It’s a good sign for a framework when books are being published in it’s name. Along with the expanding list of official resources and blogs discussing CakePHP, several books have been published to help newcomers and intermediate level programmers learn and use Cake to there advantage.

Daniel Hofstetter published an article several months back with books that are available covering CakePHP. His list has last been updated on August. Maybe you didn’t get any of these books in your Christmas stocking, but with the New Year coming up perhaps it’s time for you to buy yourself one and dedicate 2009 to upgrading your development skills.

The guys behind CakePHP Application Development have just released 2 lengthy articles which give you an idea of what you would get.

The first article covers simple associations, while the second article dives into more complex associations. Jonathan Snook has also written a review that you may want to check out.

Learning model associations is critical in using CakePHP to your advantage and I suggest anyone who is learning Cake to get a good grasp of how associations work and how they’ll speed up your development time.  Even if you don’t plan on buying the book, check out those articles because I’ve seen a lot of questions on IRC showing lack of understanding on how associations work.

Another book review was written on Daniel Hofstetter on Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional.

So, with the new year coming you may want to pickup a book to help yourself learn CakePHP. After learning the basic concepts, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is.

Update: Daniel Hofstetter has just recently reviewed Practical CakePHP Projects. Check it out.

I’m always looking for more efficient ways to organize my thoughts and notes. The old pen and paper doesn’t do it for me any more (save the trees!) and trying to find something when you have hundreds of notes to browse through would take up much of your valuable time. It’s 2008 and by now we’ve found new ways to organize ourselves. Whether it’s through text files, Outlook or related software, or organizer software, we’ve definitely come along way. These methods are usually good for keeping you organized, but what about keeping your thoughts organized?

There’s buzz about mind mapping and, while it’s not a new technique, there is now a lot of mind mapping software making it easier to map your mind. While it definitely looks interesting, it didn’t interest me enough to learn how to use it. So I kept looking until I came across wikidPad. What is wikidPad you ask? Well, it’s like notepad on drugs. Ok, that wasn’t very helpful, so let’s quote the wikidPad website.

WikidPad is a wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down.

If you’ve used Wikipedia, you’ll begin to understand what wikiPad is all about. Essentially, it’s a “wikipedia” of your thoughts. You start off with a main idea, branch off to sub-ideas, ad infinitum. What you end up with is a web of ideas all linked with each other. To continue with the Wikipedia example, let’s say you look up apples. In the apples article you may have a sub article called “apple juice“. It would then be linked the sub article. Jumping from one idea to a related one is extremely simple. The same applies with wikiPad. If you have a ideas on how to develop your next application, within this section you may have sub sections such as “user system”, “post system”, etc. From there you can continue to build your linked database of thoughts. When you create new ideas (ie: a new application) you can always reuse old concepts like the user system and so on.

To give you a non-programming example, let’s take a field of study. Philosophy, since this is currently what I am studying. I can make documents for notes on the books I read, papers I write, etc. However, the idea that I can link notes, common ideas, and concepts together makes it much easier for me to find what I’m looking for when I look back at my notes.

The best way to see if the software is for you is to try it out. It is free and open source and you can download it off their homepage. If you’re using Linux, you can follow these instructions on how to install it, or simply use their windows version under Wine until they release linux binaries. The learning curve isn’t too difficult, but if you haven’t worked with any wiki software then it may take you a while to get used to wiki formatting.

I’ve finally reskinned Ubuntu using a GTK theme from Ubuntu-Art.org. The skin is called Shiki-Colors and it’s a mix of the dark and light themes. I’ve also installed the Gnome-Colors Icons to spice up the look. Installing the theme was pretty easy, but it wasn’t without problems. After applying the new theme, I noticed borders on every division within a window, but after apply the following comment, the theme is working correctly.

This is not a theme problem, it’s a user/root permissions problem. It will happen to any theme/icons you download from the internet and install through the appearance preferences.

To fix this, there are two solutions:
-When installing a theme/icon set, install to usr/share/themes or usr/share/icons as root user, respectively.

- Or for an easier solution, run the following commands in a terminal:
sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root
sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root

And now for some screenshots of this sexy theme.