Paczkator is a small Windows utility I wrote for the company I’m currently working with. Its purpose is to simplify the process of sending multiple big images (usually scanned documents) by mail. It’s small, pretty fast and requires no configuration from the user.

Features:

• Small, free and easy to install and use
• Automatically finds any images in the folder specified and scales them down if they are too big
• Zips the folder, opens your email application (Outlook Express by default) and creates an attachment for you.
• Warns you if the compressed folder is too big to send by email
• It’s localised. Currently it speaks English and Polish
• No administrator privileges required to install and run
• No additional software required to work properly

Download Paczkator 0.8 now!

Paczkator is distributed under the GPL2 license, which means the program is FREE for both private and commercial use. You can also redistribute and modify it. If you do so, I would be grateful if you notified me.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or suggestions concerning Paczkator.

Version History:

• 0.8 - current release: added localisation, installer and fixed a few bugs
• 0.6 - improved image recognition and scaling procedures, a bug-fix release
• 0.5 - initial release

Filed under: Downloads, My Pet Projects, Windows, Mail on 2007-07-09 by Damian Gaweda 1 Comment »

iKlasa to gadżet, który pokazuje najnowsze fotki twoich znajomych z serwisu Nasza Klasa na twojej stronie domowej Google.

  Chcesz iKlasę? Kliknij dodaj do strony domowej

Już niedługo iKlasa będzie dostępna także jako kanał RSS.

Jeśli masz jakies sugestie co do gadżetu - zapraszam do komentowania.

English: iKlasa is an iGoogle gadget which displays a feed of latest friends photos from a Polish social-networking website nasza-klasa.pl

Filed under: Ajax, PHP, My Pet Projects on 2007-05-05 by Damian Gaweda 3 Comments »

I’ve been using Linux for more than 7 years now. The main thing I do on Linux is text editing. Editing configuration files, source files, html files and what not. Initially I used Midnight Commander’s built-in editor (as probably many of you coming from windowed systems). As I became more experienced and geeky I moved to one of the ‘holy editors’: Vim. Vim is an excellent editor with unlimited possibilities but unfortunately mastering it takes unlimited time as well. I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.

Here’s what I was looking for:

• as many windows-like (CUA) key bindings as possible. At least Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
• syntax coloring
• basic editing functions like search&replace
• needs to work on a VT as well as a console without rebinding keys
• minimum configuration

These features are not particularly demanding, are they? Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos.

Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box. I’m not going into details (you can read about its features on the homepage), just a screenshot and a list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• very windows-like key bindings (all that I use, I didn’t rebind a single key!)
• no configuration needed (although you can configure it pretty extensively if you want to)
• works on a VT as well as console without reconfiguring putty, .inputrc or anything
• has all the features you would expect in a basic programmers editor (regexps, etc)

Cons:

• It’s slow. It is really slow when compared to any other editor (even Emacs). It’s written in Ruby, which is an interpreted language. I’m not sure if it is for Ruby or the author’s laziness but I don’t really care. It works sufficiently fast on my hardware. It saves a lot of my time which is more valuable to me than cpu cycles.
• Syntax coloring has some problems. I think it has something to do with switching contexts. When editing a PHP file with HTML in it, the coloring sometimes gets funny. Well that’s not a major drawback for me too.

To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.

Filed under: Code Editing, Linux on 2007-05-03 by Damian Gaweda 16 Comments »

The task I’ve received recently was to develop a product site for a company producing saunas. The idea was to create a web equivalent of their printed catalogue of products. It was a pretty simple project but there were a few things I had to deal with:

• It had to be pure a XHTML/CSS site. No PHP or any other server-side scripting used on the production server. That of course implied I couldn’t use a database.
• I had to transfer all the texts, product descriptions and images from MS Word documents I received from the client.
• The site had to be multilingual, so even more data to insert from *.docs.

The prospect of manually cutting and pasting those things from Word to XHTML sources didn’t sound exciting so I decided to use some scripting to do the tedious job for me. Here’s what I did:

• Firstly, I made XHTML layouts from images I received from my friend who took care of designing the whole thing. I included a bit of JavaScript eye-candy to to make the site more attractive.
• Then I developed a minimalistic CMS using PHP for automatic generation of product entries and pages from CSV input. It could also export the whole site to separate XHTML and CSS files.
• Then I made a couple of Perl scripts to convert *.docs to HTML, extract all the data from them (images and tabular data) and create CSV files.
• Finally I fed my minicms script with the CSV data and rendered everything to pure XHTML pages.

Of course not everything went OK automagically. Scripts needed quite a bit of tweaking because *.doc files didn’t have a regular structure and some things just were faster to import manually. However, the site was ready in half the time I would have needed to create it by hand and I saved myself from some serious headaches.

Screenshots of the result (you can take a look at the live site here):

Note: Decowood logo is a property of Decowood company. Both logos and pictures of products are used only for the purpose of presentation. Currently the site is maintained by a third-party contractor so it may look different.

Filed under: PHP, My Pet Projects on 2007-02-02 by Damian Gaweda No Comments »

I’m a minimalist by nature. I like things designed for a particular purpose. That’s why I tend to create custom applications rather than to modify generic ones. I used to build everything from ground up using only a few handy PHP classes. However some time ago I decided it was a huge waste of time and drawbacks of this development method outweighed the benefits.

I decided to give some of the generally available frameworks a try. After some time of playing with open-source solutions I chose CakePHP. I liked CakePHP the most because of its conventions, model relationships and the fact it worked with both PHP4 and PHP5.

PlastiCMS was my first commercial project created with CakePHP. It’s a custom-built CMS for managing a company website with an integrated E-commerce application.

Features of PlastiCMS include:

• Page management. You can organise pages in a classical tree structure, which is not trendy but suitable for a company site. Navigational elements are automatically generated using the page tree.
• TinyMCE rich text editor. You can edit pages the way you edit MS Word documents.
• An Image Gallery with a fancy Web2.0-like presentation using JavaScript.
• A Catalogue of Products with unlimited number of categories and subcategories. Products can be assigned to multiple categories. Each product can have many variants (colour, size, length). Each variant may influence price of the product.
• Internationalisation. You can run several language versions of a site.
• A simple Client Relationship Manager is included
• It’s Google-friendly
• It works with any shared hosting provider
• It’s simple to use for non-technical people.

Screenshots of a live site using PlastiCMS:

Plastiflora’s site design was created by a friend of mine, Marcin from K13 Graphic Design. I made the XHTML/CSS version of his idea.

Note: Plastiflora logo is a property of Plastiflora company. Both logos and pictures of products are used only for the purpose of presentation. Currently the site of Plastiflora is maintained by a third-party contractor so it may look different.

Filed under: PHP, My Pet Projects on 2006-10-22 by Damian Gaweda No Comments »