This post is a bit of a b*tch-fest, so please excuse me. I really do hate to be one of "those" guys who whines about something in Open Source without contributing directly to the project in question, but I just have to on this one.
As you can guess from the title, in project in question in PHP, and …
I was given an interesting task today. My boss wanted me to develop a script which could basically take a screen-shot of a website (as much of the website [vertically] as is reasonable) using only Bash and any tools readily available on Linux.
Before I proceed, you will need the following software …
Today, I discovered an interest quirk in PHP 5. I needed to set a single value based on various possible string values. For whatever reason, I decided a big set of "if/elseif" statements wouldn't do, and a switch would be overkill for simply setting a single value. What I tried to do was use in inli…
Today, I started writing a Bash script which installed a bunch of software, and needed to create a new script which the user could execute. I wanted this installer to be a single file, so the question arose how to create a new script?
I really didn't want to 'echo' a bunch of lines piped into a test…
It amazes me that in this day and age the question of whether to comment your code is still being raised. This issue is such a no-brainer, I fail to see how so many developers can miss the importance of well commented code.
I've heard all the arguments, ranging from "it takes too much time" to "your…
For my next reflection on impressions with Grails, I'm going to look at scripts (in the context of little utility scripts to simplify common complex tasks).
For this entry, I will compare Grails' "gant" scripts with Ruby "rake" scripts.
First up, namespacing is very different between the two. Gant u…
I've become a little disillustion with all the various agile frameworks out there.
At first, I had high hopes for Ruby on Rails, but after working on it for a year and a half, I decided that Ruby is a terrible language, and Rails is an aweful framework built on top of a terrible language.
Naturally,…
After working with Grails a bit more after my original post, I've come across some rather annoying issues.
First up is an issue with the domain classes. I've noticed that if you have constraints defined which are invalid or whose value is incorrect, no error is reported. Oddly enough, what does occu…
After much inkering to get my software up and running (after leaving BraveNet), I have finally been able to get a demonstration on my file uploader applet working.
I'm still working on implementing Pack200 compression (which should significantly improve download speed), so at the moment it's a littl…
For a while now, I've been browsing freelance programming sites, looking to make a little money. Today, on "GetAFreelance.com", I came across one particular person posting up jobs.
Nothing particularly interesting there.
However, a quick glance at the jobs this person is posting and you begin to fee…
I learned today of Google's new programming language, named "Go". Over the next few days, I will be delving into this interesting looking language (which by outward appearances seems to inherit some of the basic structure and syntax of the C/C++/Java family of languages) and will be giving my opinio…
I have finally released the source code for my "ClassFactory" library on Sourceforge.
This library is heavily used in my JavaStubs testing framework to dynamically manipulate classes during runtime to enable partial/complete class stubbing/mocking.
As with all my projects, this is released under GPL…
Everyone knows the most common web-capable languages - BASIC (from ASP), PHP, Ruby, Java, Groovy, Python, Perl (by "web-capable" I mean there is a runtime/framework to allow using said language).
I worked for a company which still used FoxPro for many of their web sites.
I was a tad surprised to see…
I've seen a few projects rearing up to try to port Ruby to JavaScript (such as HotRuby). This is all entertaining and everything, but here's a few problems as I see it:
A while back I started a little project to enable scripting in a browser in languages other than JavaScript. Let's be honest - JavaScript is horrible. The project was inspired by several others I came across, and like those projects I opted for a Java Applet which would facilitate communication betw…
Okay, I know pundits out there will point at the "productivity" gains of Agile programming (see my blog post on Productivity vs. Effectiveness to see why I feel this is a farce), but I thought I'd go ahead and share a fun Dilbert cartoon on the topic:
Often I read on blogs and such of how one cannot call a given programming language slow - that's it's the individual implementation of the language or a runtime which is to blame. Here is an example of such a post.
I disagree.
If we look at core language specifications, it become abundantly clear th…
Too often I am faced with examples of poor embedding of Java Applets into a website. It's peculiar to see, because people seem to put in plenty of effort to identify and insert Flash, but nobody seems to have put in that much effort for Java.
This compounds the problems many places see - I have seen…
For a project I was working on, I wanted the ability to do simple "include"-type instructions in order to spread my code across multiple JavaScript files without the necessity for a developer to manually type out <script> tags to include them all. I came across several posts which used the browser's…
As anyone with eyes and ears knows by now, iPhone is becoming all the rage. Yet there are some of us who refuse to get caught up in the hype. So that is the problem?
Well, for me, it's a case of being locked in. iPhone offers 2 ways of developing application - HTML 2.0 or Objective-C. The first choi…
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