If you have been using OS X for any amount of time you will have noticed that the built in spell checker is not the greatest. Nathan Spindel has created a plug-in for OS X that will allow you to use Google’s spell checking system. This is the same system that is used by GMail and Google Docs. Since Google collects data from millions of users their spell checking engine is bound to be better than any desktop application.

gSpell is a great addition to OS X I am glad that I have found it.  The best part is that it is an open source plug-in.  If you would like to give it a try click here to go to Nathan’s website.

Since I have started at my new job we have been looking into several different PHP frameworks to use for the new development. We pondered doing a custom framework for the site but in the end we opted to go with CodeIgniter. I have to say that overall CodeIgniter is a really nice framework. It saves us a lot of time and code when we want to do simplistic things. The best part about CodeIgniter is that it is based on the MVC design pattern.

MVC is a really nice method to use for object oriented development. It keeps things well organized and keeps the code clean, organized and easy to manage. The framework is also very easy to extend. You can extend core classes or you can replace them with your own implementations. It also gives you the ability to create your own libraries and helpers. A library is a class which you can load into CodeIgniter. Below is an example of a controller that will load a custom library and put it to use.

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Recently Google released a beta version of Analytics.  I logged in today to see what the fuss was all about.  I must say that I think they are doing a great job with the improvements that they are doing.  This new beta is not just a round of bug fixes, it is a complete face lift to the interface.

The part I love the most is the map overlay.  The new map overlay will allow you to click on continents and it will zoom in similar to google maps.  When I zoomed in all the way to the United States I could hover over the states and it would show me how many visitors I have had from that state during the date range I had set.

If you have not done so you should log in to your analytics account and check out the new beta, it ROCKS!

Hey everyone, I am sorry it has been a while since my last post before today.  I have been going through a lot of stuff in life that I have needed to make a priority.  I am recently separated and have my own apartment.  On top of trying to get things squared away there I have also been trying to work with the Attorney and the Office of Child Support to nail down what my monthly support will be.  I am also working on getting a visitation schedule down on paper so that I can see the kids on a regular basis.

Things are slowly getting back on track and I will be posting on here more frequently than I have been.

While I do not use Windows on a regular basis I do have XP installed under Parallels (trial mode) so that I can test websites in IE. I decided that I would install SecureZIP - The next generation of ZIP. I wanted to test it out and see what all of the fuss was about. I have been hearing great things about this application. SecureZip is a compression program that will actually encrypt your files based on either a pass phrase or a certificate. Anyone who is worried about data security should look into this application.

SecureZip also integrates with Outlook and while I cannot say that I tested this feature it does look very nice. They state that you can encrypt attachments and then just resend the same files to another email address by forwarding the email and you will not have to re-encrypt or anything. I believe that this application is overkill for the average computer user however for companies who deal with sensitive data (and run Windows) this just might be the solution they are looking for.

From my tests the compression was not the greatest. I just tested by compressing my Document and Users folder on the C drive which is 89MB and it compressed down to 62MB. I also did my searching for a while to see if SecureZip had been cracked as of yet. This search turned up empty. It looks like it really is as secure as they are stating. I am sure in the future we will see a crack for them however I am sure the developers would be quick to change the algorithm that they use so that any cracks released would be useless.

They just need to make a mac version of this program now so they don’t leave out the best users of all