There Is NO Box » coding

Using Subversion With Your New Ruby On Rails Project

David M. Doolin, PhD — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:45:19 +0000

Ruby on Rails provides an elegant and speedy framework for developing web applications. But having a framework isn’t the only requirement for building a successful software product. More infrastructure is required. Like sensible revision control for distributed development. If you suspected that it isn’t necessary to archive all that boilerplate associated with a Rails project… [...]

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Using Subversion With Your New Ruby On Rails Project

PHP on Snow Leopard: 5 ways to win

David M. Doolin, PhD — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:51:41 +0000

There’s at least five ways to install PHP on Macosx 10.6 Snow Leopard. Probably more. This becomes important when you as a developer want to add some code or a module to your application. You need to know: Where to install said module. How to configure the appropriate runtime to find and execute said module. [...]

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PHP on Snow Leopard: 5 ways to win

Rails 3 and Cucumber: getting started with outside-in testing

David M. Doolin, PhD — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:30:14 +0000

[Update July 16, 2001: This article is ranking very high on Google for "WordPress cucumber," a phrase I was searching for to see if anyone has developed Cucumber features and a test harness for WordPress. Turns out there is a Gem for it. If you are looking to test WordPress with Cucumber, please email me [...]

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Rails 3 and Cucumber: getting started with outside-in testing

Payload-Envelope-Transport (PET) model for peer-to-peer overlay networks

David M. Doolin, PhD — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:58:12 +0000

Preface Several years ago I did some design and programming work in the peer-to-peer (P2P) space. What follows is a few notes I wrote during that time, but never got together for a conference paper. This is a good place to put it, and if you manage to get all the way through it, you [...]

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Payload-Envelope-Transport (PET) model for peer-to-peer overlay networks

Programming Is “Actionary” Blogging Is “Reactionary”

David M. Doolin, PhD — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:16:25 +0000

I have a problem: I need to maintain and extend two blogs, two WordPress plugins, and start work on a new piece of code for a web application. I have to blog and program… …but blogging and programming seem to require slight but important differences in how I work. Blogging requires a different sort of [...]

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Programming Is “Actionary” Blogging Is “Reactionary”

System Modal Dialogs Are (Almost) Always a Bad Idea

David M. Doolin, PhD — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:45:35 +0000

In a bout of frustration induced by being blocked from using my computer due to downloading, installing, updating, or some other task that should be handled in the background, I offer the following. In the interest of outstanding user experiences, here’s our policy at There Is NO Box for employing system modal dialog boxes to [...]

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System Modal Dialogs Are (Almost) Always a Bad Idea

Literate Programming: Elegance and good taste matter!

David M. Doolin, PhD — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:25:17 +0000

[Updated June 7 2009] Easy reading is hard writing. This is true of software, not just prose. I work really hard at writing simple, elegant, easy-to-read code. And the details really matter… I was discussing just this point with my friend David, who teaches numerical computing and software engineering, and we concluded that most students [...]

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Literate Programming: Elegance and good taste matter!

Developing WordPress Plugins on Windows using WAMP, Cygwin and Aptana Studio

David M. Doolin, PhD — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:14:13 +0000

Developing WordPress plugins is not very difficult, in theory. PHP is not a difficult programming language, WordPress is well-designed with appropriate hooks for use by plugins, and there is extensive documentation. In practice, it can be a different story. There’s two main strategies for developing WordPress (and other MySQL/PHP web applications): Using a remote host: [...]

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Developing WordPress Plugins on Windows using WAMP, Cygwin and Aptana Studio

Curious WordPress Crash: Evidence of Black Hat SEO hacking… or simple incompetence?

David M. Doolin, PhD — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:36:41 +0000

The Upshot… Fixing Call to undefined function wp() wp() will fail when wp-config.php file has Microsoft Windows line endings and is served by an Apache server on a Linux host. Changing the line endings from \r\n to \n is easy: run wp-config.php through dos2unix. Errors in unix/linux executable files edited on Microsoft Windows may [...]

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Curious WordPress Crash: Evidence of Black Hat SEO hacking… or simple incompetence?

C/C++ Naming conventions (Part II)

David M. Doolin, PhD — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:25:15 +0000

I estimate about half the code I have reverse engineered has inconsistent naming conventions. Actually, nearly all code I have ever reverse engineered (and most of the code I have written) has some naming inconsistency. At issue is grossly inconsistent naming. Consistent naming provides the following benefits: The sames kinds of objects, entities, types will [...]

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C/C++ Naming conventions (Part II)

Linking in Microsoft Visual Studio C++

David M. Doolin, PhD — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:05:45 +0000

[Note: If you do NOT find what you were looking for in this article, please leave a comment. I'll update as necessary to keep the information accurate, useful and current.] Once upon a time, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, and spent a fair bit of time in the engineering library. I recall [...]

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Linking in Microsoft Visual Studio C++

If you have to ask about linking, you won’t understand the answer

David M. Doolin, PhD — Sun, 25 May 2008 16:27:21 +0000

Just to keep the record straight, I was not the OP on this thread, but I could have been. From a discussion thedailywtf.com asuffield: You lack understanding of how C++ name mangling interacts with the linker. It is normal for this sort of problem to be revealed by the linker rather than the compiler. aib [...]

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If you have to ask about linking, you won’t understand the answer