PHPUnit2 3.0.0alpha11 released
posted: June 14th, 2006 · by: Sven
Wow :) Sebastian Bergmann finally added Mocks to PHPUnit2 which has been released as 3.0.0alpha11 to PEAR. The changelog reads quite interesting and comprehensive.
folksr.de - more thoughts on distributed votings
posted: June 14th, 2006 · by: Sven
These are the 3 most important things that I’ll need to be change next in folksr.de.
Read the rest of this entryReal fun: Get on Rails with Globalize (take #2)
posted: June 13th, 2006 · by: Sven
This article is a bit outdated and has been replaced by an entire series in the meantime: “Get on Rails with Globalize: a comprehensive writeup in 6 parts”.
This is the second version of my writeup about Globalize. My first attemp was too much a literal protocol of my actual steps – which haven’t actually mixed that well with a newbie intro to Globalize. So simply let’s start over.
I initially really shyed away from translating a pretty simple application just because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries that were nothing else but a big pain and hassle …
Ever felt the same? Then here’s some good news for yor. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how Globalize works everything went like a charm and was incredibly simple to use (at least for the very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
So, I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entryReal fun: Get on Rails with Globalize
posted: June 9th, 2006 · by: Sven
Update: If you’re interested in reading about my adventures … this article might be for you. But if you’re interested in getting started with Globalize then please refer to this follow-up version of this article.
I first shyed away from adding multi-language support to folksr (my experimental voting application) ... mostly because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries and tools which were basically nothing else but a big pain.
Ever felt the same? Then there’s some good news for you. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how to Globalize works it went like a charm and is incredibly simple to use (at least for the mostly very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entryFirst lessons learned: feedback about folksr
posted: June 8th, 2006 · by: Sven
Today I showed folksr.de to some friends of mine and watched them trying to get a vote placed. I’ve been actually terrified about the usability of some free blogging engines out there.
But it’s been instructive about how folksr.de. Here’s what I learned.
Read the rest of this entryfolksr.de is here
posted: June 8th, 2006 · by: Sven
Hey, folksr (my experimatal app for distributed votings using microformats) has now its own domain: folksr.de!
It has been donated by the folks over at My-Lands. We've been talking about it for a while and they are interested in this project.
Thanks!
RSpec 0.5.5 on Rails released
posted: June 7th, 2006 · by: Sven
Hey, cool. I’ve just found an email dropping in my inbox that announces the release of RSpec 0.5.5. on Rails.
When I checked the last time, there’s been a short note on the “Tools: RSpec on Rails” page on RSpec’s project page saying something like “Yes, there’s an experimental extension in SVN and if you feel really adventurous you may check it out.” or so.
So I did, of course :) But unfortunately I haven’t got anywhere with it - the specs just haven’t been executed and from a quick look into the code I haven’t been able to tackle anything.
There’s been some discussion on the RSpec dev mailinglist since talking about the best way to integrate Rails support (i.e. as a plugin, gem, …) recently and I’m totally excited to read that there’s a release within less than a week now.
In the meantime there’s also an intro on the RSpec on Rails page linked above covering the installation process, howto run specs, naming conventions and each one example for usage with Rails models and controllers.
Honestly. I can’t wait to check this stuff out.
Distributed votings using microformats
posted: June 5th, 2006 · by: Sven
Ladies and gentlemen … please … let me introduce to you … an experimental application for … distributed, webwide votings
Now, what’s that??
Well, first of all, it’s fun - at least, it is to me ;) What the application does is: it collects votes that are entirely spread over the web, published in a really simple way.
These days everybody who knows what a blog is also knows what “distributed discussions” are through the trackback lists below blog posts - a mechanism that has played its role in changing the web, making blogs as popular as they are and thus pushing technologies that aim at the so called long tail.
I’ve been stumbling over microformats about half a year ago or so, read through the wiki, got totally thrilled and since have been lurking the mailinglist. I’ve since wanted to check out the idea to use the VoteLinks microformat to resemble what’s been called “distributed discussion” to a system that allows for distributed votings.
Now, over the time I’ve been able put something together.
Read the rest of this entryO'Reilly Web 2.0 Kung-Fu anyone?
posted: June 2nd, 2006 · by: Sven
Hum, interesting.
I don’t know if the “O’Reilly Web 2.0 Trademark case” will entirely become a milestone in the history of the internet. But I think it will be one of those cases that people will remember and refer to in future - like Tim O’Reillys complaints about the Amazon one-click patent thing.
Anyway. It’s kind of an interesting marketing lesson.
Read the rest of this entryUsing a self join to select the rows with the maxium values per group
posted: June 1st, 2006 · by: Sven
Phew. This really baffled me. I use SQL for *years* now … but I haven’t been able to come up with a working statement for a query that I’ve thought to be a really trivial thing at first.
Like this:
I have a table articles which can belong to blogs. But blogs are subclasses of an abstract type called location. Thus, each article holds a key to the table locations where there is a column type, which will have the value ‘blog’ for each concrete blog.
Read the rest of this entry