An Open Letter to Quality Assurance People

Dear Quality Assurance people,

I’m very fond of tools you are using, but please take a minute to read the following lines.

Screenshot is a great tool to prove that you really can see the bug, but it only helps in situation where we don’t understand what’s wrong.

Could you please provide the bug evidence in the following order:

  1. Address (URL) of the page that displays the bug – it is only 1 cut and paste for you, and it saves us frustration of repetitive questions: “On what page does it happen”. We’d rather just click.
  2. Describe what did you do on the page to make the bug happen if it’s not visible immediately.
  3. If 1. and 2. are not enough, I’d be happy to ask: “What do you mean, the address is not visible?”.
  4. In case of 3. provide screenshot (optionally with freehand arrows or so to indicate the problem).
  5. If you feel you’d rather provide a screenshot in the first place, please don’t forget 1. and 2.

If you catch yourself grabbing the screenshot tool to prove that you’ve seen it, don’t forget to also think about “What can I do to help other people see the bug?” Once I can see the bug, I’ll start fixing it sooner, and that’ll be a common success.

Thanks in advance.
Developer

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Fatal error: call to undefined function imagefilter()

This and a number of other gd functions are not available by default in Ubuntu Server LAMP setup. Not trivial, but a valid solution can be found here: http://cumu.li/2008/5/13/recompiling-php5-with-bundled-support-for-gd-on-ubuntu Continue reading

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PHP Development on Windows

Being a Windows user, during many years of PHP development,  I’ve evaluated various versions of WAMP and XAMPP packages, tried to manually setup Apache and MySQL, and I must say that I’ve had some success there. Finally – I have the statement of the best platform ever. It is LAMP.

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Rule #1 for programmers

I’ve always said that number one rule for a programmer is:

Never put a coffee cup between mouse and keyboard.

Now I have a picture that tells even more…Never put coffee in dangerous places

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PHP dies silently

Just a quick self-reminder that could be interesting.

I’m pretty much used to seeing a Fatal error when a time or memory limit is reached in PHP scripts (Apache environment). However, in a highly important script, PHP script was persistent in stopping the execution without notice.

I still cannot tell why that happened, but after some poking, I finally got the Fatal error saying that time limit has been reached.

I don’t feel like going any further after all time spent on the issue. I’ll remember to check time and memory limits for resource demanding scripts.

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Drupal Views 2

OK, Drupal Views 2 is great stuff, but sometimes, it just makes my day 🙂

Drupal Views 2 in action

Drupal Views 2 in action

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Drupal views_datasource setup

Just a quick and useful one.

What sounded like an useful module http://drupal.org/project/views_datasource took like hours to figure out.

Obviously, the latest release doesn’t work, while after a bit of searching I finally stumbled upon: http://drupal.org/node/307223#comment-1040887

Now I can continue.

Have a nice day.

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Automatic Home&Office Backup Solution

Here’s an example how one can easily setup home or office backup solution using free software and Windows features.

You’ll need the following:

  1. Microsoft SyncToy available here
  2. Access to Windows Scheduled Tasks
  3. A backup drive (external or internal, but it’s essential to be a different drive, not just another partition on the drive that’s being backed up. In case of drive failure, backup on another partition won’t help.

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Laptop buying advise

Ocassionally I’m recommended as “the guy who knows computers” to help friend-of-a-friend computer newbies make a right choice when shopping for a computer. Usually my job here is to make sure that they don’t be too thrifty for RAM, or don’t spend too much on processor or graphics if it’s an office/internet machine.

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Tweet, tweet

I’m not planning to write about twitter.com. I’m still not aware of its full potential or how to release it. However, I find it cool to be able to post a text on this blog, and the tweet hits the air automatically.

Try this cool integration yourself at http://twitterfeed.com

Honestly, I wrote this one, just to make sure it works. I promise I’ll post any news either good or bad.

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