Month: July 2014

Lycaon pictus, the African Wild dog.

Lycaon pictus

An endangered species, Lycaon pictus is a canid found only in Africa, especially in savannas and lightly wooded areas. It is variously called the African wild dog, African hunting dog, Cape hunting dog, African painted dog, painted wolf, painted hunting dog, spotted dog, or ornate wolf. I had an excellent opportunity to see these magnificent creatures for a long time when we were in Botswana. Spending almost 4 hours with the pack as they went about their business.

I got a whole lot of photos but this particular one of young adults galavanting around after a meal has a dynamic quality which i particularly loved. Unfortunately the species in under a threat due to various reasons. Continue reading Lycaon pictus, the African Wild dog.

ABC & D of REBT

I got on to Secret app a while ago. I did not expect to find anything unusual other than the rants about workplaces, brags about sexual escapades or vice versa. What disturbed me was the number of my friends who were posting distressing messages about being depressed, feeling sad or feeling hopeless. Some more serious than others. I have tried to suggest therapy to all of them but the most common refrain I heard was…

  1.  I don’t want to share my past and
  2.  It is a very slow process taking years.

No it is not so! It is not so specially if you go to a REBT practitioner.

REBT (pronounced R.E.B.T not rebbit) stands for Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy. Created and Developed by Albert Ellis, REBT does not focus much on your past events but more on your present state of emotions and disturbances. It has a very easy to understand model for psychological and emotional disturbances which is very aptly called the ABC of REBT. I first came across this model when I consulted Dr. Shishir Palsapure of MorphicMinds a couple of years ago for what I feared was a Major Clinical Depression (It was not. I was merely upset.) I was so blown away by the directness and effectiveness of the method that I started to study REBT as an interest to better understand how human cognition works and now I can apply its principles in almost everything I do.

So what is the ABC model?

A – Adversity or Activating event
B – Belief you have about the event
C – Consequence

Continue reading ABC & D of REBT

Using themes in CakePHP 3

Almost every application I code has themes which either the end user can change or the admin can set or can be changed on the fly. Doing all these things was easy in CakePHP 2.x. With the first alpha release of CakePHP 3.x I was naturally keen to try out how theming worked with V3.

Wrote about using themes in CakePHP 3 at the SANIsoft blog. Themes in CakePHP version 3 are now full fledged plugins. This allows for a lot of flexibility and helps in keeping your code DRY. I have added a step by step example where I use Twitter Bootstrap to theme baked Post views. The steps are simple and have complete code for your use for the layout and index.ctp

Read the blog post

eBird widget plugin for WordPress

eBird Widget plugin solves the problem of showing data from eBird on to a website which runs wordpress. First I should elaborate what eBird is – https://ebird.org is a website which has a real-time, online checklist program. It does so by providing Global tools for birders which help in recording birds sightings, keep track of your bird lists, explore dynamic maps and graphs, share your sightings and join the eBird community and some more. The problem is that the sharing part is not too well evolved.

Just released the version 1 eBird widget for wordpress and wrote a post about it on the SANIsoft blog. The plugin uses wp_cron to fetch the data from eBird site in the background, thus the page load times are not affected. Read the complete blog post

CakePHP 3 is coming

“CakePHP 3 is coming” I said, a colleague remarked,  “Why are you saying it like – Winter is coming?”.

We have been working with CakePHP almost since its inception nearly 10 years ago. We have survived the winter of converting from version 1.2 to 2.0 with great benefits and I am eagerly looking forward to using CakePHP 3 for greater benefits. The roadmap document clearly states that CakePHP 3.0 represents a significant break in backwards compatibility.

Wrote a short introduction about the upcoming CakePHP version 3 at the SANIsoft blog. The biggest takeaways for me are

  1. Installation via composer
  2. Complete rewrite of the ORM
  3. Validation is now a service
  4. Session no longer static
  5. Themes are now plugins
  6. Changes to FormHelper

Go ahead Read the complete post