Entries by Mike Lively

As some of you know I am currently working on a project to allow Simple Test to be Apache-Test compliant. The process to take in doing so is to enable Simple Test to produce TAP compliant output. To do so obviously requires a healthy knowledge of the different aspects of the TAP protocol. The best way for me to get a grasp of something is of course to write about it. I gleaned pretty much all of this information from CPAN's TAP format documentation.

lad to Just a quick note I thought I would drop to anybody who is having this error popup when trying to compile PHP:

If you want to fix that error all you really need to do is go back into your source tree for libmcrypt. and execute the following commands:

cd libmcrypt-2.5.7
cd libltdl
./configure
--enable-ltdl-install
make
make install

turns out that FreeBSD porting process doesn't do this for you. I also am hearing word that not many if any of the automated packaging systems do this. So, hopefully I saved somebody out there a headache

I told Marcus Baker a couple of weeks ago that I would like to lend a hand in figuring out the best way to get SimpleTest working with Apache-Test. I actually was able to put quite a bit of time into this today and have achieved some results finally. Now, these results are far from a solution. All I have managed to do thus far really is to understand enough about the inner workings of Apache-Test so I can actually get a "self-created" test working inside of the Apache-Test environment.

It looks as though Macromedia is about to be gobbled up. Good news is that it's not Microsoft doing it (thank god.) It sounds like Adobe's aquisition will be completed by this fall.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153750,00.html

I am not really sure what I think about this. I have been drifting away from macromedia products for some time now due to the fact that I am about 95% programmer, 5% designer. I am just more content using programming tools like Zend Studio for my design work then I would be using tools like dreamweaver for my programming. I do however enjoy playing with Flash and Fireworks. In the whole merger process, here is what I hope happens.

In my perfect world Adobe will pretty much take the interface and the concept behind the interface that macromedia uses for all of its products and put in the functionality of their programs. I am a big fan of the functionality of alot of Adobe's stuff, I just hate how slow and cumbersome it can be to use.

I hope they just leave flash alone. It really does not need any more major overhauls. Maybe a few small upgrades, but I would hate to see them ruin the direction actionscript has taken. In my opinion the interface for that program works quite well too.

I also hope they continue moving along with dreamweaver and just ditch go live! As long as whatever they end up doing with design software, so long as it is mostly standards compliant I will be happy.

In either case, the way I see is this could either be a really good thing.....or a really bad thing. Only time will tell.

I'm done with almost all of my major projects at work, so now I get to move on to my own personal wish list.

1. Redesigning my site
2. Gettin up a couple of more 'general' blog to post my nonsense in.
3. Writing an article about the Unit of Work pattern.
4. Getting PHP4 and 5 to run as parrallel apache modules on a linux server.

So for those that have stopped visiting cause I haven't put anything new on in a few weeks. Do come back soon. I hopefully will have all manner of useful things flowing out of my fingers again.

Heh, I'm probably going to get lambasted for this...but I'm going to step out and say dreamweaver templates suck! Now don't get me wrong, they are very handy and they do limit the amount of time it take to make sitewide changes to global elements...but when you have a large site, they are just plain annoying. For instance, I now get to spend about 1 hour downloading pages of the site just so I can make 1 little navigation change. Then I get to spend another hour uploading them. Chances are my connection will be dropped at least twice so I will have to baby sit the stupid download/upload process.

Life would be so much easier if we just used a severside templating solution. You know, macromedia would make so many people happy (specifically programmers) if they just gave us a perl script that would update all files using a template in a site on the server. It would also save lots and lots of otherwise waisted bandwidth.

I was doing my daily browsing of the sitepoint forums and was visiting a topic we have started regarding Hibernate and OQL. One of the posts in that topic said pretty much the following:



Now I don't exactly know what the "PHP" way is. But a statement like this makes ABSOLUTELY no sense to me. I decided against posting my thoughts at sitepoint as this would undoubtedly ruin an otherwise informative thread.

Now thankfully I was able to get a better idea of where this guy was coming from since he posted a comment at the following blog post:

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/14-ReflectionClasshasMethod.html.

Read on....

Zend just recently released a beta version of Zend studio 4.0. It boasts of Database support, Improved PHPDoc and PHPDocumentor support, a code snippet library, and few other things. If they finally recognize the clone keyword then I'll be happy . In any case I went ahead and downloaded it and will be doing a pretty thorough evaluation of it be the end of the week. Stay tuned and you can see my opinion. (For what it's worth)

Oh, and here's a link to it: http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-studio/beta.php

I just happened upon this story. Looks like google hired the lead firefox engineer. They also were known to have recently hired several IE developers and have secured the domain gbrowser.com. What do you all think Google is up to? Could it be that Firefox is going to fork into a browser that has large corporate browsing???

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=7422857

I harbor no real ill will towards the French, but you have to admit, this is funny:

Go to google
Type in "French Military Victories" (without the quotes)
Click the "I Feel Lucky" button
If you are particularly adventurous click on the next link too

Now, since I went ahead and made fun of the French, I welcome the french to make fun of me....it's only right.

Well, I went ahead and did the manual installation of Propel, Creole, and Phing. It worked like a charm. I did even more reading into the pear and found out that I was having some wierd confilicts with paths in phing that I didn't know about. If I had better knowledge of how to use phing I never would have had that problem. The manual installation is what actually showed me how to do the pear install right. So, now I get to move on with my next project using propel. I'll let you know how it turns out.

After reading several posts on sitepoint about how great propel is and how I should really give it a try I decided to give er a go. Results of the attempted install below.

This entry was spawned by a post in sitepoint's forums about benchmarking. It reminded me of what a jaded view many programmers have about quick and dirty benchmarking options. Most people make use of microtime()/time() functions, which at the surface makes sense. However, I never like to look at things on the surface, so I would like to dig a little deeper and show everyone a unix/linux alternative to the standard microtime() bench mark.

Read on!

Below you will find a little 'bit' that I was about to put into a forum post. I then decided it was off topic from the question I was asked. There was lots of good info that I didn't want to forget I said though, so I am going to keep it here for posterity's sake. Enjoy! -MikeL

To find the best way to do something there are many issues you have to deal with. I like to divide the issues into three seperate categories: delivery of functionality, efficiency of code, and ease of implementation.

I have spent the last week or so trying to get an old computer of my parent's fixed so data can be transferred off of it onto a little USB memory key so they can get it onto my mom's shiny new dell laptop.

I thought it would be a sinch, I found what I figured were the correct drivers to get that little memory key kicking on windows 98. Well I installed them and sure enough, the key still didn't work. After cleaning off a multitude of spy-ware and viruses I decided to dig a bit further into why the key wasn't working and here is what I found.