Chris Norton » News

Magento Certification

Chris Norton — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:35:13 +0000

Earlier tonight I completed – and passed – the Magento Certification Test, thus becoming a certified Magento developer. I must say the test was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be. The questions are multiple choice but use checkboxes rather than radio buttons. Quite a few of the questions were either obscure, had an ambiguous question or answers or relied entirely on terminology which I wouldn’t consider to be standard in any way. Thankfully, it appears that if you have spent an unreasonable amount of time working on Magento code, as I have, then passing is not impossible. I’d be interested to know what other people thought of it!

WordPress 2.7

Chris Norton — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:55:09 +0000

I just updated the software running this blog – fairly trivial process, especially when you have the fallback of version control. WordPress 2.7 is really exactly the same on the frontend but the admin panel has been changed significantly, and for the better I think. For instance, I am writing this directly from the dashboard, rather than going into a full post creation page. Highly recommended upgrade!

Magento 1.0 Released

Chris Norton — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:55:58 +0000

The first production version of Magento Commerce has been released. I’ll be checking through the new release later today to see if I have to make any changes to my modules – now that the software is stable I can be more confident about working on the Australian module and translation.

WordPress 2.5

Chris Norton — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:14:56 +0000

I have just finished upgrading the site to use the latest version of WordPress. Overall it was a pretty fast and painless upgrade. The new version most obviously (to me) brings a redesigned admin area and some extra convenience was managing a blog. A good upgrade and well worth the 5 minutes it took to install!

The Magento Machine Rolls On: Direct Deposit Added

Chris Norton — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:17:34 +0000

I have just finished adding a basic direct deposit payment module to my Australian Magento module. Development only took a day – again, because I didn’t understand some basic things to do with the Magento/Zend framework – and was mostly done by replicating functionality for the Check/Money Order module that’s already in Magento. Although direct deposit is currently lumped in with the rest of the Australian stuff I could always extract it if people in other countries would find it useful. I’m not sure how popular a payment method it is overseas.

The next order of business will be cleaning up the code for release and then moving on to the development of a BPAY payment method, which should be pretty similar to direct deposit.

Vale Gary Gygax

Chris Norton — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:04:43 +0000

Gary Gygax, creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, has passed away at the age of 69. I shall have to pull out some of my books tonight for a read in his honour.

Update: I don’t think I could possibly have put it better than how the guys at Penny Arcade have paid tribute.

Update 2: There’s a great obituary for Gygax over at Ars Technica. It’s amazing to think of the impact this man’s work has made on so many people in the world!

2008 440 Teams Announced

Chris Norton — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:27:10 +0000

As a few students have already noticed, the official team listings for 433-440 Advanced Software Engineering Project have been placed on the subject web site. I hope to have a great year with everyone involved!

I’ll now have to start setting aside a beer budget for team A…

The Government Fails Again

Chris Norton — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:12:38 +0000

Is it just me or does the Australian Government fundamentally have something against its citizens using the Internet? The latest is a proposal to require ISPs to ban users who are caught pirating copyrighted material. I thought punishing criminals was the job of the police?

However, I have worked out what the reason is behind all these attempts to destroy Australia’s internet access: the Government is attempting to dissuade or prevent people from using the Internet so that our crappy networks will be able to handle the increasing bandwidth needed for multimedia transfers (think YouTube, IPTV, Skype, etc). Instead of upgrading the networks I’m sure it’s much cheaper to just stop people using them. Devious bastards.

Update: Another article on the subject from Ars Technica.

Final Browser Updates of 2007

Chris Norton — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:21:17 +0000

Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.

First, IE8 will drop the use of hasLayout, meaning there should be a bit more consistency in renderings between browsers and less need to resort to conditional comments with IE-specific CSS. (It doesn’t help with current versions however.)

Second, WebKit now includes an implementation of getElementsByClassName, joining Firefox 3 and the next Opera version for support for this highly desired function. Benchmarks are given which show the staggering speed increase on this common operation. You can get some for Firefox 3 as well.

The WebKit guys especially seem to be keen to start pushing the limitations of current browsers so I think 2008 will be an exciting year.

PyroLinux?

Chris Norton — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 05:16:43 +0000

Another Linux distribution looks to be hitting the net in the next few days, dubbed PyroLinux. The site looks impressive but I’m seriously underwhelmed by what I’m reading about the OS itself. For starters, it’s based on Ubuntu and seems to have just added some packages in by default, including non-free drivers and codecs (a la Mint) and some “fancy” apps like Avant Window Navigator dock.

Whilst I’m all for diversity in Linux distros I would prefer if people actually had something to show, or at least had a semi-original idea, before submitting their distro on Digg and trying to build hype. I mean, really, why on Earth would anyone want to use PyroLinux? To save themselves the 5 minutes it would take to install AWN?