Looking for something nice that could be done with the WS2801 strips i bought, I came up with this idea to build a light globe. The arduino drives the strips and has a couple of programs it runs.

The best way to show how this all looks is probably some movies. (Beware, i used my cheap digicam to record, no high quality...). Some still pictures at the bottom.




The globe in action

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The other day, i wanted to write a controller that expects an object as an action parameter, with the help of a custom router. Writing the router was as easy as adding a field to the array i return in the match() method. But then sometimes the controller has to send a redirection response. In production mode, everything works fine.

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Auch dieses Jahr gab es viele interessante Gelegenheiten, Photos zu machen. Hier eine Auswahl der Bilder, die mir am besten gefallen.

I repost some of my blog posts made @ liip. Please see here for the original post and comments: https://blog.liip.ch/archive/2011/12/18/multilanguage-support-for-doctrine-phpcr-odm.html

Over the last weeks, Dan, Brian and myself worked on adding translation capabilities to Doctrine PHPCR-ODM. PHPCR-ODM is an object - document mapper for the php content repository (PHPCR). Thanks to the Liip Ecostar process, we got funding to do this during work time.

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Symfony documentation recommends to use XML for dependency injection configuration. I like the yml format because its simple and intuitive, but the main benefit of XML is the possibility for better validation and editing help.
So today we tried to port some configuration from yaml to xml.

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Conference: International PHP Conference / WebTech Con 2011
Title: PHP Content Repository Specification (joint talk with Lukas K. Smith)
Links: Slides, joind.in

The PHPCR specification defines an API that combines the power of NoSQL databases with hierarchical data structures and versioning, powerful search and other features. Content repositories, like Midgard2 or Jackrabbit, can implement the API to provide generic access to their content. Using PHPCR, applications can focus on the application logic and use the API to quickly implement CMS functionality.

NOTE from 1.5 years later: This is not best practice. If you want a testable controller or write a reusable bundle, you should take the effort to inject the services you actually need, instead of extending the symfony base controller. For rapid development however, i would still recommend this as the base controller methods are very convenient.

I often want to have my controllers be a service so you can inject some information. But at the same time i like to extend the base controller Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller to have the convenience methods like $this->render. Now if you just create a service from your controller, you won't be able to use the methods anymore. You will get exceptions about calling get() on a non-object.

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Recently, i ordered a sample of a ws2801 based RGB LED strip from China. After todays successful playing around with it, I plan to order a bigger quantity beginning of next week.

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I repost some of my blog posts made @ liip. Please see here for the original post and comments: http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2011/09/27/a-frontend-editor-for-symfony2-cmf-with-the-help-of-vie.html

Yesterday we started working on an editor for the Symfony2 Content Management Editor, the LiipVieBundle. We use VIE and - until something non-GPL comes along - the Aloha editor. VIE is a piece of javascript on top of backbone.js that handles storing data with a REST backend. In Symfony2, this is a breeze thanks to the FOSRestBundle. Sounds complicated? Its actually quite simple, at least for the user. I made a short video to show how it looks.

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I repost some of my blog posts made @ liip. Please see here for the original post and comments: http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2011/08/24/jackalope-progress.html

At Liip, employees can propose open source projects they want Liip to support. Together with Daniel Barsotti, I did this for the PHP Content Repository implementation Jackalope and Liip was so nice as to grant us a couple of man-weeks to implement stuff for Jackalope. Now that we used up the allocated budget, its time for a progress report what Jackalope can now do.

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