Just in time for Winter. But what a Winter it is going to be! Two weeks after the event, I think it’s high time that I comment on our move to Cape Town from the UK.
Late in 2010 I was invited to relocate to South Africa and join the executive team of TAKE2 as CTO. I’m excited to say that I accepted and that I’m looking forward to the challenges of building up the IT team as we expand the operations of the business and bring a new look and feel to TAKE2.co.za.
The real business opportunity is more than just a face lift. We have ambitious plans to bring new capabilities to the platform and have a strong commitment to improving the usability of the site. Internet connectivity and credit card use it starting to accelerate in South Africa and there’s so much scope for growth. It’s going to be a thrilling ride!
We plan to use some interesting open source projects within our systems, and Magento is figuring significantly in there. Already carrying as many products as we do and with plans to expand, we really are pushing the limits of what packaged e-commerce systems can handle and it’s for that reason we are looking to hire talented web developers that want to work in a dynamic environment with likeminded people.
Sunset view from our window
The move to South Africa was a hectic one, and although it seemed like we waited an eternity for the visa paperwork to come through, there was never going to be enough time to see all of the friends that we wanted to before we took our flight to the sun. Of course, we will be more than happy to welcome friends and family to our new home in Cape Town — it’s a great destination for all of you living in the Northern hemisphere to take a Winter break when it’s Summer down here!
And if you’re looking for a spot of online shopping in South Africa then you need to check out our site.
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I have no idea how I managed to install xdebug on my MacBook earlier this year. But thanks to the following post, it didn’t take very long on my desktop.
Tip: read the whole post before you start typing.
Building and Installing Xdebug on XAMPP for OS X 10.6 | Mugginsoft (OS X app software for Mac).
Posted in: Blog
Mostly for my own benefit because I can never find one when I need it. Here is a text list of all the United Nations member states. One per line. No markup. No need to write regular expressions to parse out the details. Ready to use.
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Like many others in the Drupal Community, I’m looking forward to DrupalCon Copenhagen next week. Hopefully Eyjafjallajokull won’t snarl up the travel plans as it did earlier this year for DrupalCon San Francisco.
One of the difficulties that people regularly level at Drupal is the apparently steep learning curve. I agree that there is a degree of complexity in what a developer needs to learn to get started with Drupal, but the concepts aren’t that difficult, nor are they more significant that alternative frameworks such as Zend Framework or Joomla! The problem, I believe, is that the information is presented in a format that suits a specific learning style and as a consequence the people that are able to consume that material in turn produce more material in the same style.
The solution to lower the barrier to entry for Drupal is to expand the available material to present content in ways suitable for different learning styles. I am pleased to see that efforts are underway, and next week Heather James and Stella Power will be running a Communicating Drupal Visually session at DrupalCon Copenhagen.
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I think I have finally found the solution to my diary management. I have tried lots of different alternatives to Outlook and Exchange, most of which I preferred but usually with one or two niggles that prevented me from relying on them.
After a rocky start with Google calendar it has now been running smoothly for nearly a year and syncing well with my iPhone and MacBook – no need to pay for Apple’s mobile me service. Using Google apps I can keep my email, contacts, and calendar in sync between my phone and multiple computers. I have multiple Google apps accounts, one personal account and several business accounts. I use my personal account as the principle account that holds all my contacts and my main calendar, this is synced with my iPhone using Google Sync and seems to work really well. I then bring in my mail and calendars from the other accounts using IMAP and CalDav. The setup is the same on each of my computers.
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