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Using Zend_Test for Web Services
13 August 2009
Read moreRecently I had cause to develop a web service and so I wrote some tests to go along with it - or I was about to. When I looked at the asserts available in Zend_Test, they were all geared towards HTML/CSS output - but we can test just as effectively on …
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The Writing on the Wall
12 August 2009
Read moreI'm currently redecorating in the house and have moved my office up to the top floor temporarily - I like it up here but its a flight of stairs to the bathroom, two to answer the door and three to get a cup of coffee and I also have no wired …
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Customising Screen-Profile Files
11 August 2009
Read moreI wrote a while ago about the new version of screen in Ubuntu Jaunty. Screen is an application which lets you run lots of tabs inside one terminal window, then disconnect from screen and reconnect again later. You can turn on and off a whole bunch of notifications which appear …
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Upgrading Subversion Server to 1.5
06 August 2009
Read moreI'm really excited about the magic merging features in the newer subversion versions at 1.5 and later. I'm still figuring out which are actually useful, more on those another day, but I wanted to mention something I ran into when upgrading my server.
Some time ago I upgraded the …
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5 Ways to Make Friends at a Technical Conference
03 August 2009
Read moreThese are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.
Take an extension cable
Conferences are notorious for having too few and too short power leads, and everyone needs to recharge laptops, especially in hands-on sessions like tutorial day. Having an extension cable will …
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PHP 5.3 Feature: Late Static Binding
29 July 2009
Read moreWith the release of PHP 5.3 comes the functionality "late static binding", a feature which I've been impatient to see for quite some time! This is something a lot of developers have been puzzled by in earlier versions of PHP 5, probably without being aware it had a name …
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PHPUnit with Zend_Controller_Action_Helper
23 July 2009
Read moreI'm currently working on a REST service built in Zend Framework and I ran into problems very quickly - when I tried to write the first unit test for the first action in fact! PHPUnit was just dying when I asked it to dispatch() any URL which didn't return HTML, it …
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Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Aspire One
21 July 2009
Read moreA while ago, actually quite a while ago in May, I put the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope onto my lovely blue Acer Aspire One netbook.
The way this works is that on another machine (or I guess on an existing OS on the netbook …
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Whose Responsibility is Your Career?
20 July 2009
Read moreI guess we've all seen this geek witticism, its a little piece of the fabric of the culture. Personally I split people into two groups along other lines: those that look out for their own professional interests, and those who don't.
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PUTting data fields with PHP cURL
17 July 2009
Read moreThis is a little post about how to PUT multiple data fields using the PHP cURL extension. Why I wanted to do this in the first place is beyond the scope of this post, since its quite a long story. The curl command line allows data fields to be sent …
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New Bedroom Curtains
13 July 2009
Read moreThis weekend I took some time to make some curtains for the bedroom. Since we bought the house we've had some rather unattractive and slightly broken metal blinds. The room was otherwise OK though and we just kind of moved into it and worked on the rest of the house …
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Presenting with a Netbook
09 July 2009
Read moreI've been giving a few talks in the last few months and I'm increasingly realising that although I love my thinkpad, its overkill for anything where I don't really need the hardware, or where I don't want to be carrying a full-size laptop all day. So I'm increasingly taking just …