Tomas Liubinas

After two years of a halt with new releases I am glad to inform you that finally today OXID released eShop version 4. As a team member and eShop developer I am really proud of this product. I could tell you a lot about new features and general improvements such as massive refactoring and automatically tested code, performance improvements, ultimate search engine optimization, new Web 2.0 functionality or customizable Look’n'Feel engine. But all the details you can find on official OXID eSales site. I’ll just want to make a long story short and the Big news first. The most interesting and exciting part is that OXID eShop since today goes.. OPEN SOURCE! Yes, that’s right now we are fully GPL, you can download and use our software for free or even join the development process and contribute the product yourself!

As for me personally and the team, we enjoyed a short period of relax after the release stress, raised a few glasses of beer and now we are back to development again. We’ve already got some reports on minor bugs and hope to release the first fixes soon. I definitely promise that you do not have to wait another two years for the next release. As I mentioned before we fully automated eShop testing with unit and acceptance tests. That’s why version release process shrank from a few weeks of nightmare of testing, fixing, testing and fixing again, to a few hours procedure.

Short facts:

OXID eShop is PHP and MySQL based standard online commerce system.

OXID eShop Community Edition is an an open source GPL product.

Demo shop online

Demo shop admin (username:password - admin:admin)

Download OXID eShop CE 4.0

Today I’ve read an article about some british craftswoman producing baby-like dolls. She is really good at her job, and makes her best to manufacture as realistically looking dolls as possible. The dolls can even breathe. Do you already expect some cute looking little wonders? Wrong. A single reaction from people who commented the article was they were fucking freaked out. Indeed the dolls look really CREEPY (pics). And it is no surprise. Cathy Newcombe starting this business probably has never heard about it, but there is a theory called uncanny valley hypothesis. It basically states that, the more you try to reproduce artificially nice looking human the better chance is you get an opposite reaction. Interesting isn’t it? So back to what I wanted to say. If you are in toy, robot, CGI, gaming or sex doll industry and plan a human looking product, you will fail. Don’t do that. (Unless, of course, you are Ron Mueck and love scaring people).

Remember what was Tunguska meteor? It exploded over Siberia on June 30, 1908, exactly 100 years ago. I am really excited waiting for Century Protal reporting the event. Century Portal is Lithuanian web site announcing exactly 100 hundred year old “news”. Due to Julian calendar shift and news traveling not as fast as today there might be some delay before we can read it, but I can’t wait for those serious century old intelligentsia journaslists covering such an extraordinary event

80% of good ideas are bad.

Rimvydas Paškevičius reported a way to access private and protected vars from outside of class scope. Do you think it’s a PHP bug? It works for me on PHP 5.2.1 Read the rest of this entry »

Source

In case you need to generate image thumbnail, you can use this simple PHP function. It takes 4 parameters: source filename, thumbnail filename, thumbnail width and height. Before resizing the image, this function crops it proportionaly, this way ensuring that thumbnail image is not streched. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to my blog! Nothing to say too much here, just this page was created as a first ENGLISH blog entry..