PayPal opened in South Africa just recently, however one of the flaws is that you are unable to sell in ZAR (South African local currency), you have to sell in Dollars. I looked for alternative systems, however none were as easy to use as PayPal. So I spoke to a few friends, and one of them directed me to this code which I edited a bit to work.

You can insert the ZAR rate and use the exchange rate server to return the USD rate.

Introducing the Classic Blend Framework.

Both myself and the other developer (a good friend of mine – Jonathan Wagener – http://www.espresso-online.info) have worked with many other frameworks over the many years that we have been developing. What we have done is committed to developing one of the easiest frameworks to use – both for ourselves and for anyone else – for free.

What have we done so far?

• Database Class: We have created a powerful database class which handles all database queries – from one -> x number of database connections
• Module Class: This powerful class allows the framework to be easily extended for any purpose. Third party developers will be able to create and edit their own modules and optionally make it a public module which will become available to any other developer in the Classic Blend community.
• Theme Class: This is possibly one of my favorite aspects of the framework. It allows for the development of themes for the system to run. However, it also makes use of the “Smarty” template’s engine (however is heavily edited), and allows for the assigning of theme variables from anywhere in the entire framework!

That’s it for now - take a look of the first screen-shot the public has seen!

“The past is behind us, what has been, now is gone, but right now is with us and we must carry on, but when regret closes in, I dont think what might of been, I think grace and I know whatever comes, he’ll make a way! This time, this is what counts, this is what our lives are about, this time..”

and..

“It’s the heart afraid of breaking, That never learns to dance, It’s the dream afraid of waking, That never takes the chance, It’s the one who won’t be taken, Who cannot seem to give, And the soul afraid of dying, That never learns to live..”

and…

“What the hell were we thinking, Were we thinking at all, What the hell did we believe we’d achieve, We stood there with our hearts exposed,  As the others said I told you so, What the hell, What the hell…”

and..

“Close your eyes and they’ll all be gone, They can scream and shout that they’ve been sold out, But it paid for the cloud that we’re dancing on. So shine on. Just shine on! With your smile just as bright as the sun. ’Cause they’re all just slaves to the gods they made, But you and I just shone. Just shone.”

So those are just a few for now that I have enjoyed.

Noel Harrison

So today I was sitting and thinking how much I love music, my first idea was to blog the lyrics – but that was not the ideal for me. So the solutions to this is to release an article “Music I Like” once a week with one of my favorite songs accompanied by a video / slide show of images from the week.

The first one can be seen below. If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate them.

Noel Harrison

Hello Readers,

Just a quick notice, noelharrison.net will be having a new guest writer, Jonathan Wagener. He will be writing about PHP, MySQL and other programming technologies which are being used on the internet. He is a really close friend of mine and he has alot of knowledge in this field.

Jonathan and I intend on doing a PHP / technology based podcast series in the near future, so keep an eye out for that. I hope that you enjoy his writing and feel free to contact me if you feel you could be a positive contribution to this blog.

Kind Regards,

Noel Harrison

Just a quick notice, Simon Davo has asked to be a guest blogger on noelharrison.net. He will be writing small articles on Ireland in order to gain awareness for the country and its events. This will be published on a weekly basis.

We look forward to reading some new content on noelharrison.net and hopefully also learning something new about the beautiful country – Ireland.

Should anyone else be interested in taking up a guest writers role at noelharrison.net, please feel free to contact us by utilising the contact form on the contact page.

Regards,

Noel Harrison

If you are looking for an article that will bash Windows, this is not the article you are looking for and also if you dont have much time, I can sum my experience of Windows with a single word – Wow! I am a very strong “follower” of Apple and have removed Windows and PC’s from my life in general. However, I was interested in seeing what all the talk about Windows 7 was about. A good friend of mine (he is sold of Windows) convinced me to install it as my main operating system on my designers computer, which I let him do.

Although it is still in Beta, it has proven to be brilliant in every aspect of the word. In general it has the same clean and dynamic looks as Vista, but it is better. They have added many minor tweaks which makes it easier to make use of. One of the issues for me at first was the ugly start bar, but now that I am using it, it aint ugly anymore. When you delve deeper you also realise how much work they have put into something as simple as the start bar.

An application when running is displayed in a small square along the start bar. When moused over, all the active open windows running with the program show in a small thumbnail above the icon. Also when mousing over, you will notice that it takes the most used color in the logo and makes it the highlighed icon color. See screenshot below;

The start menu is alot like Vista, but the main thing that is so wonderful about this one is that the shut down button is the first button – unlike Vista where you had to click and go into a small menu to shutdown. It is that kind of minor tweaking which makes it so much better in my opinion.

On a more intellectual note, Windows 7 is by far more stable than any other Windows OS that I have ever used (with Windows ME or Vista ranking as the worst). As far as software compatibility goes, Windows 7 runs like a charm. One of the huge put offs for me with Windows Vista was the fact that I could plug a memory stick in and it would not be able to locate the driver and therefore I could not use the memory stick. It was terrible, I could not use devices that I needed to do the work that I do.

The computer that I am running Windows 7 on was built to run Vista. It only had a gigabyte of ram and Vista was heavy on the system resources. Windows 7 on the otherhand starts quickly and runs fast in general and also shuts down very quickly in comparison to my experience with Vista on the machine.

They have built in many useful small things such as libraries. This makes it easy to share files with other Windows 7 users. The networking controls have been improved dramatically – one of those things that many Vista users hated about Vista.

In closing, it is the same beautiful look of Vista, but this time it is backed by the stability and speed of OSX. What do you think, have you tried it – what will you be willing to pay for it?

Noel Harrison