Dani Berg

I was planning to skip Karmic Koala. Jaunty was running just fine but since I replaced my notebook I had an opportunity to try it.

I bought another Sony Vaio but this time without a stupid keyboard. I opted for the VPCCW model because it offered an NVIDIA (GEFORCE 230M) graphics card. I was interested in the SR series but because of my bad experience in the past I didn’t want to deal with ATI.

And that is the irony. Installed Karmic and even wireless worked out of the box. Surprise! After enabling NVIDIA proprietary drivers (190.42) and rebooting my screen was black. Frustration.

After some time googling and reading NVIDIA documents I found out that I had to set xorg.conf to use a custom EDID.

Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/path/to/bin/edid/SNY05FA.bin"

Everything is running smoothly now but I can’t stop thinking that this kind of problem is what makes linux desktop adoption harder. It’s just a matter of time though.

In order to accomplish my goal of keeping this blog updated and grant me some good memories in the future, let me write down about what is going on in my small PHP world:

CakePHP

In my daily job we deal with tons of code written in the pre-framework era but I had a chance to experiment with CakePHP in the past months. I had a good time being involved in three side projects using the framework.

The documentation is good and written like a tutorial but some times you still need need to dive into the framework’s source code to get specific details about classes and methods.

Emacs PHP mode improved

I replaced php-mode for php-mode-improved. The improved version has fixed some bugs in from the previous version but it is sad to read:

;; This has been submitted to the php-mode maintainer, but I've not yet had a
;; response.


The (probably) most popular php-mode is abandoned.

Xdebug

I occasionally read Chromium’s tools written in Python and - as the newbie for life that I am  - I wasted a significant amount of time adding print and exit statements to the code.

It was time to learn how to use a Python debugger and make life easier. Enters pdb.

It didn’t take long to look for a similar tool for PHP: xdebug.

I just wonder why I didn’t try to learn these tools earlier.

PHPUnit

This was something I was excited to do. To move all the crude test scripts to a test framework as dictates industry’s best practices.

Some tests were written using SimpleTest but after a few grep and sed commands they all work with PHPUnit now.

PHPUnit’s documentation is better and development is active. SimpleTest is stuck in version 1.0.1 since April 2008.

I was randomly checking the titles available from Safari’s web site when I found Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. The book presents several patterns to improve your learning experience as a software developer apprentice.

Evaluating how you you learn is key to excel and achieve mastery in any form of art. Yes, I’m including software in the art category.

A good example to follow are musicians as they have in their curriculum a solid base on the matter. They learn not only how to play but how to study and practice. They have method.

Aprenticeship Patterns is a good book and the subject is fascinating. Probably most of the patterns are already part of your daily schedule, but reading the book is still a good opportunity to reflect on the process to hone in on your skills.

I always try to have at least one small toy project that I can play with at night. Sometimes it consists of only reading the source code and mailing list from a big project and sometimes my toy project involves writing code and playing with different tools than the ones required by my daily job.

A few months ago I added to my schedule a Windows Day. Brand new world. I dove into Vista, ASP.NET, C#, IIS, MSSQL and Visual Studio one day per week (and occasionally weekends) for a few months.

I was excited because of the novelty. I read a few books on the subject and had  to play with it.

Here are some random thoughts about my experience.

Right on the first day I got frustrated using the mouse for simple tasks like moving and copying files around so I installed cygwin.  A difference between two worlds.

I learned later that there is a Windows option for the command line: Powershell. Although I didn’t try it the Wikipedia article gives me the impression that learning Powershell is probably a good investment for Windows developers.

Back to random thoughts.

I was then ready to try Visual Studio. It is amazing to try examples from books just dragging and dropping icons that build some correctly written snippet of code. I just doubt that experienced developers would follow that approach.

One problem I had with Visual Studio was trying to set the Emacs key bindings. Leaving the keyboard home row to reach keys like arrows, page down and page up is disturbing. I followed this post advice and installed Emacs Everywhere.

The next step was the database. Oh boy, choosing a MSSQL version is so damn confusing! I’m probably getting older and dumber but I couldn’t understand which option to download from the MS website. Installing MSSQL in Vista was quite painful, too. Had to follow some MS black magic recipes to get it running. Installation on Windows 7 Beta was a breeze though.

After setting up the database I went to the HTTP server. IIS is pretty straightforward. You can setup a working environment with just a few clicks.

Working environment ready and I started to follow the books’ examples. A few ASP.NET web forms later and I was ready to start learning C#.

Talking about computer languages is somehow a taboo so it should suffice to say that C# is verbose.

Well, a few months after my first Windows I’m back to a Linux side project but I’m glad that I took some time to get an overall idea about the ASP.NET world. It’s not for me. Once you go open source you never go back.

If you are only interested in building your client project it doesn’t really matter the platform you pick but it’s a disturbing feeling that you can’t build IIS or poke Visual Studio’s source code. There is this sense of being a powerless and passive consumer always trying to catch up every .NET update.

I’m trying to keep track of the books I read on this blog. It will be fun to check the posts a few years from now.

I just finished reading one more book from the O’Reilly learning series. Learning MySQL by Seyed M.M. (Saied) Tahaghoghi and Hugh Williams.

I picked this book up for two reasons:

1) I had never read an entire MySQL book until now and there is just no excuse for that.

2) It is easy to read and digest. Productive leisure.

I think I’m now ready for an advanced book on the topic