After a relaxing six month break it's back to the hustle and bustle of London city. As with all the best jobs I would have to kill you if I said what I was doing, but needless to say it will be most enjoyable. With a Costa Coffee in the office and Convent Garden just round the corner things can only be good. Looks like old blighty will have to put up with me for a few more years be before I can make good my escape from the british TAX system.

Tinbag.com has started to see the light of day in the wild-world we call the Web. So when Allen Stern from CenterNetworks contacted me for an interview I jumped at the chance. You can read the article titled an Interview with Richard Allinson, Tinbag at their fast moving news site.

I came across this on YouTube today and just had to share. It puts to video the journey from No Web to Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes. It's a true work of art.

I finally got around to finishing the explanation of the Design Pattern used in my PHP5 Framework CopperOnion. It's entitled A Structure for Flexible Data Retrieval and covers at a high level the main concepts used. Of course I have now started down the slipper slope of documentation, who knows where this madness will end!

Rapidly developing an application? Like the first pass will be perfect! You can have Rapid Prototyping followed by iterations or a long drawn out waterfall before fingers hit a keyboard, but the thought of rapidly developing a finished product doesn't still well with my intellect.

The time has come, CopperOnion reaches it's first mile stone. Pre-Alpha, the grave yard of open source. To celebrate it's first birthday I have created a CopperOnion powered website to drum up that all important interest. But the fun doesn't stop there, you would not believe the domain names I found!

Adobe have announced that they are releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization. The title might be a little melodramatic but does this announcement set the stage for a new age of openness in proprietary software?

If you are receiving emails from larpnation.com, please be assured they are not coming from this website. Larp Nation is a domain I registered and never used. The mails you are receiving are the result of a common tacit spammers employ, faking the source of their emails using randomly chosen domains. Unfortunately for me this time they have chosen a domain that points to my blog. Lets hope we one day find a solution for this plague of the internet.

With my framework CopperOnion getting closer to its first release I thought I would share with you some of the useful work practices it provides. Before we start, here is the current tag line to give you a flavor. "CopperOnion is a Prototypal styled PHP Framework for developing high load scalable web applications, designed and built from hands on experience, CopperOnion is a working concept in PHP application design."

The simple easy to use web based Help Desk that gives you the power to make money from your knowledge and expertise.

Startup stories have always held a great interest for me. So working on my first web based startup I spend a fair amount of time researching how others made theirs a success. I see it the same as code, when you have a new problem the best place to start is with how others solved it. Or more correctly where they went wrong. Learning from mistakes, either personal or distant, is the way to move forward. Iteration is the key to successful software and the same logic can be applied to business.

Finding a reliable source of free currency exchange rates is a simple task on todays internet, that is so long as you don't need it as a web service! I recently acquired the need to have up-to-date rates, I also acquired dismayed at the apparent lack of 'reliable' and 'free' data. After a long search I found just what I was looking for so I felt I should share to save others the pain.

As code is getting closer to completion I thought I'd give you all a little teaser as to the nature of my first startup.

I have been asked many a time over the course of the year 'what is the best way to learn how to program?'. Not an easy question to answer as the reason for wanting to becoming a programmer is more important. If the goal is large sums of cash then stop reading, property as a much easier and less risky route to riches. If you want to be in the Golden Ring of Yahoo, Google or Microsoft then you better be good, at everything!

While benchmarking code for CopperOnion I discovered that several routines seemed to run slower than I was expecting. On further investigation I noticed they all used recursion, a function calling it's self, as part of their functionality. So in a quest to find an efficient looping mechanism I created the following comparison test.

Well kinda, here in the quiet of Nova Scotia I have found the time to work on ideas with the upmost of concentration. With my new found focus I have begun work on my fledgling Prototypal PHP5 Framework. It's a collection of methods, concepts and lessons in how to create an idilic framework for every day use. Coding it is easy, the hard part is trying to explain how it works!

A Manager has three major roles Planner, Provider and Protector as described in this article What Makes a Great Manager by Gerard M Blair. There has been a lot of research into management solutions over the years and many a person has built a successful career on the principles discovered. So not whishing to reinvent the wheel I use these very same principles in my code. My reasoning for this is that the Object Orientated practice of encapsulating the data access methods in an Object is just not cricket.

Amazon really has their purchasing relationship down to fine art. I've been buying books from them on and off over the last few years and today was the first time I really noticed there sales tactic. Oddly enough the Amazon sales process started when I was near a Bookstore, I was not even in it the store and not purposely looking to buy a book. But as I was there I went to see if they had a copy of The Laws of Simplicity by John Meada.

It's funny now things that are meant to be find a way of getting to the mainstream. Last year I decided that I would give LISP a spin, for educational purposes, after remembering this snippet from Eric Raymond, "LISP is worth learning for a different reason - the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot."

Active Record came to the mainstream when Ruby on Rails used the pattern to great success. Its excellent thinking in principle but my thoughts on the subject revolve around processing time. Look at how the average Active Record pattern is implemented and you'll see what I mean. There's a reasonable sum of code involved in turning an Object into an SQL statement, and more code means more overhead.

With the vision that is Joomla 1.5 just around the corner everyone is asking what is going to change? The official party-line is that 1.5 is not an upgrade but a migration. This is a sign that things have changed for the better, outdated code has been removed and replaced with high performance chrome plated parts, the rusty underbelly is cleaned and primed for racing.

The nature of Open Source Software means that it is free of cost for a user. The governing problem is that it is not free for the developer. There is a considerable amount of time and effort devoted to creating these works, and as most Open Source developers will tell you a donation button is not as attractive to the user as it is to the developer. So how do you overcome the problem of wanting to create free software for a living?

When you think of making a pretty penny on the Internet you think you need that one big idea, your own eBay or Google. I have a different approach, one of lots of small ideas. A handful of simple, easy to use and easy to maintain applications that fill the needs of the few.

Everyone has an idea for a Tech Startup, whether they know it or not. The trick is to recognize them as being ideas and then deciding if you can make that idea generate revenue. What you really need more than an idea is an 'Idea Approval Formula', a system that you put an idea through to decide if you can execute on it successfully. This is the formula I decided upon, my repeat as necessary treatment.