Wanting to make it a little bit more difficult for people to share the links I went looking for a PHP based solution to provide unique download links that are only valid for a certain number of downloads and expire after a certain amount of time.

I found Ardamis has kindly shared a great solution for Unique download links, so just wanted to tip my hat in his general direction, and share this for the next person with the same issue.

It waits for the page to be loaded, and send the client machines time to the server by ajax. The server then returns $timedifference.”|”.$offset where offset is the difference in seconds between the server and the local machine.

The script will then check the local machine time every second and apply the offset.

This approach allows us to use the local machine’s time keep capability to keep ourselves accurate.

If there are time zone differences to be taken into account these will also be accounted for.

Click here to check it out:

After spending AGES trying to set it up…

I thought that there was something wrong with my Rails installs (and re-installs).

I was working from Beginning Rails by Apress. The book is pretty old and it turns out that SQL lite is no longer packaged with rails and the basic example was bombing out and I didn’t realise it…

The discovery of the log/test.txt was instrumental… wish that had been mentioned in the book.

This change in Rails wasn’t to be the last pain in my arse it seems… The way rails does scaffolding has changed completely it seems, so another 2 hours later I find an open Internet place (tropical island remember?) and I have a working tutorial (http://fairleads.blogspot.com/2008/01/this-is-second-part-of-my-series.html) for Rails 2.
And I see the fruit of my first rails scaffolding setup… I must say it’s beautiful!

I’m sure I’ll be finding a few more things that don’t work in ‘Beginning rails’, but ‘Beginning Rails 3′ will be out in March 2010 (next month), so I’ll probably make a move on that asap.

I am going with Ubuntu for now:
I found these instructions on setting up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu really helpfull.

Although initially annoyed at the mess of setting up in Windows, I’m grateful for the opportunity to get to know Ubuntu and Linux a bit better…

Think I’ve finally found a solution. Seems although Ubntu 9.1 ships with the drivers, it doesn’t ship with the firmware… I followed the instructions here – dell 1501 ubuntu wireless drivers, but I assure you I didn’t find that without a LOT of googling and digging!

Participation, seems to be closed, but spying is not

There motivation and aim seems to be summarised by:
“Hey, we are all agreeing that we are going to code this way and we’d like you to do it to.”

Isn’t that nice

The meeting included representatives from Agavi, Cake, PEAR, Phing, Solar, Symfony and Zend.

Given the attendees there is certainly some weight behind this and it’s worth keeping an eye on… especially if you’ve been developing your own framework.

Find out more at the ugliest usefull site in the universe

The site itself is pleasing on the eye, as we’ve come to expect from Randa, but the buttons the themselves are hot stuff!!!

I finally settled on a set from Cheth Studios, who seem to be on a mission to provdie some seriously cool free content, graphics and resources to the masses. Well worth checking out.