I’ve made a couple of resolutions for the year 2009, namely the following:

• Do not neglect my Workouts, train regularly
• Do not spend money randomly, keep books and check monthly what goes where
• Do eat healty, keep good food around at home
• No random surfing in the internet
• Practice courage in public.

Did I follow up on my resolutions? Quite surprisingly it worked, and apart from the last point, I am pretty satisfied with the results.

Putting down a list of resolutions in writing is surely recommended, because it not only gives you a direction of where you are going, but it can also give you feedback whether the techniques you are using to reach your goals are efficient. And also, most of my resolutions above where based on experiences where I did something wrong when I reflected over the last year. And upon my reflections I decided what actions are necessary to improve upon said shortcomings.

So what I am up to this year?

• I realized that I spent to much time working without making an impact. w4w

Therefore I resolved to

• Start and implement my own business based on principles from 4hww and various other self and life improvement books that I am reading.
• When doing custom work, I resolve to only focus on what I do best

Another thing that I noticed is that while I was eating healty, I still tended to eat to much, digging in huge plates of stuff. Therefore

• I resolve to eat slower and smaller meals and try to listen to what my body tells me, rather than digging in blindly

Apart from that, as for to improve as a person in general, I’ll add the following:

• I’ll strike up conversations with strangers whenever possible

And maybe I have another sneaky resolution that I am not going to share with the public. You never know.

Have fun in 2010.

Cheers
-Richard

building websites can be tough, especially when there are CMS and Email-Forms on the page, because due to last minute changes in the sites, Emails can be lost and there might be malfunctions in the CMS, which of course only surface a week later, when the client actually starts to use the Site.

And no sweet talk, this happens to all of us, … well, until NOW.

We are going to do Test Driven Development. Enter SimpleTest.

It’s a really sweet and easy to use PHP based Unit testing framework.

I mostly use it like this:
I create a test case that logs into the CMS admin, adds an article via a from, then loads the actual site, checks if a text from the testing article is found on the page, and then it goes back to the admin interface and deletes said article.

This might sound quite simple, and with SimpleTest, it indeed is. And the little bit of extra effort saves a magnitude of headaches later on. It’s useful also for example when you are testing a website on your own testing webhost, and then upload it to the clients webspace, which runs quite likely a different version of PHP, differently configured (broken ). Having some tests available is convenient to make sure that stuff actually works, after you’ve fixed the most obvious screwups.

If we were living in a perfect world, we would only deploy to a “certified” webhost, But well, you know how things are.

SimpleTest is also convenient as you are really testing on the “actual” website, and not on any kind of internal code representation, therefore you can also use it to test arbitrary websites, which might not have been programmed in PHP even.

Oh, and the SimpleBrowser in SimpleTest is also quite convenient to programmatically control websites, login, post stuff, etc. like sending spam, erhm,… posting important updates of course.

And if you are going to test thoroughly, you also want to test your form-mails, for which you can setup SimpleMail with Fakemail. But for this you need a “real” webhost with shell access, where you can run either python or perl scripts, because Fakemail is available for those two languages.

Have fun,
Cheers
-Richard

Cheers
-Richard

I just had a little idea that I’d like to share with you. When interacting with technology like computers, every now and then it happens that you do not have enough space on the viewport to lay out all the Information that you are interested in. Like for example you want to draft a document and at the same time you need to look up some conversations with another person about said document. In small screen you have to switch between those two views, and you cannot easily get any work done. This happens especially with mobile Internet devices like the G1 or iPhone.

Now I know that there are very fancy things like multi touch tables. Now what if you had some multi touch table equipped with some short range data transfer mechanism like bluetooth for example. And as soon as you lay your mobile device on the touch table, you can interact with the data on the device. Like dragging a SMS to an email, or updating your contact list and copying/dragging infos from a mail to a new contact entry, etc…

Endless possibilities and much more convenient man-machine interaction. Looking forward to the future.

Cheers
-Richard

previously

Cheers
-Richard