Recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of time trying to work out the best way to enable my team at work to be able to rapidly meet several impending deadlines for new projects. In this I have once again started looking at some agile practices that have been largely tossed to the sidelines. Some of the more important practices that I am currently trying to preach again are the old of code standards and unit testing. While there are many people who see these as barriers to progress, viewing them as yet more things they need to do, my hope is to perhaps give them the tools to be able to see the truth; that these practices exist to empower developers.

One of the core issues that I see day in a day out is that testing almost always takes 2-3 times longer than originally expected. This is by no means the tester’s fault though. It has been shown over and over again that following a waterfall style approach to development is in fact the most inefficient way of producing software. The reason for this is because when you put testing at the end of the process, you force everything to grind to a halt as you backtrack to fix bugs.

In fact, unit-tests are designed to help prevent this. Now while I won’t go into the specifics on what unit-tests are or why they are good, as that has been covered by many wiser men than myself, I will say that holding developers accountable for writing them is a key component to making this ecosystem work.

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So lately I’ve thought about switching my PHP development over to Zend Framework. The main reason for this is that I am just tired of rewriting the wheel. Most of the common problems with developing a PHP application have been solved and for once it would be nice to just build an application, instead of building a framework.

To get started in my efforts, I needed to set myself up with a local development environment. While I do have a production web server hosted with Slice Host (which this website is served from) and a local server at home, I wanted something that was a little less configuration heavy. After looking into several Mac OS X solutions, like XAMPP and Entropy PHP, I ran into Zend Server Community Edition. The first two, while decent solutions, were no where near as complete as the Zend provided solution. It was a clear winner for me.

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Amidst all of the CES buzz, there was an announcement about my most recent obsession, Boxee and the BoxeeBox. It seems that not only is the Boxee beta open to everyone now, but that the BoxeeBox itself is to have quite abit of power under the hood. Those who know me have had the unfortunate luck of having to hear me droll on and on about how much I love the up coming BoxeeBox.

Until today, all I had been waiting to hear was some news the hardware in the thing would be able to support 1080P HD video. In fact, now that the Tegra2 processor from Nvidia has been announced as the engine behind this little beast, I’m ready to put my name on the pre-order list for this little bad boy.

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Over the last several months, since I started writing this blog I’ve noticed a tiny trickle of visitors. Most seem interested in the Acer H340 that a blogged about in my first post. I felt bad for many of them, seeing their search keywords, knowing my little bit of writing wouldn’t help their plights. The only consolation to this has been that I knew adding the link to whsplus.com at the bottom of the article had been a smart move, as it seemed to help those poor folks out.

However, for the longest time I received almost no comments on any of my articles. While I would love nothing more than to see readers talking and asking questions in my comments area, I knew that not only have I failed to advertise this site, but that I really do not have any real compelling content as of yet. After all, this is nothing more than a personal side project.

Beginning when I changed the site’s name a month back I started to notice another change. I started to see some comments come through. The first was a classic bit of spam, all filled with links to various sites. Akismet caught it though, so no worries there. Then I noticed several others that, while short, seemed to be written by people. Finally living breathing people reading my site!! Or perhaps not.

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I know it is politically correct to say, “Happy Holidays,” however I stand by the fact that Christmas is a government holiday and is mostly a commercial holiday to me anyway. So with that, I hope everyone properly stimulated the economy today and got all sorts of fun toys.

I wish your holiday season to be a happy and safe one. Full of good food and fun times.

With that, here is a LolCat:

When I decided to try blogging again, it started as mostly an experiment in getting to know WordPress. To that end, I did not put alot of time or effort into thing like picking a domain name or styling the site. Mostly it just seemed a good use for the .name domain I had been holding onto for a couple years. Over the last few months, while I haven’t blogged a whole bunch, I do feel as if I would like to grow beyond a personal brand and perhaps try taking it a bit more seriously.

To that end I bring you, Abstracted Method.

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In all of my new server craze, I’ve come to have a need to be able to connect to it from where ever I am. Initially I thought that the best solution for this was to just use the DynDNS.com free service. It does exactly what I need with three exceptions.

1. I have to use one of their canned domain names.
2. After 1 month of inactivity, they will cancel your account.
3. My current AirPort Extreme router does not support dyndns.com updating like my old LinkSys one did.

Now, most of these are either easily overcome or downright nit-picky. #2 and #3 could be easily overcome with a script that updates the IP address periodically. However if I’m going to need a script for this, I might as well go to the next step and use a solution that let’s me take care of #1 as well. Enter SliceHost.

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Lately there has been quite a stir at my job regarding WordPress. In this we have played alot with deployment methods, including proxying it through another application to add an extra layer of features. Because of all of this I have had quite a few conversations with teammates about the easiest way to set up a new blog. As I feel I have a very quick and easy way to not only install a new WordPress installation, but also to keep it up to date, I figured I would share it here, in case that knowledge might be helpful to someone else.

A quick warning first, while nothing I am about to describe is necessarily difficult nor hazardous, all of it requires that you have some sort of direct access to your server. In the case of my explanations, I will be speaking of doing this through an SSH terminal connection. Some familiarity and access to Subversion is also needed. Mostly, this is a solution that should appeal to other developers.

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No one can deny the effect that Google has had over how we use computers in the last decade. In the beginning it started with a simpler home page, one less burdened by the clutter that other search engine’s provided. From search it moved to dominate the web advertising with it’s Adsense program that provides relevant marketing to web pages and the ever-changing content of the web. They sought to change the face of e-mail first by giving you a simpler way to organize and manage your in-box. They also looked to offer free online tools to write and manage documents that were more traditionally handled by expensive word processors. More recently they have sought to change the face of e-mail and general communication again, with their newest beta product Wave.

These are only a small number of the growing projects that Google has in its labs. Lesser known to some has been Google’s dabbling in building its own operating systems and browser. It started with mobile phone platform known as Android that has taken the developer and general geek communities by storm, promising a truly open platform in the ever-growing mobile universe. This was a complete affront to the blossoming Apple iPhone movement, which while exploding, is somewhat plagued by sense that big brother is always watching and stifling innovation. The promise from Google was that it wanted to facilitate innovation by providing a truly open alternative for the traditionally very closed mobile market.

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Gentoo

A little while back I discussed my (at the time) recent purchase of an Acer H340 Windows Home Server. At that time I was just getting into ripping my DVDs into x264 / DIVX formatted video files. At about 1.5-gigabyte per movie, it seemed like it would take me forever to fill up the 4-terabytes of space the server afforded me. I figured by the time that happened storage would be more dense and a new, similar solution would be available to replace my “aging” H340 server. Of course, as usual, I underestimated my enthusiasm in filling the device. See, shortly after I began this project I started modifying what I was filling my library with.

With my discovery of the PS3MediaServer package, I found serenity in being able to transcode higher resolution rips. Now all the sudden a whole new world of ripped 720p and 1080p BluRay media opened to me. This of course went great for a while. I was able to watch all sorts of great movies on my nice LCD TV in uber high-resolution and my little media server was chugging away, doing its best to keep up with all the transcoding I threw its way. Soon, the 2-terabytes that drive duplication afforded me filled up, so I deduplicated my TV show archive and made my way to 3 -terabytes. Which I of course filled equally fast.

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