Mental notes to myself

I was trying to explore alternatives for slave/master architectures and gave a try to federated tables.

No this post is not about Sun buying mySql.

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I’ve just changed the design of my blog. I’ve tweaked a template from styleshout.com to wordpress. If you see any bugs here and there let me know. When it’s good I’ll be giving this away.

I have a feeling this year will be good.
Have great year everyone!

Nobody denies the benefits of testing and especially unit testing.
However I’m still having hard time understanding the baised testing methodology of phpunit or other automated unit testing frameworks.

In test driven development, programmer writes a test then fills in the code to make the test pass. I find this extremely baised.
Alternatively, I find coding baised test cases that can cover the code 100% gives the developers a false sense of safety. This is rather a phylosophycal discussion than practical.

For complex scenarios of testing, can unit testing cover everything efficiently? How efficient is to find and write the correct test cases that test everything throughly? Does any company have the time and money for this (or they are willing to pay for their testers to write code for 100% coverage) ?

I really like the idea of php unit and automated tests. However for web, I’m still for the black box testing, if there is a good way of analysing the efficiency of blackbox tests.
Feel free to comment.

Updated: typos

I was reviewing the formula 4C + V + P = Web 3.0

This is what I think:
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I’m looking for 2 PHP Programmer for the company I’m working for.
I’ll be hiring a Senior and Intermediate PHP programmer.

If you’re in Montreal, QC and intrested in drop a comment I’ll contact you.
This is not a webmaster/designer etc job, if you’re a pure PHP programmer I want you!

Position: Full Time, Permanent
Industry: IT Multimedia/Entertainment
Qualifications: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Javascript (Ajax)
Assets: CSS, Java,Oracle, PL/SQL
Important: Version Controlling (CVS,SVN or BitKeeper), Debugging (XDebug, Zend or DBG)
Start Date: Immediate

PS: If you are a PHP Guru, you should definately apply, it’s a well paid job.
PSS: This ad is valid until the end of 2007.

Important update: If you are not already living in Montreal, you don’t need to apply. Thank you.

You’ve just bought a new dedicated server, what should you do before moving?
Check what is promissed and what is given!

1. Check the CPU
   # dmesg | grep "CPU:"
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (2813.54-MHz 686-class CPU)
2. Memory
   #dmesg | grep memory
real memory = 1072627712 (1022 MB)
avail memory = 1040084992 (991 MB)
3. Hard Disk
   #di -th | grep Total
Total 104.4G 1.2G 94.8G 9%

4. Number of IPs (I’ve masked my ips with ?)
   
#ifconfig -a | grep inet
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000


It was weird when I see a keyword, that I’ve regularly watched, poped up at a .gov site.

Some blackhats, hoping to get the page rank benefits of a .gov site, hacked the forum of the site and placed a gateway like page. I guess search results come from google as well.

Check it out yourself.
nevadacityca.gov

PS: the keyword I was looking was the name of one of my sites, not cealis lol.

I’m trying to understand how google handles the duplicate contents and wondering why some sites are luckier than others, almost having an immunity for duplicate content issues.
Some collective sites like answers.com is seems to be immune to the duplicate content penalties.
See this page about smokey bear(PR4). Correct me if I’m wrong but all I’m seeing is a rip of wikipedia page(PR6) along with lots and lots of advertisements.
Who can really say that this page benefits surfers when wikipedia page is exactly the same thing. I guess answers.com is taking this duplication tactics to the roof. Google is also helping them to drive traffic by hardlinking to their content as the “definition” reference.
I’m expecting no comments from Matt Cutts , just thinking laudly.

I was checking for the Free Content category on DMOZ.org and I saw it’s updated. I also tried the check the google version. Big surprise! The category does not exist in google’s dmoz copy.

I’m not sure if this is on purpose, but it’s most likely that google is also moderating the biggest moderated directory on the net. Hehe that’s a good one.

See it yourself (I’m not sure for how long this links will be alive)
Dmoz link : updated around June 4th
Google’s Link: doesn’t exist as of June 5th

Also I’ve found if you search for url that exist on dmoz’s certain category, google returns a result but the link is simply for oh for.
See the first link.

Last notes: Yahoo’s directory doesn’t have the category too. I kind of understand it since the category is under Business branch and it’s a paid service for yahoo to appear under that branch.

I was reading a post at webmaster’s world, and started laughing after reading the opener:

Are Scrapers Exploiting the sitemap.xml file?

Many people seem to posting saying after adding sitemaps they are suffering a problem with content. Could sitemaps.xml be beeing abused. Is the new content title and meta tag scraped before the sitemap is submitted to google by sitemap generators?

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