Since some time now, I’ve been using NginX as a local development web server. After numerous years of Apache, the configuration of NginX needs some getting used to, but in the end, it is a lot easier and more flexible. Here are a few mappings to get you started if you’re used to Apache.
Author Archives: drm
How to restore grub with a live CD
I borked my primary boot device’s grub installation last week because I wanted to start Windows 7 to play some LAN games. Windows 7 wouldn’t boot from grub, so I thought I’d install a new grub version. I reinstalled grub before regenerating the config file and rebooted. Too bad the Arch packages don’t handle that [...]
Unit testing and Drupal; what’s wrong with this picture?
I guess the guys at Drupal.org didn’t really understand the concept of unit testing. In comparison to the Zend Framework 1.13 and Symfony 1.4 test suites, of which some tests did not pass mainly due to some configuration issues (98.6% and 99.9% respectively), Drupal had some, let’s say, surprising results. Though it reported 100% of [...]
Enhancing Python unit tests further with decorators
Decorators in Python are awesome. In follow-up to my previous post on a missing feature in Python’s unittest module in comparison to PHPUnit, here’s the implementation of PHPUnit’s @expectedException annotation in form of a Python decorator
Endless scrolling based on a simple HTML pager
We had a little brainstorm today at work at how endless scrolling could be best implemented utilizing progressive enhancement. Here’s my idea and a proof of concept. And a good example of progressive enhancement in pure form, if I may say so. The concept When I think of endless scrolling, I see it as just [...]
PHPUnit style dataProvider in Python unit test
PHPUnit has a handy feature with which you can provide testdata to your tests. This is called a data provider, and is implemented by annotating a test with @dataProvider methodName. Python’s unittest module doesn’t seem to have such a feature.
Introducing Spritzer: A CSS sprite generator
CSS sprites are pretty useful in web development. The general idea is you use one big image that contains all your icons and other interface-related images and use that image as a background for your HTML elements, shifting it’s position such that the right portion of the sprite is displayed. This technique is becoming more [...]
About MySQL, UTF-8 and saving headaches
One of the most confusing topics ever in web development history is character sets. MySQL has a lot of features to help you with this, but when things go wrong, it can be a real pain to get it solved. Read this and fear no more.
HTML5 WebSocket Server – Work in Progress
So, I thought I’d devise a websocket server in Python. I’ve been tweeting some stuff about that too, but as soon as I wanted to publish the source code, I accidentally deleted websocket.py, instead of websocket.pyc (which I didn’t want to occur on github). That was quite dumb…
10 must-have key and mouse binding configs in Openbox
In openbox, you have a configuration file in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml in which you can pretty much configure all the shortcuts you need in a lifetime. Here’s my top ten configurations, along with their code.