i.justrealized

I haven’t exactly thought of programming as a chore. And I am always quick to admit that I am not a good programmer, it just so happened to be what I do better in.

Lately, programming has been turning into a tiny chore and I hope it doesn’t enlarge itself. I overcome it partially by adding interesting things to do into the project so it felt a little more fun and probably can gain myself a little more satisfaction. I define “interesting things” to be something I never done before and have a high chance of getting it right. However, these “interesting things” aren’t good for me because I ended up having to maintain these interesting things.

My work generally involves – development, maintaining. I think I am supposed to squeeze testing and planning in somewhere in the steps but I don’t give a crap about those management level definitions.

Development is always the more fun part. You make something in 10 hours and watch it work. However you may end up watching it work for 10 days leaving your eleventh day in front of the computer debugging for the next 5 hours. This process typically recurs and the base case is the termination of product.

I don’t have a good solution for it but I need a constant feed of “interesting things”. So during maintenance, I added in those “interesting things” which is really just a curse. These “interesting things” come back and haunt me; and I end up having to maintain these “interesting things”. And during the maintenance of these “interesting things”, I added…

The easiest way to start developing in PHP is to get XAMPP, the whole package can even be placed in a flash drive. Using the free AOL Mail account also allows you to sign in to the SMTP server without TLS which allows XAMPP sendmail to work.

0. Objective

To get your PHP scripts to send an email out. This guide assumes you have XAMPP or XAMPP Lite. My environment is Windows Vista. (I use XAMPP Lite by the way.)

My XAMPP is placed in C:\xampplite\, so your configuration may be a little different. The files to be modified are sendmail.ini and php.ini. (more…)

Google Analytics API has been launched as a public beta.

Attention Developers: Google Analytics API Launched!

A Google Analytics API has long been one of our most widely anticipated features. Today we’re pleased to announce that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users!

What’s so exciting about an API? The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways. (Source: Google Analytics Blog)

Here’s the documentation.

Okay, main news is that Java SE 6 Update 10 is out. I’ve been using Update 10 beta since a month ago. I got it simply to see the Java Swing menu fonts using ClearType and that’s all.

Let’s side track a little to look at how sucky a state Java download page is in.

Sun Microsystem probably has the worst marketing team. Java SE 6 Update 10 is now. Before update 10 was probably update 7. The numbers doesn’t seem to be incremental.

But that’s okay, that’s just Sun’s way of doing thing. The version after Java 1.4.2 is Java 5. Java can’t compute elementary math. Java Standard Edition 6 is also known as Java 1.6.

You go to their Java SE download page and you see:

• Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 10
• Java SE Development Kit (JDK) 6 Update 10
• JDK 6 Update 10 with Java EE
• JDK 6 Update 10 with NetBeans 6.1
• JRE 6 Update 7 for Intel Itanium®
• JDK 6 Update 7 for Intel Itanium®
• JDK DST Timezone Update Tool – 1.3.9
• Java SE 6 Documentation
• Java SE 6 JDK Source Code
• and other friends like Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy

Usually you just need whatever’s that’s need at the top. New Java developers would no doubt get intimidated by the choices available. They should have separated the developer page from the rest of the Java site. And on the developer page, there really should just be 3 options:

• Java Standard Edition 6
• Java Enterprise Edition 6
• others…

(more…)

Okay, Django 1.0 alpha has been released finally. I don’t have the time to test this out but I played around with some pre 1.0 alpha builds a couple of weeks back and that time the software was quite stable already.

Django 1.0 alpha released!

In accordance with the Django 1.0 release roadmap, tonight we’ve released the first “alpha” testing version of Django 1.0. This release includes all of the major features due for inclusion in the final Django 1.0, though some lower-priority items are still scheduled to be included before the 1.0 feature freeze, which will occur with the first beta release next month.

The next step on that path will be the first Django 1.0 beta release, currently scheduled for August 5. If you’d like to help out, please review our documentation for contributors and feel free to join in one of the development sprints scheduled for the run up to 1.0; the full schedule is available in the Django 1.0 release roadmap.

Now when would CakePHP 1.2 be released?

I’m using Windows Vista and Windows XP. Enabling cURL (Client URL Library) of PHP is really easy and is a matter of uncommenting something only.

Open your php.ini. I use XAMPP for development, XAMPP’s php.ini can be found in C:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini. You can probably find your copy lurking around there if you use XAMPP.

Do a search of ‘curl’ in the php.ini, there’s probably only one.

Uncomment it.

My environment is Windows Vista but these instructions work for Windows XP as well. I also written a guide on how to set up virtual hosts in Ubuntu.

0. Introduction

Sometimes, we have multiple projects and we would like to access the Project 1′s website by typing ‘http://project1/’ in the browser address bar. And Project 2 may be at ‘http://project2/’. This is how we can configure Windows and Apache to do just that. While this guide is written for XAMPP’s Apache, if the instruction applies pretty much to Apache too. You can put your configuration into ‘httpd.conf’.

1. Add a new host in Windows

First go to your hosts file, it is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts for most people. If you’re using Windows Vista, you need to run command prompt as administrator. Type ‘cmd’ into the search bar and right click on the ‘cmd’ search result to point to ‘Run as administrator’. (more…)