stm’s page

I purchased an iPhone recently and after many struggles and much cursing I’ve managed to get it activated. Aside from Apple’s sorry support of alternative desktops and ridiculous ringtone expectations it is a pretty cool piece of tech. I’ve created the following ringtones for myself and thought I would share them with anyone who has a phone that can set ringtones for their contacts. Feel free to use either one for me.

These are in 16bit wav format so you can convert them to whatever your phone uses.

I ran across a new project for PHP this last week called PHPSpec. I’ve been using Test-Driven-Design for a little while now, but I still had been struggling conceptually with how much effort I should be putting into my UnitTests — The Behaviour-Driven-Development facilitated by PHPSpec helped to clarify the concept for me. The main difference that helped clarify it for me was that BDD takes the approach that the Specs (similar to unit tests in TDD) are meant to demonstrate how the functionality is used. Every developer who’s gone into a system or framework to attempt to use it always looks for some kind of example. No matter how good the documentation for something is, a good example always provides more information. PHPSpec allows you to write out all the use cases for your functionality and then write a clear statement of what the expected outcome from the action was. This is very similar to what unit tests in TDD do, but the emphasis on TDD is more from the testing angle than the using angle. Oh, and PHPSpec spec(x)->is->equalTo(y) make it clearer what you are attempting to verify than the TDD assert->equal(x,y).

I got a promotion at work this week. I am now the Manager of Development for Stream Energy. I’m in charge of all of our PHP and Flex developers now. It is pretty exciting. We have a lot of interesting projects going on currently and I’m really looking forward to helping get them done.

Happy New Year!

We had a great time at our New Year’s party this year. Lots of friends and lots of Rock Band. Larry took some great photos, and even featured me on his new website, DailyFaithCaptures.com.

In my php news, I’ve finally gotten the new chachradio code up for public consumption on my svn server. To get a copy of the newest development code with
svn checkout http://www.chach-house.net/svn/chachradio/trunk chachradio
There is not a lot of installation help at this point, but I’ll focus on that once I get some more basic functionality built in.
I’ve also set up a new project site using RedMine, a ruby on rails based web-app that has built on the Trac features to create a pretty powerful project management tool. If you want to do any testing on chachradio or suggest features, please register on the RedMine project site.

I’ve been trying out the new Zend Studio for Eclipse (which recently release their 2nd beta). It is pretty nice. It bundles PDT with some other standard Eclipse plugins which I had also been using previously (like Subversive — which is a life saver for managing our releases at work), but also includes some extra functionality like PHPUnit integration, ZendFramework project generation and PHPDoc generation. They are definitely still working out some bugs but I highly suggest you try it out if you’ve used Zend Studio or PDT.

When I first started this blog way back in ‘99 it was because I was inspired by the JenniCam which I thought of as some kind of internet-honesty. That is, a person allowing their life to be completely transparent, good, bad and nekkid. I think now it was just a bit of exhibitionism, but the idea has something in it that I still think it worthy of pursuing. My original ideal was that if I could be completely honest with my website (ie, the world) then that kind of transparency would help nudge me to be a better person. Basically if I wouldn’t post it on my website (this was internet-aeons before the ugly term ‘blog’ was invented), then maybe I should think harder about why I feel that way or would act that way. I don’t think that was necessarily a bad concept, but I definitely have some past entries that I kind of wish didn’t exist anymore. (I was going to link some here, but the point is I *don’t* necessarily want you to see them) At any rate, I’d like to continue that ideal in some way. In that spirit I’m going to attempt to make a posting at least once a week on my programming projects. I’ve always been hesitant to post technical stuff I’ve been working with. I want to more transparent in my programming development.

My current project is writing new software in PHP for ChachRadio using the ZendFramework and some standard object-oriented patterns. I’m going to try and get to a point where I can publish my current code out in a SVN repository and try and get some community support, but until then I’ll do updates once a week on my progress and remaining tasks before publishing.