Reading this blog post entitled, “3 reasons to stay in a big company“, I can’t help but comment about some of the points the author made. A brief background first, i’ve worked with some big companies in the past, but all have left a bad taste in my mouth for reasons I will point out later on. I will be talking about my experiences which led me to believe that big companies aren’t all its crack up to be.
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Been struggling to get Redmine working with Mongrel instead of using Apache + FastCGI (been using this setup for while till this defect kept on bugging me and my teammates: http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/5864), when the cause was simply a bug with cpanel’s generated .htaccess file for the subdomain internal proxy redirect.
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I’ve been working on a project, which started on 1.2.7, for almost 6 months now and have been upgrading it religiously along the 1.2.x branch which stopped at 1.2.10. We’re currently entering the testing stage, and being as curious as I am opted to create a 1.4 branch from the current trunk and started the upgrade process while merging fixes from the trunk as fixes come in. We’re using the PEAR-based approach which allows us to quickly upgrade the base installation as soon as a new release comes in. Although i’m planning to migrate it to the subversion approach soon, but thats another blog post.
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Can anybody recommend a good SyntaxHighlighter for Wordpress? I’ve been using SyntaxHighlighter Plus for over 1year already, and its been always giving me headaches on character escaping with html/php codes. Now its been refusing to cooperate with indenting Java codes.
Finally bought a smartphone, first time to have one actually. My former phone is a Sony Ericsson K810i, used it for around 2 years plus plus. Very sturdy phone but the mediocre support for connectivity is really hurting me since I need a good 3g connection for my mobile office. Initially was planning to buy an iphone 3gs but got really disappointed by the bad battery life, then decided to go for a blackberry bold, but my provider screwed me on that one. So upon hearing about the Nokia N97 (especially the very cool 32gb of internal memory which is expandable upto 48gb), I decided to jump back to the Nokia bandwagon after being away for such a very long time. Credit goes to Sony Ericsson for not releasing any good smartphone (the xperia x1 sucks really bad).
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Been giving this alot of thought lately. What to use for my next project. Ever since symfony 1.2’s move to Propel 1.3, the major argument of speed against Propel has been solved with its migration out of creole and into PDO. So speed is definitely at par with Doctrine, but the curious side of me wishes to delve into something new to mix things up a bit.
What to use? Doctrine or Propel?
Unit testing is tedious, but it has saved my bacon so many times already that even though it eats my time I still religiously create unit test cases for every important business logic use cases. I’ve been using Spring’s integration with JUnit and its very cool transaction support for test cases. Unfortunately with this approach, I have to craft test data to test every single code path for complex business logics. Although the setup, tearDown and rollback upon completion of the test case is handy, I still have to carefully craft the data.
Enter EasyMock, I know i’m late in the game with mock objects, but in the quest to meet deadlines and still have close to 100% test coverage (well I try to anyway), I haven’t had the time to actually check out what’s new in the TDD world.
At its most basic level, it allows you to record and replay the expected method calls and return values for methods that are being used by the object/method that you are currently testing. Aside from mocking interface classes you can also partially mock concrete classes (meaning mock only selected methods) using EasyMock’s Class Extension. With this, you have fine grain control on how each and every test case will behave.
Check it out at http://www.easymock.org
I’ll post a tutorial in my next blog post. There’s so much stuff in there that I haven’t used that I’ll have to start a new tutorial series just to cover this very cool mock framework.
Just upgraded my Macbook Pro (3,1) to Snow Leopard and the increase in speed and responsiveness of the system is immediately apparent. While everything seems to be working fine, two of my work-related softwares are broken. One is Macports, the fix is quite easy, just an upgrade to the new Macports version and its good to go. The other one is Eclipse Galileo.
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I was initially skeptical about these numerous form frameworks that are coming out, I would initially opt to create forms and validations the old fashion way, but after giving symfony forms a shot; I can honestly say i’m converted! Lets start the tutorial by creating a basic registration form with a captcha. I would assume you know the basics of symfony if not go to their website (http://www.symfony-project.org) and check out their tutorial.
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Just discovered a quick way to do a screenshot based on a url
They even have a cool and easy to use api!
