I've been working with eZ Publish CMS by eZ Systems since 2008 when I joined the Energy Saving Trust. Recently I've moved to work for the Financial Times as a CMS Developer still using eZ Publish.

Every year, eZ Systems is organising a summer and winter conference. The winter conference is more for the developers and the eZ Community, it's the opportunity to get updated on the evolution of eZ Publish and get some trainings and certifications for free. The other great advantage is meeting a bunch of great people from around the world working on this same open source Content Management System.

This year, the eZ Winter Conference is taking place in Nice, a very beautiful city in the south of France just by the sea. Luckily, my hotel room has been upgraded to a seaview one, I had a great sunset sight this morning, although I woke up a bit late :-P

Among other programs of this conference, there is the speed talk where a member of the community gets the opportunity to hold a small talk of few minutes on an eZ Publish subject of his/her choice. I've proposed myself for a talk on my YubiKey extension for eZ Publish.

I'm looking forward to learn more about what eZ Publish is preparing for us.

Time can be used to make money, money cannot be used to buy time. In London, you are wasting time so much because everything is far. I'm spending 3 hours a day in a train and much more because of signal failures, person under a train, trains not moving to even out gaps in the traffic or what ever excuse they have... "So you're screwed!" Want more money but don't have lot of time to make it... Grrrrr But I try to make use of these 3 hours a day commuting from and to work by doing some work such as filtering pre-editing photos, offline coding etc... But it's still not enough but it is also killing your health on the long run. What can you do? That's life. So lets just enjoy what we already have!

I went to the Ukulele Wednesdays this evening, a great bunch of Uke fans meeting up in the basement of the Royal George Pub on Tottenham Court Road. Jamming the evening away with Keira Knightley having few drinks on the table next to us! Hope she liked the jam ;-)

I've made some progress with the version 3 of my Online Lighting Diagram Creator, an online drag-and-drop tool for photographers allowing easy design of lighting diagrams. It took a while, I know, but this is a personal project and I've been pretty busy last year. But the first useable of v3 will be on production pretty soon with some cool features.

As I was trying to build an XML sitemap for the website I was wondering why it took so long to map this small site. The answer was the little calendar on the bottom of the right hand side menu in the blog section. It allows one to browse in the future and in the past even farther than the oldest blog post and would never stop...

So I copied extension/ezwebin/design/ezwebin/templates/parts/blog/calendar.tpl into extension/quochuy/design/ezwebin/templates/parts/blog/calendar.tpl to override the template and added some more logic code to not display the next button if next month is in the future and not to display the previous button if previous month is older than my oldest blog post.

It's now fixed. I've also added a rewrite rule in Apache to allow access to http://www.quoc-huy.com/sitemap.xml and have submitted the URL to the Google Webmaster Tools.

This year, my wife and I decided to stay at home and relax. After last year's issues with the snow at airports, we just wanted to avoid any new trouble and save money for future holidays. So yesterday evening we had our roast turkey with apple and thyme filling. We then just stayed in bed watching "The Weather Man" rented out from iTunes.

We have planned to visit Ron, our neighbour but as my wife is pretty ill with a bad cold, I went alone and kept him company with a nice piece of Panettone, playing a bit of the Ukulele to entertain ;-)

I hope you guys have had a very nice Christmas and are ready to party all night for the new year coming.

I've finally managed to migrate all the content from Joomla into eZ Publish, the old blog has been migrated, I've added an HTML5 streamable audio support to my eZ Publish installation but it needs some more debugging for other browsers than Safari.

I now need to tweak some more CSS settings.

Current features includes:

• podOmatic integration using eZ Publish's RSS auto-import feature
• customized eZFlow templates to animate the frontpage blocks for the homepage with eZJSCore and some jQuery codes.
• eZLightbox for the blog's embedded galleries.
• 'mytwitter' extension from my eZ Publish Workflow tutorial.
• HTML5 audio support, need some tweaks as MP3 support with HTML5 is not compatible with all browsers...
• Using eZ Publish blogging feature, but still thinking if I should use Blogspot to take advantage of the community...
• Twitter right hand side block from eZFlow 'feed reader' block item.
• Nginx in front of Apache to cache static content.

I've been sent a package containing a Sony Digital Frame. When switched on, the frame displayed a video inviting me and my photography blog readership to enter the Sony Photo Challenge, where you can weekly win a brand new Sony NEX-5 the world smallest interchangeable lens digital camera.

For more info head to my photography blog.

I've finally started to migrate my website from Joomla to eZ Publish. Joomla is a cool CMS for simple website but it is not robust enough for my needs. As being trained and certified as an eZ Publish developer, I've learned to appreciate the power of this advanced Content Management System coming from Norway.

The first step was to migrate the content, I've now only have to take care of the blog. The music section has been reviewed and I've done an integration of PodOmatic, a free podcast hosting service, using eZ Publish RSS auto-import feature and creating a new content class to auto-generate PodOmatic embedded player.

The eZ Flow extension was also very helpful and saved me hours of development on integrating my Twitter feeds.

I hope this will help boost my blogging frequency on this website.

One of my friends and bro' in France just got a wonderful news. When I was living in Montpellier (south of France). We use to be in the Vietnamese Student Association of the city and we would do some songs recording for fun. I did sing with him in a Vietnamese band playing for Vietnamese weddings. He is a very good musician, singer and wonderful music/lyrics composer. One of his songs had been heard by a famous Vietnamese singer who felt in love with it and asked anh Thắng" (litterally brother Thang) if he could sing it in his next album. What the hell! Of course he can! And so he did!! So here is a little extract of the song Tình Cuối Chân Trời (Love at the end of the horizon) thru the voice of Bằng Kiều (recording studio: Thúy Nga Paris).

Lyrics:

Chiều buông cho bóng đêm về trên phố không người qua

Mình anh cô đơn bên thềm trong nhớ nhung buồn tênh

Sao không  đến đây người, tình yêu em mơ mãi chân trời 

Có hay rằng anh vẫn chờ mong
 

Chưa gặp nhau một lần sao đã trao tình yêu 

Chỉ đã nghe tiếng em cười anh biết đã thầm yêu 

Tặng em khúc hát ân tình mà anh viêt trong những đêm trường

Hỡi em yêu xin hãy về đây

Vì mắt môi trái tim kia làm vấn vương tâm hồn anh 

Dù cách xa lòng anh chỉ trao về em, em hỡi 

Về với anh sống bên nhau mình sẽ yêu nhau từ đây 

Người dấu yêu đến bên anh để mãi yêu nhau trọn đời

To get more information about the author, search on Google

More songs from Bui Pham Thang may be coming... so Thúy Nga's fans, keep your ears open!"

Having few instruments at home and some microphone stands, I was wondering wether I can use them for y flashguns or not... The problem are the screws on mic stands are bigger than the ones for flasguns...  

Today I went on my daily visit to Strobist.com and read this article: DIY Ball-Bungee Speedlight Soft Box Mount". And suddenly it rang a bell in my head! EUREKA!

I have a Samson C03 microphone with its shock mount, a normal and a mini microphone stand. The idea is to use the mini (and eventually the normal one) to hold a flash gun.

 So I'm gonna use the idea of the Ball Bungee Speedlight Soft Box mount to mount my flash gun on any microphone stands using the Samson C03 shock mount.

 Step by step:

  - Picture 1: use one of the two rubber bands from the shock mount and attach them to three of the four its top bars.

  - Picture 2: at this point, one of the four bars is free, take the loop from the opposite bar and fix it around that free bar.

  - Picture 3: you should end up with a 4 branches star with a rectangle shape in the middle.

  - Picture 4: as we can see here, the rubber band is quite low, if you put the microphone now, the shock mount's frame can hide part of the flash screen.

  - Picture 5: thus we will lift the two branches of the star that are close to the mic stand (this is the way the rubber band should be fixed in normal usage).

  - Picture 6: screw the shock mount on the mic stand and insert the flashgun in the rectancle shape in the middle. Tada!

  - Picture 7: front view and flash on.

  - Picture 8: if you have a normal microphone stand, you can use it. Completely deployed and vertical, it can be around 2m high.