Historically, I’ve always created virtual boxes with apache environments with vagrant like this or recently a combined docker image like that. But, as I do more front end work as well, I realized these were pretty heavy weight. (more…)

PHPStorm has an option to install an icon for your Unity Dash on ubuntu - you can do this through the menu system. But, if you use this, it always opens to your last project. I have a number of projects running simultaneously, so this is no good. I could, of course, stop it from opening the last project, and just display the splash page menu. But I didn’t like that either. I wanted to... (more…)

If you’re not familiar with having PHP QA Tools, go there right now! And then come back and read this. (more…)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently moved to PHPStorm. I’ve done a little bit of configuration and I plan to start using it more now. Here are a few things I really like: (more…)

We’ve just migrated to the PHPStorm IDE in my team. Commercial licenses are $200, personal are $100. I believe that the investment was well worth it. If you’ve been following my entries, you know I have a love affair with Eclipse PDT. It has been hard for an open source programmer like myself to want to buy software. But, we did it. (more…)

It had been irritating to me seeing the .svn folders littered throughout my project workspace. In addition, they all show up in the search results… this can be irritating with the svn-base files that show the old version of the file before a commit. (more…)

When searching for how to count the lines of code I had in my project, I ran into this blog entry. While its a good start, it still gave me some inaccurate counts. I was getting inflated counts because of new lines. So, here is my alternate solution: (more…)

When using FirePHP, I ran into this issue where I could not see the output of the debug information. All the documents I found kept suggesting that I had not enabled the Console tab for this particular site. (more…)

As you probably know by now, I’m a huge fan of Eclipse PDT. Well, I wanted to stop using MySQL GUI tools for a bit and explore Eclipse tools. (more…)

During the creation of my websites, I develop solely in Firefox. When it comes to testing, I run it through IE tester. One thing that I really miss is my Firebug. (more…)

The BlueFish editor is a primarily linux based visual editor for various web languages. Visit the site for more… (more…)

While communicating with other coworkers, they generally just give me a trac ticket # and not the full URL. And, as a lazy programmer, I hate typing in the full URL or loading up trac and searching the #. So, I generated this bookmarklet. Replace the url with the root path to your trac instance. Finally, create a bookmark and put the following content in it: (more…)

When I use an IDE, I expect for it to do everything I need for my project, from start to finish. As you may have read in earlier entries, I enjoy using Eclipse PDT. I think its time to include load testing into my arsenal of tools inside of eclipse. I’m going to focus on apache’s AB for this article. (more…)

At superdev, we have a distribution of a gentoo image made with vmware workstation. This works fine in vmware player - but not the free vmware server - and I wanted to have vmware server running so I could have more than one server running on my windows laptop. Well, there are two small simple edits I had to do - and it was all good. (more…)

Unfortunately, at #superdev, there are times when the include_path in PHP is calculated. It is not always clear where to find a file. Other times there are just too many places to find the file. Because of this - and Eclipse PDT’s inability to find a file from an include or include_once statement when you ctrl click it, I needed to find a tool to find files fast. (more…)

XDebug and Eclipse PDT on Windows - From Start to Finish (more…)

I recently came across this tutorial here about Testing with TPTP- and I’m confused. Whats the benefit of this type of testing (um… creating JAVA code for a JUnit test… right?) compared to running some PHPUnit, Selenium and AB (from apache, or something…)? What am I missing - does anyone have any other good hands-on tutorials? (more…)

This particular example is going to be based on a connection from Windows XP using Putty, MySQL GUI tools and Dreamhost. (more…)

I just thought I’d drop some useful links and tools your way for those beginning and non-tool-cist peoples: (more…)

Most of my development in Eclipse PDT with the results tested outside of it - using firefox. PDT has a few options in the Run… menu: (more…)

So many times during development, I’ve missed little PHP errors because they were 1) on a processing page that was redirected or 2) output inside of a html tag - and rendered invisible. From time to time, I have to go back to my file system and check the php error log to see what happened. The first step to solving this was implementing a custom error handler - which we did at (“the triangle”).... (more…)

In my posting about Integrating PHPDocumentor into Eclipse, I touched on External Tools a bit. The combination of external batch files, the external tools extra options and the console has made my life easier. I’m using two new additional batch files that I’ve written myself and integrated as external tools. These include automated SVN release update and resource refresh and Apache application control (for those who can’t run apache as a service on w32): (more…)

Update: Looks like the plugin is no longer available at that link. (more…)

After I installed Eclipse PDT, I had two project navigators. I closed the native one and kept open the PHP Explorer. PHP Explorer showed my php, css, js, etc, files. It also puts a plus sign to the left of the filenames. Using this view, we can expand the file to see the classes and functions inside of the file without opening it. (more…)

Although I’d like to pretend that my side jobs always are pure programming, but alas, not the case. There are times when the users send word docs to me and I have to convert them to html. Now, even these word docs might have spelling mistakes - but that’s just not ‘acceptable’ to them - I should correct those issues too! Whats up with that? But anyway, I now have a good plugin to do... (more…)

The last time I downloaded Eclipse PDT for PHP, (located at zend.com/pdt), everything was great. That is, until I wanted to run the updates. It stopped with an error and would never update my PDT. Luckily, one of the consultants from (“the triangle”) had the same issues - and he was able to tell me what was up: (more…)

As you can probably tell from my last test of a firefox extension here, I am constantly looking for new tools to make my job more accurate (see: lazier). Another similar extension I came across is Tamper Data. Tamper Data doesn’t have a lot of documentation, so it was harder to actually determine the uses of this extension. Some tutorials on the net claimed that Tamper Data was better than Live Headers or Load Time... (more…)

So, I started looking at a few load time analyzers for my sites - and I found an interesting plugin for firefox. I wasn’t too entirely sure what I was going to find - but I figured I’d try it out and figure out if it was useful. (more…)