Today was an absolute sh*t fight. Starting from an entire morning where after I experienced several crashes with Visual Studio Express, that I thought I’d try the full version.

To do this though, I had to expand my VMWare virtual disk. So a quick:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 45GB windevxp.vmdk

… and my virtual disk is now 45GBs! – I then had to resize the windows partition. I’ll post more on this straight after this post.

So with that done, I’m set to install Visual Studio, I thought yeah it should take about 5 – 10 miuntes…

BOY WAS I WRONG!

The installation took like 2 – 3 hours at least, so there’s a large chunk of my day gone. (Great… F*CK!) At this point though, I didn’t care anymore, I was bitter about the amount of work I’ve lost and the disruption caused by stupid Visual Studio Express randomly crashing! I just wanted the whole thing to be installed and start coding again.

After Visual Studio had finished installing, I start coding again, only to experience RAM shortages on the Virtual Machine I use as my windows development environment!

Luckily though, I had 4GB stick of RAM, which my colleague Neil had organised for me yesterday, comin’ in today. I was just itchin to get my hands on that frickin extra RAM, when it finally came, I threw a party! I installed the RAM, started up my notebook. I start making mental comparisons on how much faster it is now, I’ve got 6 GB of RAM now mother f*ckers! (f*cking yes!).

All this excitement was drained out of me when I launch VM Ware and I receive a Kernel panic! Not even it just rebooted back to the start up screen.

When it rebooted, I find that my EXT4 partition has been mounted as read only. Some digging around dmesg reveals that some deleted inodes were being referenced. Pretty scary. I’ve never run into such problems. A quick google search guides me to some information stating that e2fsck will fix this situation - all I need to do is create a start up disk that i can boot into, then run an e2fsck -v /dev/sda2 (/dev/sda2 is where my corrupt files are).

So I burn a start up CD, run it and used e2fsck to fix my hard disk.

Long story short, important VM ware files are missing… I got no answers to this aside from reinstalling. Absolutely terrible! GRRR!

Now, I find myself carving up new designs for ancient projects and looking at the code base, I’m honestly surprised that it has managed to not only run, but make bank for the company it belonged to all these years. Caching really does save your ass, so does having a dedicated server you can pump hardware into.

In the past few weeks, I’ve carved up designs, chased several phantom display bugs (which ended up being typos – you would’ve known if you had been keeping up with my tweets) and went back to coding ASP like it was 1999.

Yes you read right, ASP! I’m currently trapped in legacy code world… negotiating screen real estate and dealing with browser laws and rules that change ever so slightly for each different version of browser software!

Surprisingly, I’m still an epic ASP classic coder. After shaking off some rust, I’ve implemented good old option explicit, eliminated all the “on error resume next” one liners scattered throughout the source code, controlled and centralised the numerous global ADODB Connection and Recordset objects which get shared by different parts of the code… in short I’ve started makin’ the move to make the codebase a little more meaningful.

We opted to go with this option due to time constraints and other plans I’ve got down the track. Needless to say, I’m single handedly taking care of business and by the time I finish, this mission critical website is going to:

• Perform better - I’ve sped up the site by lessening the newbie load cerated by having several Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”) calls, to use just the one.
• Be easier to navigate - At the present moment, the current version of the website I’m workin’ on has 5 different navigation systems with links that point to the same pages but are named differently. I’ve changed this so that the links are meaningful. Related navigation items are grouped together.
• Consistent content layout – Well, as consistent as possible anyway – there are different heading layouts and a lack of consistency in the current site. The new design has design consistency goodness all over it, but due to the html being deeply mixed up with ASP (we’re talking 3000 – 4000 line scripts here) and the time line I’m working with, I really can’t afford to nit pick html. I’m going for a happy middle here.
  
• Have a complete Member’s Control Panel – The website is going to have a Control Panel that works like a control panel rather than a password protected page with a bunch of links with useless info.

All in all, I’m excited about the end product which comes closer as each productive day is complete! What happens from that point is currently being idly, but meticulously planned for. Very exciting times ahead, this should be great!

Last week, I’ve quietly launched project chronus. A project which provides multi site administration system geared for collaboration. Project Chronus makes it easy for our website content admin people at DevProducts to keep track of numerous website projects placed under their control.

Project Chronus is the first project I’ve built with Zend Framework 1.8 and above (as in utilising bootstrapping with Zend_Application) that felt natural. I’ve built several projects with Zend framework 1.5+, but not as comfortably as I did with my recent project.

While Project Chronus is a project to be used for our own internal purposes, it served as a live project with enough real requirements to be effectively used as a sandbox for future projects we choose to undertake and in addition, set (and put to the test) standards for how we do things.

What I used to build Project Chronus:

• Zend Framework 1.10+
  • I used the Recommended Project Directory Structure.
  • Zend_Auth and a Controller Plugin to check for/redirect authenticated/non-authenticated users.
    • ZendX_Doctrine_Auth_Adapter – although we had to change Doctrine to Doctrine_Core on line 168 since we are using Doctrine 1.2.x which does not have the empty Doctrine class extending Doctrine_Core.
  • Zend_Dojo_Form
  • Dojo View helpers
    • TabContainer
    • ContentContainer
    • We also _slapped_ together an EnhancedDataGrid View helper class (using EnhancedGrid in Dojo 1.4) – which supports menus, delete, export and added a togglable search form.This class is in dire need of refactoring, but it does the job – and doing it well so far. I’m waiting to see if Matthew’s proposal gets active and becomes complete, to see how the ZF/Dojo pros do it and will then fashion our and perhaps release some code I would not be ashamed of.
  • Zend_Navigation
  • Zend_View_Helper_Placeholder
  • Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase – Yes, we were unit testing everything including Controllers and Views! Although sadly, we found ourselves reverting to “just code it now” conventions as we raced tot the finish line.So we stopped testing Controllers and Views midway – we did however, unit test most of our model_service code and it’s in the cards to write tests for the untested units to achieve 100% code coverage for controllers and models.
• Dojo 1.4x
  • Several form Dijits.
  • The EnhancedGrid component.
    • Menus Plugin
  • Dojo.xhrGet/Post
  • TabContainer
  • ContentPane
• Doctrine 1.2.x ORM
  • Doctrine Query Language – We use DQL extensively within our Service classes to fetch and use models.
  • SFYAML – Doctrine uses this to process fixtures and schema yml files which we use to setup and update the database schema.
• PHPUnit 3..4.11

Approaches we used to build the Project:

• Service Layer – as per my previous entry: “My Zend Framework Model Layer: Part Service, Part ORM” with a few tweaks included. I didn’t get a chance to include ACL into the Service Classes however.  I went with the Controller Plugin option, because we did not have a requirement for multi-role user system.

  I was a little confused at certain times. For instance, I have a Service Layer for authentication and password which started off as authentication, change password and reset password. Still throwing it around, but aside from this, when I have to deal with actual entities, the Service Layer class is pretty much semantic.

• Authentication Module – Another thing that was slightly strange was that I decided to create a separate authentication module where I put in my login, logout, reset password confirmation (sends email) and reset password (after confirmation) features. With this being in a module, I can just drop this module in whenever these generic features are required.

I will be using this as a base for any web applications we will be building using the Zend Framework. The generic features in Authentication and other unmentioned features such as an administrator dashboard module which has features for managing System Users serve as a great starting point for any web application.

I guess it goes without saying, I’m lovin’ web dev at the moment and I’ve finally got some free time, so it’s back to blogging.

Of course, this is not the first time I’ve taken time off, so I thought I’d warm up my blogging again and talk about what I do to get my mind into gear. So here are 5 things that I like to do to get myself back into focus:

1. Classical Music
   This is more a point about setting a quiet mode for the day. When I have my headphones on with a Play list that has Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven, I know that my thoughts are going to be well insulated against the hustle and bustle of phones, idle chatter and other random office noises. Not only that, but over the years, I’ve come to associate classical music with focus – which is my ultimate goal. I want to have a focussed day and this sets it up for me nicely.
   
2. Pen and Paper up a list of things to be done today
   Yes, that’s right I still use pen and paper when creating a “to-do list”.I use evolutions task manager for this in my day to day, but during times when I need to kick start me off, there’s nothing like a good pen and paper to-do list to keep me focussed on what I need to do. I guess it’s because I am more deliberate when I’m writing up a list rather than typing it up.

   It goes without saying, but after each task is completed, I cross it off and continue on to the next one. This keeps me focussed and helps me build momentum.

3. Get the backlog of easy stuff out of the way first – regardless of how tedious it is.
   Once I’ve got Now this goes without saying, today, this is exactly what I did and even though I’d much rather be in the trenches coding away, I know that I’ll be distracted if I didn’t do this first. So that’s what I did. I answered emails, wrote up quotations and even wrote a letter of reference for someone who used to work for us.

   This is linked directly with my to do list and how it works on building my momentum. As each little task is complete, I plough through the next few until there is no more left.
   

4. Do not let myself be swayed by positive stress
   So as I have now completed the easy tasks out of the way, I usually feel the need to lean back and ‘lax out. I feel like I’ve run a marathon… and won! This feeling is known as positive stress. You’ve poured all your energy and focus into a task and successfully completed your mission now it’s time to report to for debriefing. NOPE! Roll forward to the next task – Unit Testing.
   
5. Unit Testing
   Now I’ve mentioned this before on a previous post – I’m a fan of Unit Testing. Unit Testing really does aid in focussing your mind to achieve tasks at hand. With Unit Testing, I map out what I need to do by way of tests. What functionality a certain model object will have. My models methods start off mapping to business requirements, my tests map to each public method in my models. It’s a beautiful cycle of productivity. I love this stuff!

I apply the same to my blogging as well. I’m not game to launch into my theory of how models should be explicitly returning messages just yet, so I’ll be holding off on that post till tomorrow or the day after. I’m currently listening to Classical music and getting this easy post out first to gain some momentum writing my blog posts.

I recommend you try it out yourself. It’s really something that separates the counter-productive, procrastinating me to the productive, action man that I know I am.

I came accross laserlight back in the day when I was still trying to find a forum to hang out after work or over the weekend.  I ended up at PHP Builder and had posted a few comments and tried to be part of their community. I think what turned me off PHP Builder was that the members that they had were slightly cliquey and were not as friendly as the ones at SitePoint. At the time, they also had some very big trolls. But that I Imagine would have been in the past.

It would have been great to keep in touch with her, she had some brains about her. Hopefully she’s doing well.

So the way Top Commentators works is that it keeps count of those who comment on my blog posts by using email addresses, does a calculation and then displays the top ten people who have been commenting on the home page and each of the pages on my blog, with a back link to their website.

Hopefully, this will encourage my followers on twitter and the rvdavid my blog log community members to get involved and participate in leaving comments on some of the blog posts that I write.

This is my way of providing a window of appreciation for everyone who contributes to my blog posts. So thank you in advance, and thank you to the regular visitors who keep an eye out for my blog. You guys are great!

Introduction

The plea for help was pre-empted with a light-hearted exchange between the Client and I where the client jokingly blamed me for the predicament that they were currently in.

“You said late last year that you had a full schedule and that you were not taking on any new projects until February (resulting in them hiring these guys) [...] so it’s your fault!”

I know the Client very well and they are very reliant upon the technical consultants that they hire to provide direction and complete the project as they have no technical expertise themselves or technical staff internally. This Client needs to be taken good care of (of course, as do all clients) since they put total trust into the technical consultants that they hire and have no real input into the direction of the development aside from the business rules.

The problem is, with the exception of the Web Development company I work for, it seems as though they keep picking the wrong Web Development companies when they are not with us.

From what I hear, the web development companies they hire are full of hype and seem to be stepping into the projects without covering the usual bases. Now, for a company whose average project consists of Mission Critical Web Applications as opposed to your run of the mill Joomla CMS, Sugar CRMs or E-Commerce websites, this is very dangerous.

The Rant: My Clients got burned on this one and it really disgusts me…

In this particular case, it seems as though the Web Development company that they hired did not do their homework and either failed to gather requirements completely or just chose to flat out ignore them. In addition, it seems as though not enough testing was done and the result of this is a Web Application that is in production with enormously glaring bugs similar to  users logging in with the credentials that they have specified during registration and getting someone elses data – this is totally unacceptable!

Fundamental functionality such as logging in should be childs play and the fact that they couldn’t even get this part right not only says a lot about the low level of skills the developers this Web Development company had, but also, the level of incompetence Management and QC had – that is _IF_ they even had someone in QC.

Ahhh so that’s what caused it

The Developers were apparently blaming this on the database software that was being used for the web application. The thing is, these developers recommended the database system to the client themselves! The client gave them free reign with direction and went along with the recommendations made, but when the application was placed into production and had real users – everyone was complaining about performance issues and random errors.

Apparently, the developers were making excuses something along the lines of “oh these performance issues are being caused by the lack of resources and processing power in the server currently used in their  production environment”.

As I was listening to my Client’s tale, I was processing this in my head and my mind was ablaze with several rhetorical questions “why then, did you put it there and if you were unsure of load?”, “why did you not test load first on the production server, prior to releasing the Web App?!”

“Move the App to Another Server with more Power”

So they recommended that the client spend an additional sum to purchase hosting with an external company which had the machines with enough grunt to handle their application. So the client did so and hosted with the Hosting Company recommended by the Web Development company. This marginally improved the performance of the app, but major flaws such as logging in and being allowed to modify someone else’s data along with intermittent runtime errors were still occurring!

“The problem is with the database that we recommended for you”

They came back with “oh the X database does not handle more than Y users at the one time”. Again, when I heard that this is what they said, more rhetorical questions: “Well then why did you recommend it, knowing what the _Web Application_ was going to be used for?!”, “Did you not investigate how much the expected traffic would be?”, if they did, then why did they not test for it?! why did they ignore this very important detail?

“Spend some more money and buy a license for a more powerful database software”

So now the Developers are recommending that the Client purchase a license for a database which handles the required number of users. They are confident that this will fix performance issues with the database and resolve certain bugs that they are experiencing… magically.

The checkmate move from the Development company: “We’re not touching it because you did what we told you to do and moved your Web Application to an External Host which we recommended for you. So now, we don’t have to fix anything”

The Client has requested for the Developer to fix other bugs and make changes to the system. The Development company now says that they will not touch the Web Application as it is no longer hosted in-house. Wait a minute, didn’t the very same developers recommend to move to the an external hosting solution to the point where they recommended the hosting company?! So basically, the Development company set it up so that they will no longer (in their eyes) have to do anything to rectify their mistakes.

That’s absolutely terrible and down right despicable.

This is not the way I roll

I’m not saying that my team and I do not make mistakes, but on the rare occasions that we do, we at least fess up to them and do everything we can in our power to rectify the situation. Whether the Client stays or goes, win or lose, my team and I will always, _ALWAYS_, make things right. One way or another.

When I am presented with a project, I make sure that it is something that my team and I can take on and execute with routine, uneventful excellence. This is the very same reason I do not take on projects due to time restraints or workload. I need to be sure from the very beginning that we can deliver and not put our Clients at risk.

*Deep Sigh* Okay, well let’s lighten up the rant a little…

This is the way I see it. Being a Web Developer or a Specialist of any sort is kinda like being the Hero in stories, the Specialist, the Chosen One, he or she who has come to save the day and provide safe passage to those who cannot face up to the technical challenges that the requirements for Web Applications present.

The Web Developer is the knight in shining armour – the highly skilled, honour bound Protector who (thanks to his years of training and experience whilst meditating in his home office or the university library perfecting his art) is resourceful and quick thinking.

Conclusion: A quick Story for you to imagine…

Now imagine if you were stuck in a story book and you get the dud hero? The one who either turns to the dark side and mauls you or the incompetent one who ends up being captured by bandits or eaten by a Dragon?!

What do you do? Where do you go?! You’re out of options. You’ve got this dragon sniping at you and there’s nothing you can do. You’re trapped. You’re screwed. So you get out your magic business card given to you by the True Hero. But the more you talk to him, the more you see that it’s too late. He’s asking questions like “what type of dragon is it?”, “does it breath fire, ice or acid?”, “does it have wings?” you don’t know the answers so you don’t know what to tell him so he just tells you to run and explore certain avenues, but cannot guarantee anything.

This is the unenviable situation that my Client is now in. Seeing as I’m the story teller, it’s my blog and I’m a self proclaimed Narcissist, I get to be the True Hero… who has super powers… like shooting laser beams from his eyes and can fly and, and… *continues to ramble on about other super powers but you’ve already lost interest at this point and it becomes inaudible* … and he works out …  *you roll your eyes and find yourself muttering “oh please shut up about your stupid super powers already”*.

That’s the end – thank you for reading.

Next post is on Monday AEDST.

Maybe it’s just a routine. So from this point forward, I guess I’m going to retire the “fast 15″ concept and actually just post one post per day and try to fit it inside 15 minutes – I think this is makes sense. It makes the blog’s structure a little less complicated and less gimmicky.

So to conclude, I guess I’m just making a quick announcement to let you all know that the “fast 15″ is now gone and has served as an introduction to a more regular posting schedule.

Nice and quick today – I’m finishing off a double scotch at home as a reward for working so hard during the week and watching “Rich man, poor man on Fox Classics + 2″.

I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, but not listening to the hype of the others who says she’s got some “mad dezign skillzzzzz”. If she has an iota of the design skills that I have been told, that’s part of the way there.

Skill or Potential

The first thing I’ll be looking for of course is Skill – I want this person to have the skillset of a seasoned designer who I can start talking to about a brief and by the time I’ve stopped talking, they will have a sketch concept saying “something like this?” – Will this ever happen? probably not at junior level – but then comes in the potential factor. I am willing to overlook a slight lack in skill given that the person has or seems to have the potential to improve.

Apart from skills and potential other big sellers are attitude and interest. I found that measuring the level of interest a person has in what they do will indicate if they will be able to continue down this career path and attitude will determine how far they will go ie interest is great and all, but if you don’t have the right attitude to execute accompany it, you’ll be starting a lot of things but never finishing it. I hated this about myself when I was younger and make a conscious effort to see things through to their entirety.

Why is Attitude so important to me

To my experience, a person’s attitude reflects what their work ethic will be like. If they are keen and present a good attitude toward work and all that comes with it, I usually look upon them more favourably. Negative attitudes such as chips on shoulders, know-it-all-ism and indecisiveness I can not get by – perhaps I’ll be doing them a favour by not taking them on as the guys in the Development room will eat them alive if any of these are present.

One last thing that I look for as well is how their attitude will fit in with the collective. Chains are only as strong as their weakest link and if there is one, then it will snap that oh so fragile chain of productivity – which of course, is very bad for business.

Why Interest is so important to me

If they come in with a certain lack of energy, to the point where I feel like I’m working hard to try and get them psyched up or at least paying attention during the initial evaluation, then I know that further down the track, I’ll have to keep working to keep them focussed and interested on projects that we will be working on in the future – I don’t want to be working _that_ hard. I _shouldn’t_ have to do this. I love self driven individuals and this is what I look for in people.

I’m looking forward to this meeting tomorrow, win or lose, it should be great!

1. The Web Development Blog Phase
2. The Web Development & Ubuntu Linux Phase
3. The WTF Phase

I’ll give you a brief summary below – within 15 minutes on the first real post on the Fast 15.

The Web Development Blog Phase

For those of you who had just tuned in, this blog started off as a technical blog which specialised in PHP Web Development, PHP Design patterns and anything related to PHP Web Development. This was great at the time because I still had a somewhat basic understanding of OOP and breathed, ate and shat OOP concepts such as Design Patterns, Composition, Aggregation, UML and of course MVC – and I’d post my thoughts on what I think would have been relevant topics.

My readership, I’d imagine would have been comprised completely of Web Developers or those interested in the Web Development field – I think the highest feedburner stat I had was like 32 subscribers.

The thing is that the more I understood about these concepts, the more it was “simple” to me, so I kind of lost track on my progress, it became second nature to think and speak OOP and before I knew it – there was nothing worth “posting” about because I imagined that I’d only be harping on what other people already knew as common OOP knowledge.

So I was posting less and less frequently.

The Web Development & Ubuntu Linux Phase

It was also at this time, when I had been introduced to the Linux Desktop Distro called “Ubuntu” and again, I felt challenged and breathed, ate and shat Linux commands which, by the way, I still do to a certain extent. I posted about what I had to do to get wireless cards working, how to fix certain bugs etc.

This of course is a blogger 101 no-no, because my readership was interested in PHP Web Development – I could picture them saying: “WTF?! I’m using Windows” or “WTF?! I’m using a Mac!” then in unison they say “Where’s the PHP posts at?!” Readership dropped down to about 18 – 19 and peaked at about 24 during this period.

But since Ubuntu now supports my laptop out of the box (kudos by the way guys), I don’t need to tinker with it to get my wireless network card working or configure sound or flash. It just works (well for me anyway) – so as a by-product of that, I really don’t have anything to post aside from “hey I’m installing software from the list of 100 linux software I found on the nets” type posts. So again – no relevant posts.

Late last year I decided to update the look and feel and moved my blog’s domain from blog.rvdavid.net to www.rvdavid.net I put in the necessary redirects, but this does not bid well for my RSS feed subsribers. My feedburner RSS stats went down to about 7 readers – it’s picked up a little again though now we’re back to double digits at 12.

Identity Crisis: WTF Type Blog is this now?

Anyway, point of this post is that now my blog is going through something like an identity crisis: “Is this a Web Develpoment Blog?” “Is this a Ubuntu Desktop Linux Blog?” “Now that I’ve decided to get into body building, will this be a body building blog?” I really don’t know. From where I sit I guess I have the following options:

1. Create separate blogs for each topic I’m interested in main pros being I can provide content and perhaps increase my readership. Main cons being the time factor – I simply just do not have the time. I’m not a full time blogger, I’m running a Web Development Business.
2. Create separate categories and make the links more visible. Pros – the site will be divided nicely and people will know where to go to get content relevant to them. Cons – It may just be a complete waste of time considering readers use RSS or similar syndication methods via their favourite services.
3. Roll on with what I’ve got so far. Continue with the changed focus from the Technical and somewhat barren “Web Development Blog” to the more personal, but not so specific “A Web Developer’s Blog”. Pros – I post more so there’s more content and people actually get the chance to read about what I’m actually thinking outside of the odd “how to integrate doctrine with ZF” or “how to activate the backspace shortcut key to being the back button in firefox” type posts. Cons – I post more, meaning I contribute to the irrelevant, uninteresting noise that’s currently out there on the internet with people saying “we don’t give a fuck about how interesting, quirky, funny your day has been… STFU!” (haha)

My Decision and the Conclusion

I make decisions firmly and stick with them for better or worse – well, for a while anyway and I have decided to run with option 3. Based purely on the fact that the cons could be attributed to my being diagnosed as a paranoid narcissist.

Anyway, I’ve gone way over time with this – my fast 15, has become the slow 30 I’ll be sure to be faster next time. Keep in touch.

• “well, do I really want to do a post just for the sake of doing a post?”,
• “do I have anything entertaining or informative to share?”,
• “will the trolls come and get me tonight in my sleep?”
• finally, there’s “do I have the time to write a post?”.

See at times like these when I’d almost always say “no” and then leave my blog as is.

New Schedule: Well, that’s about to change!

Since yesterday, I’ve decided to get back into the swing of things. I’ve decided to get active again on twitter and mybloglog and it actually felt good. So I’ve started to rebuild my MBL community membership numbers (we’re up to  12 now from 0) and will be posting regularly with the help of my new blog category I’ve decided to call “15 minutes” ”Daily Recap” ”Recap Daily” ”Fast 15″.

About the new “Fast 15″ Category

Fast 15 is where I do a post on whatever I’ve been thinking about during the day or… at that particular point in time. It may be a recap, may be an opinion, may be just some random BS that I wanted to share or blabber on about while bashing on my keyboard for 15 minutes.

Not sure if it will be interesting, not sure if it will be informative, but it will certainly be genuine, coming from me, raw, from the top of my dome.

I plan on posting a “Fast 15″ post every weekday – maybe even some on weekends too if I’m able. So be sure to check out the site. If you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter – let’s keep in touch.