Testing, Java & Family There's been so much going on in the past month. No time to blog! I have to make time. Leaving for Montreal in about 1 hour, and I am waiting for laundry to finish packing. Having a coffee, and decided now was the time.

The planet foods project is well underway now. Another project utilizing the pantheon framework YAY. Check out http://www.pantheoncms.org for more! ;) We are going ahead with the XP (eXtreme Programming) methods. So we need to test test test! One of the first things I did was create a test harness for PHP. spent a couple of days (nights actually), and hammered out a couple of different classes to aid us. The testing offers multiple output (console ... colorized via PEAR classes, HTML, real time, and export to files). I still have to actually "write" the file export, but the hooks are there. Using it is as simple as writing one PHP function for a test, and creating the test object. The adding to the test factory. Neato! I was happy with the short time span I worked with.

Recently I was having troubles with my PC at home. I thought it might have been time for a new one, because a couple of times it made some Handel like beeps and would just randomly shut off. So I thought at first. Until I started running gkrelim again, and noticed when I would play online poker that my CPU would spike to 100% after a couple of minutes of playing. I discovered that there is some bug in the java app from one of the poker sites I play on that obviously does not seem to like my java implementation. I have Suns 1.5. I decided to try a new one, and jumped to 1.6 with the same results. On a whim I tracked down a copy of blackdown's 1.4 (they cease to exist now). To my surprise the 1.4 JVM worked without killing my computer. Neat. So I now have 3 versions of java installed, and konqi is using 1.4, Firefox is on 1.5, and 1.6 is just idle.

My sister was in town for a visit last month as well. Her and Dolly Van came and stayed with me. We went out, visited, they visited friends. They managed to break _both_ of their digital cameras. Never could find the coffee shop they wanted to go to, we had eats and fun. They didn't seem to care much for the football, but come on the Riders were in the western final. Which they won ... and then proceeded to win the Grey Cup the weekend after (Sub Party ... mmmmm ... fat). She is also going to still be in MJ for Christmas (although her 5 AM Xmas day flight is cutting it close!). So I am planning a trip back to the motherland for the holidays.

I have so much more I could talk about, but my ride is here in 50 mins, and I need to get ready. ciao for now, and the Montreal stories will be forthcoming!  ¶ 10:30:00 PM 0 comments

  Laptop? Testing & Secret Diaries So due to some circumstances beyond my control, my sister arrived back home in MJ to have no internet, and more importantly no computer for said lack of internet. :S So AJ let me have a laptop to send to her for a bit. Kris had to set it up, and couriered it overnight. To bad they could never get it working. Not network cards recognized (even with the included drivers installed first). I even had them send the windows disc, and re-install. No dice. It was super frustrating, as I can't trouble shoot a windows problem over the phone. Actually I would probably be no good having the computer in front of me either. The entire thing bothers me to no end, and the parties have since given up, and my sister has made other arrangements. My good intentions were fraught with obstacles. I feel bad ... I did what I could.

With the PF project moving along, and another new developer reading and waiting to get going, we kinda of need to get some of the base lego blocks in place. I have the base site setup, and working on the test machine. I did a walk through with the new guy, and he's reading through code, and the project development guide (Oh yeah ... I had to write that too ;)).

With eXtreme programming being the way to go, we kind of need a testing harness before we can go to work. So I spent a night working on a new simple unit testing mechanism. I wrote a Test class, and a TestFactory to handle the multiple test, and test groupings. You can register dependent classes, run your output directly to console (colorized via Console/Color.php), directly to a browser, or to flat HTML / Text files (which I'm not quite done yet ... a few lines of fopen / fwrite and it will be all done. The point to that is night runs of the tests, and archived for us.

Overall I am quite happy with how it all worked out. Sure it could be way better, but I'm not into writing the _best_ PHP unit testing project in history. This makes it simple enough to write a single function performing the test, and placing a few lines of code in the right test file for it to be run. Colorized output in many forms, and historical data. Good enough for me.

Amidst all that coding I discovered my new favorite TV show. "The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl". It is shown on ITV, but I am lucky enough to grab them from tvtorrents. I find it sexy, funny, and brilliant how you get wrapped into both the working girl persona "Belle", and the real person "Hannah". It's a struggle for anyone to separate their work life from their personal one, and it just goes to show how much your work affects your person, no matter how much you try to keep them distinct. It's only 8 episodes apparently, and I'm waiting for the final of 8 to be uploaded. Check it out if you get ITV  ¶ 10:08:00 PM 0 comments

  pantheon, pbuilder & halloween Nov 1 was a big day for the pantheon crew. We had a hack session, committed some patches, and reworked some features. We tagged and rolled the release, and announced it on the lists, and uploaded things to www.pantheoncms.org. It was an all around exceptional day. Aaron and I had a well deserved drink afterwards. We never did get a chance to discuss the roadmap for the next while. Next coffee session for sure.

So my latest PITA was more side effects of the dist-upgrade / PHP5 upgrade a few weeks back. I decided to keep the servers in tandem, and upgrade the mail (Kolab) server as well. I have Horde running for webmail installed on the system outside of kolab/openpkg. So the dist-upgrade went fine, but the corporate webmail was borked. You could login, but the sidebar frame was completely blank. I finally had some tiem to start looking at it. Checked all the standard things in php.ini settings. I delved into debuggin Horde itself, and quickly gave up after one fix was followed by another problem.

I was running an older stable version of horde packages, and decided to try a newer version(s). I gave a whack with the horde "groupware" version, and gave up after screwing with it for a couple of hours. I seemed to be caught in the "neverland" of versioning problems. I had Kolab 2.x, with PHP4 + Horde that worked, and the upgrade forced to PHP5 which broke horde, and no PHP4 is available in feisty. Kolab 2.2 is not ready with horde integration yet, and I needed to make this work ... like now. I decided to try and find a way to install PHP4 on feisty. I found someone who rolled his own debs, and placed them in a repository. It was a really bad connection, so it took forever ... oh yeah ... now is when I find them incompatable because I forgot these are 64 bit boxes, not 32. meh.

Here is where pbuilder comes in. It was time for me to build my own debs from source. So it took me a while to figure out how to get it rolling, and then use the "universe" repositories, and get the dependencies all squared away. I finally got PHP4 to build, and created a local apt repository. apt-get install away, and bingo ... horde is working again. what a workout!

It was just recently Halloween. I did not really partake, as the last few weeks have been crazy so I stayed in. I've got so many things on the go that I just really don't have the energy or time to socialize right now. My day in the sun will come though. My sister is back in MJ from Nova Scotia. My brother moved out taking his computer right before she moved home, so I acquired a laptop, and with Kris' help sent it to her by courier. She'll be looking for work, and hopefully getting up here to visit me before she goes back down east.  ¶ 1:38:00 AM 0 comments