be good

less evil is a proper wish
to be made by oh so many
but what they are prepared to give
is seldom worth a penny

For what? To stand, to fight, to live
in a period of upheaval
for one thing we cannot forgive:
being passive, by not being evil

First Piins OS release: Smarty & I18N

Yipiiieh, here we go. Our first public Piins open source release (MIT license). We've decided to release Smarty plugins that make life with Smarty and i18n easy (well, at least as easy as I18N can be per se).

Wolfram Schlich posted a nice overview of best practices to internationalize Smarty templates. His overview can be read in this mailinglist archive.

Unfortunately none of the provided best practices seemed to be compliant to the standard GNU i18n library gettext, as employed in many applications. Hence we thought about implementing our own, which turned out to be both - incredibly easy and very handy.

We would like to share this library with you including a little tutorial how to use it. The files for the i18n & smarty tutorial can be downloaded as well.

We've also hosted it on Google code as the Google code piins-smarty project.

Help us making the library better by posting the bugs you found :) ah and by the way, there are many more libraries to come, such as:

• php-DAL: data access layer for PHP and MySQL, built on PDO. Allows stored procedure call with easy access
• php-DAL-generator: auto generate the DAL (data access layer) for your MySQL database (including stored procedures).
• php-MVC: a very lightweight MVC framework for PHP with complete i18n/L10n support
• .NET enterprise libraries compiled for Mono on Unix systems
• and much much more...
  

Enjoy & stay tuned!

Piins @ Minibar - 28th of March

As many of you have read in our last post, Piins is still in 'stealth-mode'. We've received quite some e-mails regarding this and whether we can disclose anything yet. Please bare with us some more weeks. Be assured, no one except the team and our investors know what it is about yet, so it is just fair not to disclose to some individuals and not some others.

For everyone who might care (and even for those who don't), we want to announce, that we're leaving our strict 'stealth-mode' in the next Minibar, where Christian, the organizer, secured one of the much sought-after presentation slots for Piins. We'd be very happy if you could mark the 28th of March red in your calendar. Sign up at the Meetup site, still room for about 30 people. It's worth it...

We're going to distribute 100 MOO minicards with unique invitation-codes on them for our hopefully very dedicated first-ever user group. These will be the only ones to see the interiors of Piins for about another month until we're opening to a wider audience, well presumably the whole OpenID community at least.

In case you can't make it, don't worry - we're going to post at least some pictures of the event on this blog. So although, we're very sorry, that we didn't meet you personally at least you can see us - for whatever that's worth.

See you there...!

Further Links: Minibar Location (GoogleMaps)