Symfony

An exciting couple of days have just passed. I had a great telephone conference call with a business associate about a new project. It's something that will keep us busy for a good few months.
The need for a decent development framework is now even more pressing, so yesterday afternoon, I downloaded and installed the most recent supported version of the Symfony framework.
Installation was fairly straightforword: just a case of RTFM and taking my time. The one slight problem I had was getting the apache virtual host directives to work properly. These were sorted out this morning - I was tired and forgotten to change a couple of parameters that appeared in the vanilla directives given in the Symfony manuals. I had also forgotten to add an entry into my /etc/hosts file.

It was quite a surprise to find and fix the problems so quickly as one of our dogs ate something unpleasant (fox or cat poo) a day or two ago. Since then she's had a bit of an upset tummy which came to a head at bedtime. Standing at the back door at 2:00am when it's -2C waiting for a dog to relieve herself for the umpteenth time isn't conducive to a good night's sleep. She's a bit quiet at the moment and probably very hungry as all she's had is a tablespooon of rice for breakfast.

Anyway, time for a(nother) cup of restorative coffee and a shower.
Once I'm fairly compus-mentis, I have Christmas presents to wrap and I want to have a go at making a Stollen.

A bientot!

Downtime

One skill that I have recently acquired is baking bread. As I type this, I have two batches rising. The first batch is destined to become a couple of wholemeal loaves. It's a basic recipe from an old Good Houskeeping cookery book that my wife has had since the year dot. The second, is an enriched dough (by that I mean I've replaced some of the water with soya milk and a couple of eggs), which I'll use to make bread rolls for Christmas. Most of them will be destined for the freezer. I have some ideas for the rolls, for example, incorporating some stilton and walnuts into some of them.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with IT. Well, two things: first, as the proverb says, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and second, kneading dough gives me a great opportunity to ponder things that need to be "background-processed", such as the look and feel of my next project, which framework and so on.

Talking of frameworks for PHP, I'm going to have a look at Symphony and will probably install that tomorrow, along with Netbeans, as I think my current PHP editor, Bluefish, could be better. A full IDE will make me much more productive.

Anyway, I think my first batch of dough is ready for knocking back and putting into tins ready for proving.

TTFN