Paul M. Jones

I'm starting work on Savant3, which will be PHP5 E_STRICT compliant, and the work is going nicely; I should have an alpha release at the end of the week. This time around, I'm doing real unit tests, and I can now say I am a fan of unit testing. With Savant2, I used "eyeball" testing (described here) but that was no fun at all.

The real problem with unit tests is not writing them; in fact, it's kind of fun trying to figure out how to break the library and then come up with a test for it. No, the trouble was figuring out how to *do* unit tests in the first place. After cursory reviews of SimpleTest and PHPUnit, I was less than enthusiastic; they are their own applications in many ways, and not that intuitive for the new unit-testing initiate (me).

However, the .phpt methodology easy to approach and apply ... once I found it and figured out how to do it. There is some official documentation here (although it does not seem to be widely advertised), and a tutorial-like overview from Aaron Wormus here at the very end of the article.

Between those two pages, and a day spent experimenting, I am now putting together a unit test suite for Savant3. Let me tell you, it is *much* easier to call pear run-tests *.phpt than it is to load the individual Savant2 test pages in a browser and eyeball them for errors. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to apply unit testing to a complex application, but in a library with limited behaviors, it's relatively easy to do and has a high reward-to-effort ratio.

Update (19 Jan, 23:15 CST): You can find the Savant3 CVS repository here.

I have just released YaWiki 0.20. The change notes are:

* Added "create new page" link in the authentication box, so you can create a new page directly instead of having to edit an existing page (requires Javascript)

* Added "edit this page" link in the authentication box, so you don't need to scroll all the way down to end of the page

* Can now specify i18n strings for submit buttons (Save, Cancel, Delete, etc) and scripts will honor them. See the new Yawp.conf-dist.php file for more information. Per request from Heiner Gassen.

* History links to older page versions now bring up the proper version, not the current version. Per note from Lukas Smith.

As of a couple of days ago, I was able to retire my Windows box completely. My house is now all Macintosh all the time. (Well, except for the Dell laptop I have signed out from the school. ;-)

Until recently, I needed that Windows machine for only one thing: Quicken, my personal finance software. Earlier versions of Quicken for the Mac had been disappointing, so Windows it had to be. However, Quicken 2005 for Mac has worked out just fine; I'm not importing the old Windows data, I'm starting clean, and keeping the old Quicken data as an archive. So goodbye Windows, hello extra desk space, and thank you Jebus.

YaWiki is a wiki-ish CMS, or CMS-ish wiki, primarily for collaborative documentation efforts; it uses Yawp and PEAR as its foundation.

This release adds an enhancement that was removed in earlier versions. The AreaMap page, which allows you to add navigational hints such as tabs and sidebars, now allows you to specify an optional navigation title for the element. This was available in early versions YaWiki, before it supported freelinks; after freelinks became available, navigation element titles were taken from the page title. Due to consistent user feedback, it appears I was unwise to take away the alternate titling, so now it's back. Use a pipe character ("|") on an AreaMap line to indicate the navigation title; e.g., "HomePage | Welcome!" will link to the home page, but the navigation element text will be "Welcome!" regardless of what the HomePage page title is.

You can view the list of changes for this release here.

The Belmont Club today talks about bloggers and blogging as an emergent phenomenon made possible by the internet.

The blogosphere is a specific manifestation -- and by no means the only one -- of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry', which was nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject -- politics, culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective fields. This is exactly what happened in Memogate. People who had designed Adobe fonts and written desktop publishing programs knew the memos were computer generated and were not going to be overawed by Dan Rather's experts asserting the contrary. They were the real experts and to make an impact they did not have to be correct across a large range of issues. They only had to be right in the one thing they knew best and from that vantage could hammer a mainstream pundit into the dust. Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was inevitable.

Read the whole thing; Wretchard talks about digital cameras being the sensory apparatus of the internet, and much more.

Yawp is a single PEAR-compliant class that encapsulates a number of other PEAR classes, and ties them all together with a simple configuration file. This release provides a minor functionality improvement.

Previously, when a hook script was called, it would be included directly in the calling code (e.g., a 'start' hook would be include()-ed in the middle of the Yawp::start() method; same for login, logout, and authErr hooks). This means it would be possible for the included script to use (and possibly overwrite) variables in the calling Yawp method; while not a security violation, that kind of thing could lead to unexpected behavior, and requires a much closer knowledge of the Yawp internals than should be necessary.

To solve this problem, I have added a method called run() -- all it does is include a file. It doesn't even need a parameter (using one would create a new variable in the scope of the function, and we want *everything* isolated for the included script).

function run() { include func_get_arg(0); }

This has the benefit of executing a script in its own scope, so that the hook script cannot accidentally overwrite variables in the calling Yawp method. All hooks now use the Yawp::run() method instead of include().

From Belmont Club:

In an abstract way, the information flows surrounding the Tsunami of December 2004 structurally resembled those preceding the Pearl Harbor and September 11 attacks. The raw data announcing the unfolding threat was there, yet the pattern so evident in hindsight was invisible to those who were not looking for it. But if tsunamis and asteroid strikes are rare events, they are comparatively more common than that still rarer object, the unprecedented event: the something that has never happened before. Threats like that can emerge suddenly out of chaotic systems, like WMD terrorism or new viral plagues. Against such events, specific precautions are impossible because no one can prepare for what cannot be foreseen. The real challenge is not so much to create a new dedicated network of staring systems against known threats but to tie current sensors to systems which are capable of cognition. The most valuable survival asset is situational awareness -- the ability to recognize threats you have never seen before and respond in an evolving manner -- and that capability has not yet come to the world as a whole.

And his concluding words: "...the world is not and was never a paradaisal Gaia but a dangerous place filled with peril both natural and man-made. On the days we forget the ocean is there to remind us."

I love it when other people say what I've been saying (although other people usually say it better). This is from Agoraphilia.

Here are some highlights:

Like it or not, some people are just not college material; they would be better served by vocational or on-the-job training (or by a better high school education than our public schools provide).

Moreover, the attempt to provide universal higher education has the pernicious effect of reducing the value of higher education. Radley Balko explains part of the story: as the supply of people with college degrees rises, the wages of people with college degrees will tend to fall (or, more accurately, not rise as quickly as they otherwise would, since other factors like technological progress tend to drive wages up). But the wage effect is not necessarily a bad thing -- competition is good, even (especially!) among people with desirable skills. My point, at which Radley also hints, is that the incentives created by policies designed to universalize higher education systematically drive down the quality of education.

Why? Three reasons. First, the policies in question typically provide education at far below its real cost. ...

Second, and relatedly, the existence of a large class of weak or unmotivated students changes the incentives of educators. ...

Third, the existence of (near) universal higher education has an undesirable effect on the quality of high school education. Students know, because they are told by their counselors, that a C average is sufficient to get them into a state university. ...

But read the whole thing, really.

This story about a professor of applied physics isn't real, but it sure is funny, and highlights the differences between practice and theory (which of course is much bigger in practice than in theory). I found it via Joanne Jacobs.

A typical Gaston exam question involves asking students to choose between catching a small metal box filled with 20 pounds of lead dropped from a height of 1 foot, or the same metal box stuffed with 20 pounds of feathers dropped from the roof of an 8-story building. Each year, about five students try to catch the feather-filled box and end up in the emergency room with concussions.

"I still think it was a trick," glowered Marvin Stoddmeyer, a student who chose the feathers and failed the final exam, breaking his collarbone in the process. "Gaston said something about momentum and kinetic versus potential energy or something during the year - yadda yadda yadda. But at no point did he specifically warn us not to try to catch a 20 pound object dropped from an 8-story building. That's deception, man."

And then at the end of the article:

Gaston did say he was willing to cut his students a deal and add 10 points to everyone's grade before applying a curve to the final grades.

"Now that's fair," said Brandon Marlowe, one of Gaston's students. "At least he's being honest with us."

Lots of fun for kids, but maybe not as much for the parents. Jim Carrey is thoroughly "on" in this movie as the cruel, somewhat disturbing, but imcompetent-when-it-counts Count Olaf who covets the fortune that the children have inherited. I might go so far as to say he's the star of the film, much in the same way the Joker was the star of the first Batman movie.

The children encounter all sorts hardships and have to use their wits to escape both treachery and forces of nature, but as the eldest of them says: "There's always something." That is, there's always something you can use to your advantage; don't give up, keep looking for a way, there's always something that can help you (even if it's not obvious, even if it's not the "intended" use). So we have a continuing theme of self-reliance and perseverance in the face of impending doom, which is great stuff.

There is another theme that is not as prominent, but still worth mentioning. The children face terrifying animals (snakes and leeches) as well as terrifying forces (hurricanes and heights) but these are not the worst. But the worst things they face are other people: malicious people, indifferent and incompetent people, clever and conniving people. I think the lesson here is that nature can be dealt with, but other people, well, you have to watch out for those. (Compare with my "Rule Number 1".) Family, though ... family is sanctuary.

There is one scene toward the end that really disturbed me: Count Olaf attempts to marry the 14-year old daughter (the eldest). Made my skin crawl while I cringed away from Olaf's leer.

Rating: worth a matinee viewing, but take the kids with you.