories. My list includes 23 cities, which represent a combined population of approximately 380 million people. That's roughly 5% of the world's population. Listing and population figures based on Wikipedia's list of metropolitan areas by population.
On a project I'm currently working on, I decided to try out something of a related flavour. I built a stand-alone app in Silex (a sort of Symfony2 distribution); but, per the project's requirements, I also managed to heavily integrate the app with an existing Drupal 7 site. The app does almost everything on its own, except that: it passes its output to drupal_render_page() before returning the request; and it checks that a Drupal user is currently logged-in and has a certain Drupal user role, for pages where authorisation is required.
The result is: an app that has its own custom database, its own routes, its own forms, its own business logic, and its own templates; but that gets rendered via the Drupal theming system, and that relies on Drupal data for authentication and authorisation. What's more, the implementation is quite clean (minimal hackery involved) – only a small amount of code is needed for the integration, and then (for the most part) Drupal and Silex leave each other alone to get on with their respective jobs. Now, let me show you how it's done.
