A tribute to my Volvo 850

Nov 24th 2009, 02:10 | 4 comments

He served me more than 100.000 kilometers, we drove through England, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, but now it's time for his retirement. Bye Volvo 850 GLT!

My personal favourite DJs

Sep 5th 2009, 21:51 | 2 comments

Another music post on my blog. Every year you can vote for your top 5 DJ's which where special for you this year. I have a mixed feeling about the DJ MAG poll because I prefer to keep my favourites DJ's for me alone so the gigs are not crowded and the DJ does not get too arrogant. On the other hand it's important to let your favourite DJ's know you support them since this DJ MAG poll is pretty important for them.

For a very long time I'm a big fan of Armin van Buuren, but since he raised in popularity, the gigs were more crowded, the ticket prizes increased badly and the atmosphere went down. That's the prize we've to pay when our favourite DJ's getting more and more popular.

Anyway I would also like to support those who gave me a good feeling, a healthy vibe and the thrills on my back. Here's my list:

1. Armin van Buuren (Now # 1)
Armin was again awesome this year, my favourite DJ of this year especially after the successful ASOT 400 parties in Wuppertal and Rotterdam. Every week he's listening hundreds of tracks to give us his weekly radio show A State of Trance.

2. Blake Jarrell (Now # ?)
A typical 'best of the rest' DJ, I'm already following him for a while and again this year he made me smile more than once. Especially his album 'Concentrate' was fabulous, my favourite album of the year. Hopefully he will spin the wheels more in the Netherlands soon. Extra credits for him for his Twitter activity, it's always nice to follow your favourite DJ's.

3. Above and Beyond (Now # 4)
Last year my number 1 for their Sirens of the Sea album. I enjoyed their radio shows a lot, but missed the special thrill I was used of them. Hopefully next year?!

4. Marcus Schossow (Now # 124)
Ever heard his radio show 'Tone Diary'? It's hilarious! New DJ on my list, I like his style a lot, did some awesome remixes this year and did an incredible performance at Trance Energy. Come to Holland a bit more please! =) Extra credits for his funny Twitter activity!

5. Gareth Emery (Now # 23)
Gereth Emery made two of my favourite tracks this year. His performance in Rotterdam @ ASOT 400 was very nice and enough reasons to put him in my top 5.

Other DJ's who deserve some extra credits are Roger Shah, my favourite German DJ with his sexy voice, I loved the Sunlounger album! First State, an stunning performance at the Future Talent stage of Trance Energy. Markus Schulz, nice album you made!

Give your voice and vote at http://www.top100djs.net/


Badges by my girlfriend Illuminal

Five useful CakePHP functions I just dicovered

Jun 25th 2009, 13:33 | 2 comments

I don't have to explain why CakePHP is such a brilliant PHP framework, it simply is. The good part with frameworks is that they include a rich reusable API library full of functions that will make life easier for most programmers. CakePHP is such a framework with an enormous rich library. I only know half of the functions but every day I discover some new great functions which some of them I want to share.

1. Httpsocket
After I wrote an article about how we built Twittermail in 48 hours, Matt from PseudoCoder.com wrote a blogpost about Httpsocket. I was constantly using the curl library from PHP, I just did not know CakePHP had it's own 'grabber' included. It's called Httpsocket, it's a core Utility library and it's quite interesting what the possibilities are. I truly love curl because they have many functions like handling cookies, auto follow header locations and other very handy stuff. But for quick calls it's just as easy to use the CakePHP Httpsocket. Here's an example:

To simply get my LastFM timeline, I only need: 

App::import('Core', 'HttpSocket'); 
$HttpSocket = new HttpSocket();
$lastFMxml= $HttpSocket->get('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/LennieZ/recenttracks.xml');

 You can be much more specific with the Httpsocket library like giving a User Agent or supplying user authentication. See this page to get more info about that.

2. Convert an Object into an Array
For data I prefer array's more than objects. To get my LastFM timeline I need to retrieve an XML file. I always used simplexml_load_string to convert the results to an XML object. After that I had to convert the object to an array and therefore I used a custom function I found on php.net. Lately I discovered the beautiful 'Set' Core library from CakePHP. In the Set Core Utility library there are some very useful functions to manipulate arrays and objects. One of the functions is called Reverse, and this function is doing exactly what I want in just 1 line:

$result = Set::reverse($lastFMxml);

3. The XML library
Coming to the next point, the XML library. I did not know CakePHP had an XML core library and that's why I had to use 'simplexml_load_string'. With the XML library you can easily convert a string to an XML object.

$xml = new Xml($input);
$xml = Set::reverse($xml);

You can even get a remote XML file by using an URL!

$xml = new Xml('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/LennieZ/recenttracks.xml');
$xml = Set::reverse($xml);

4. Cache::set()
I just love cache, I use it quite often and can't live without it. The only problem is that when I use Cache::write(), in the past I could always tell this function for how long it should be cached. For some reason this is not working anymore and you need to supply a config name. In my core.php file I told some configs for how long it should be cached. Today I found out I can tell the cache on the fly for how long it should be cached! Using Cache::set()!

Cache::set(array('duration' => '+30 days')); 
Cache::write('results', $data); 
// Later on 
Cache::set(array('duration' => '+30 days')); 
$results = Cache::read('results');

For some reason you also need to supply Cache::set when you read your data.

5. String insert
Most of my projects I prepare for Internationalization so it will be easy to add more languages in the future. Therefore I'm using the __('Hello!') function for every text I need. But what if you need data in your text like a name or an age. You can use sprintf and the %s signs in the text, but I just think that's not so nice in the PO files.

By using String insert you have a more accessible text in your PO files which is easier to understand for translators.

String::insert(__('My name is :name and I am :age years old.', true), array('name' => 'Bob', 'age' => '65'));

 
Next month I will talk about hacking, so stay tuned!

Getting Canon RAW thumbnails in Windows 7

May 11th 2009, 19:12 | 9 comments

Trying out the latest Windows 7 is quite awesome. The day Windows Vista was released I slept in front of the store so I could install Windows Vista immediately on my computer. Now Microsoft will release later this year the even more awesome Windows 7. I won't bore you with the new features because there are plenty of blogs who already talk about it.

Photography is one of my hobbies and because I want a quick overview of my photos without using external software to see them I previously always shot both in RAW and JPG. In that case I could see the JPG thumbnails so I knew which CR2 file I had to open with Photoshop. I still can remember a photoshop trick with Windows XP and the first Adobe Photoshop CS version where you just had to copy a DLL file to a shell folder in the Adobe Common group. Windows 7 has by default a RAW viewer, but since I'm shooting with a Canon 5D Mark II it's still not compatible with the Windows Raw viewer. I searched for several hours on the Internet however the solution is pretty simple. Canon supplies software and it's called the Canon RAW Codec (1.5). It's made for Windows XP but it's also working on a Windows 7 machine.

Canon Software Drivers > Cameras > EOS 5D Mark II > Canon RAW Codec (1.5).

After installing the Canon RAW codec I'm able to browse with Windows Explorer through all my photos and I'm able to view thumbnails from CR2 files of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Keep your Adobe Photoshop up to date because with last updates they also supported the 5D Mark II CR2 files. The solution is incredible easy but nobody told me so far how to get CR2 raw files as thumbnails in my Windows 7. Have fun on your Windows 7 machine!

CakePHP: No markup with formhelper input

Apr 10th 2009, 11:30 | 3 comments

Just a short blog post about CakePHP, I see loads of people around me who don't want any markup like DIVS or LABELS around their form input elements. There are plenty reasons you don't want those markup, for example when you need your form in a table.

I see programmers using $form->select(); or $form->radio(); to avoid all the markup, but there's a simple trick to hide all the additional elements and still benefit from all the magic features of $form->input();

Just add two parameters in the input options:

input('title', array(
    'div' => false,
    'label' => false)
);

Blake Jarrell presents Concentrate 2009

Apr 8th 2009, 16:29 | 9 comments

This is the first time I write a review about a new music album. Normally I wouldn't write reviews, but I really want to share a new album because it's really brilliant. I pre ordered the album a few weeks ago and last weekend I found it in my mailbox. I started listening it immediately and felt in love with the story of deep progressive beats, trancy melodies, housy sceneries and indulging side-effects called ' Blake Jarrell - Cencentrate 2009'.

Blake Jarrell is an American DJ originally from New Orleans, after the Katrina disaster he moved to Chicago and started his DJ Career. After listening to a few of Blake's tracks, Armin van Buuren himself contacted Blake and right after that he started touring with Armin all over the world. Personally I first heard of Blake Jarrell after the Anna Nalick - Breathe remix, which was my absolute favourite track in 2006 and made my summer perfect with loads of great memories. I started following Blake Jarrell and was pleased to watch him live in The Sand in Amsterdam. He started his radio show, also called concentrate which is a monthly radio show full of nice progressive music. Since I was searching for a less main-stream DJ, Blake Jarrell is now one of my favourite 'future talents'.

The first CD of the album is full of new remixes from Blake and his very own track called 'Eilat'. The tracks are really amazing, Blake is one of the best remix DJ's I've ever seen, he remixed artists like Snow Patrol, Anna Nalick, Linkin Park and now on this album he remixed some tracks of his colleagues in the Blake Jarrell style, which are quite brilliant. I would almost say this album is quite ambience, every track is a story within very big story, it's perfectly mixed together and this first CD is one big pleasure for my ears, my brains and my body.

The second (bonus) Cd are tracks we already know from Blake Jarrell which are awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing ' Not Alone tonight ' again and his brilliant remix of ' Wouldn't change a thing' from Jose Amnesia feat Jennifer Rene. Also, a few of his own produced tracks are on this album, a perfect CD for in my car, I love it.

Blake Jarrell didn't want to create ‘just' an artist or mix album. Blake needed something special. In my opinion he succeeded. Blake's album is Focusing on Blake's remixes and productions, all in optimal balance to one another. Blake Jarrell is also in 2009 my favourite future talent, although he's already a huge talent. I can't wait to see him spinning again in Holland.  

Read the full article

A great tool to write blog posts

Mar 27th 2009, 19:00 | 6 comments

Writing a blog post is for amateurs like me very difficult, especially when English isn't your mother language. I just got pointed by my girlfriend about a web service who can help me.

Not only my spelling is pretty bad, also my word choices, my grammatical feeling and the way to express myself. EssayRater is able to help me, I simply write my article in a document, paste it in EssayRater and hit the Analyze button.

After checking plagiarism, spelling & grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and Style & word choice, EssayRater shows me a full report about my blog post. Using this tool is so much better than my spelling check, it even tells me when I use words and phrases inconsistent with the context or the style of the entire rest of my blog post.

After checking the blog post, it also suggests words with the 'WordBooster'. In short it well suggest me context-fitting synonyms to look my blog post even better and smarter. I'm just an amateur blogger, but for students this web service is also quite awesome, even when you fully master the English language.

Using this tool will cost you about 19 dollars a month (so for Europe it's like 1 EUR a month), then you can use this tool for unlimited kind of documents!

Check it out: http://www.EssayRater.com/

My recent photos

Mar 24th 2009, 04:21 | 1 comments

This is a new list of my most recent photos. I haven't been photographing that much lately. I have gigs of new photos to process so expect some new photos in the next couple of days (weeks?)

How we built Twittermail.com in 48 hours

Mar 24th 2009, 01:00 | 6 comments

Okay, for those who don't know Twittermail, Twittermail is an open idea by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, he thought that it would be great if people could e-mail their tweets to Twitter.com.

This is potentially very useful for people who use mobile phones. Of course you can go to the mobile webpage of Twitter, but sending an e-mail is pretty much easier. Some older phones do not even contain a browser and only have e-mail functionality. Also a lot of businesses block Twitter.com on their corporate network but with Twittermail you can continually update your Twitter account even from your business e-mail address.

Those who register at Twittermail, get a secret unique email address like 1234abcde [AT] twittermail com. When you send an e-mail to this secret email address, it will get posted instantly to Twitter.com through the Twitter API.

Read the full article

Why I started blogging

Mar 24th 2009, 00:00 | 5 comments

I’m Lennaert Ekelmans, 21 years old and originally from the Netherlands. I’m a serial (Internet) entrepreneur, web developer and cake baker. I’m photographing for fun with my Canon 30D and a Canon 5D Mark II. I’m also a trance addict, especially a fan of Armin van Buuren, Above & Beyond, Aly & Fila, Blake Jarrell and Roger Shah.

I was always against blogging because I know myself and I wouldn’t update it even after a few weeks of trying. I changed my mind because:

• My girlfriend started blogging and I was a bit jealous..
• I think it's really useful to blog articles so that people can find it on Google and use it as a reference.
• And of course I like myself, which is a must for having a blog..

So don't expect me as a serial blogger, blogging about my beautiful life and bore you to death. I will only write articles which might be useful for readers, like write about my CakePHP experiences or writing about interesting subjects. Hopefully people will find useful information on a specific subject so that they can use it as a reference.
 
Edit: A hot requested feature (already 10 hours after the launch) is the ability to post comments. Expect this feature soon..