SVN, Git — Comments Off
07
Feb 13

Firefox user preferences with selenium (behat+mink) to bypass a proxy or disable cache

At work we are testing an existing application with behat+mink. We normally use goutte driver, but in some cases (when javascript is needed) we need to use selenium server piloting firefox.

When using firefox, the page is loaded including external javascript (google analytics, network ads etc..) so it needs connetivity. An alternative is disabling external requests on the testing environment or use a fake DNS entry, but that wasn’t a viable solution for us.

A small problem I had was bypassing the office network proxy, that requires a proxy auto config file (PAC) when firefox was running. You can find many links online mentioning the various firefox preferences you can set, for example network.proxy.http and network.proxy.http_port to specify a proxy, or network.http.use-cache to enable/disable the browser cache.

In my configuration (ubuntu 12.04, with selenium 2.28, firefox 18.0.1), the preferences file read by firefox is located at /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref/proxy.js, where you can add the various calls to user_pref([settings], [value]) .

Here an example of how I changed the puppet manifest of the box to make things working for us

file { "/usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref/proxy.js":
 content =>
'user_pref("network.proxy.autoconfig_url", "http://chante-with-your-value/default.pac");
user_pref("network.http.use-cache", false);
user_pref("network.dnsCacheExpiration", 1);
user_pref("network.proxy.type", 2);'
}
SVN, Git — 1 comment
15
Jan 13

Composer: how to use your github forks

Scenario

Imagine you are using a github project in your composer file

"require": {
  "original-user/project": "dev-bugfix"
}

Now, this dependency does not do exactly what you want, so you want to change it and use your fork instead (and potentially submit a pull-request).

How to use your fork

Just add your repository into composer.json

"repositories": [
   {
     "type": "vcs",
     "url": "https://github.com/mygithub-username/project"
   }
  ]

Important: Do not change the “require” part, it must continue using original-user/project.
Run a “./composer.phar update” and composer will then download your fork (even though it echoes “installing  original-user/project” during the operation).

Go into “vendor/original-user/project” and run “git remote -v” for a double check, you’ll see the remote source “composer” that is your fork, and “origin” that is the original project. From there you can commit the changes to your fork and update it from origin (git pull origin master).

 

documentation

Composer

Loading a package from a VCS repository# There are a few use cases for this. The most common one is maintaining your own fork of a third party library. If you are using a certain library for your project and you decide to change something in the library, you will want your project to use the patched version. If the library is on GitHub (this is the case most of the time), you can simply fork it there and push your changes to your fork. After that you update the project’s composer.json. All you have to do is add your fork as a repository and update the version constraint to point to your custom branch. For version constraint naming conventions see Libraries for more information. Example assuming you patched monolog to fix a bug in the bugfix branch:

DB and MySql — Comments Off
17
Dec 12

MongoDB + MySQL with Doctrine 2. Example of listener to maintain redundant data (alternative to joins)

If you are developing an application with MongoDb, sooner or later you will face the need of solving a query that involves more than one collections (or a MongoDB collection with a MySQL table). In this case, an SQL join operation won’t be available.

If you have a small amount of data, you can perform two MongoDB/MySQL queries and then join the results at the application level, but – depending on your needs – that could be not feasible or turn out to be inconvenient. A possible better solution for that could be redundancy.

Example
Continue reading →

DB and MySql / design patterns / Javascript, AJAX and JQuery / Linux / PHP applications / testing / Web applications — 1 comment
20
Oct 12

97 things every programmer should know: personal notes

Last month I saw a book flying about the office, containing useful tips from developers. 97 suggestions from experienced developers. Amazon is still selling it, so I suggest you read it if work as a software developer or you occasionally dip into coding: 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

I’ve finished reading it, and I took some notes while reading. Some concepts and suggestions were obvious, as I hear them many times from the community (blogs, conferences, colleagues) or I’ve already personally experienced them. I’ll paste those my notes here, with the hope that you can find something valuable from looking through them.

Continue reading →

PHP applications / PHP functions and features / PHP tools / Web applications — 1 comment
30
Sep 12

How to create a wordpress plugin, a minimal example

If you’ve ever wondered how wordpress plugins work, you’ll be surprised to see how simple they are.

Let’s create a plugin (I’ll call it “capitalizer”) that just modifies the text of the blog posts.
Continue reading →

Uncategorized — Comments Off
13
Jul 12

10 posts from the past

Uncategorized — Comments Off
11
Jul 12

Startup notes

Interesting article shared by some colleagues. If you work for a startup I’m sure you’ll find truth in most of the points the post raises. I’ll share some parts of it.

Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs. « Michael O.Church

Startups often involve, for engineers, very long hours, rapidly changing requirements, and tight deadlines, which means the quality of the code they write is generally very poor in comparison to what they’d be able to produce in saner conditions. It’s not that they’re bad at their jobs, but that it’s almost impossible to produce quality software under those kinds of deadlines

…

The result of this is that the engineer’s job isn’t to build great infrastructure that will last 10 years… because if the company fails on the marketing front, there will be no “in 10 years”. The engineer’s job is to crank out features quickly, and keep the house of cards from falling down long enough to make the next milestone. If this means that he loads up on “technical debt”, that’s what he does.

…

A competent manager can do a lot for a person’s career that he wouldn’t realistically be able to do on his own. Still, the idea that joining a startup means not having a boss is just nonsense.

Uncategorized — Comments Off
09
Jul 12

Git rebase and remote operations

Taken from http://git-scm.com/book/

When you rebase stuff, you’re abandoning existing commits and creating new ones that are similar but different. If you push commits somewhere and others pull them down and base work on them, and then you rewrite those commits with git rebase and push them up again, your collaborators will have to re-merge their work and things will get messy when you try to pull their work back into yours.

Uncategorized — Comments Off
09
Jul 12

Commentary: Why Do People Hate PHP

Commentary: Why Do People Hate PHP? | PHP Tip A Day

Usually someone hating on PHP does so because they don’t understand it, are upset by what it lets people get away with, feel it makes it too easy for someone to earn the title of “developer,” or because they’re dicks who have to insult other people because they can’t simply be happy with their own choices.

DB and MySql — Comments Off
27
Mar 12

NoSQL and MySQL notes

NoSQL: If Only It Was That Easy at Marked As Pertinent

What am I going to build my next app on? Probably Postgres. Will I use NoSQL? Maybe. I might also use Hadoop and Hive. I might keep everything in flat files. Maybe I’ll start hacking on Maglev. I’ll use whatever is best for the job. If I need reporting, I won’t be using any NoSQL. If I need caching, I’ll probably use Tokyo Tyrant. If I need ACIDity, I won’t use NoSQL. If I need a ton of counters, I’ll use Redis. If I need transactions, I’ll use Postgres. If I have a ton of a single type of documents, I’ll probably use Mongo. If I need to write 1 billion objects a day, I’d probably use Voldemort. If I need full text search, I’d probably use Solr. If I need full text search of volatile data, I’d probably use Sphinx.

Which is faster: MySQL or MongoDB? Does it depend on the use case? – Quora

To me, the Mysql vs MongoDB benchmarks are revealing as they show that with beefy hardware, a NoSQL engine does not have to be faster than a well indexed Mysql Table, which might seem the case.

 

MySQL became the most popular relational database on the planet by turning its weaknesses into strengths and successfully leveraging its ubiquity.

 

It would be foolish to predict the same success that MySQL enjoyed for MongoDB, because the underlying market context has changed.

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