Links on tdd, css & others

• Doctest - runnable tests inside the docstrings (php pear package)
• Mutation testing 
  

  “Mutation Testing is basically testing…for tests. It ensures that your tests are truly capable of detecting errors and problems with the source code. It does this by mutating the source code itself (using ext/runkit) in such a way that an error is created in the code. If your tests detect the error, all is well with the world. If your tests do not detect the error…well, you better add a new test that does” 

• Phpcp
  

  “phpcpd is a Copy/Paste Detector (CPD) for PHP code.

  The goal of phpcpd is not not to replace more sophisticated tools such as phpcs, pdepend, or phpmd, but rather to provide an alternative to them when you just need to get a quick overview of duplicated code in a project.”

• Object oriented CSS
  

  “OOCSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front end code.” 

• Bespin
  

  Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology.

data visualization for everyone

Just found out about the wonderful project by IBM Many Eyes that alows anyone to create data visualizations without any programming knowledge (the usual suspects are flash/actionscript and processing) whatsoever.

In their own words:

“Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. ”

On the usability side, the creators are to be congratulated on the simplicity of the whole interface. The user chooses a dataset - it is also possible to upload datasets - and then chooses a visualization type, eg. tagcloud, line graph, etc, previews, and publishes it! Really simple :=)

I actually created two visualizations, one on Obama’s speeches and another on Alice in Wonderland. Since the applets are interactive you can change the words and a new visualization will pop up.

note: may take a little while to load

Obama’s ‘We’

Alice in Wonderland - you, won’t

playing with alice’s playful dialogue

Links on scalability

This post is simply a collection of articles i particularly liked on scalabilty:

Scalability Best practices: Lessons From Ebay
ChasingSparks: Sharding with Cookie-Based Sessions
The Hitchhikers Guide to PHP Load Balancing - Port:EightyEight
The fav.or.it Blog » Fixing Twitter
Hueniverse: Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I

update

i started this blog at blog.whythelongroads.com and ported the few posts there and their comments to here. that blog will be going down in the short future.

hello world

the start of a journey