Glen Scott – Keeping it simple

Introduction
This is a quick and dirty guide to the absolute minimum you need to get up and running with PhpDocumentor.
One of the slightly off-putting aspects of PhpDocumentor is the amount of tags (`@`) that are available, which can initially be overwhelming. e.g. see PEAR example:
PEAR sample file
This guide shows you the most [...]

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Good introduction to usability testing on a budget:

Download free chapters on user testing from Steve’s book, Don’t Make Me Think.

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When I sign up for new websites and services, I don’t want to give away my primary e-mail address so I typically set up a disposable address through SpamGourmet or AddressGuard. My thinking is that if a website then decides to spam me, I can just throw away the address and everything is hunky [...]

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EnterpriseDB have kindly created a one-click installer for PostgreSQL, but unfortunately it doesn’t work out-of-the-box, at least not on my MacBook Pro. The problem is down to the amount of shared memory that is configured in OS X; by default it is 4Mb, and PostgreSQL requires 32Mb:

The error message suggests looking at the [...]

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My current project at Yahoo! is using a Subversion repository for version control, as opposed to the usual CVS (thankfully). Unfortunately, it turns out that the svn client installed on Mac OS X Leopard up to and including 10.5.6, is 1.4 whereas the “best” release is 1.5.
It’s very simple to get the newer 1.5 [...]

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A good article from IBM’s developerWorks on the new functional programming features in the upcoming release of PHP 5.3:
What’s new in PHP V5.3, Part 2: Closures and lambda functions

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Whilst I found myself agreeing with most of Jeff Atwood’s post The Problem With Logging, I strongly disagree with his third point:
If it’s worth saving to a logfile, it’s worth showing in the user interface. This is the paradox: if the information you’re logging is at all valuable, it deserves to be surfaced in the [...]

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As well as moving away from a completely open model, Sun’s MySQL has bigger issues:

Sun has announced the official release of MySQL 5.1, a new version of the popular open source database software. Although Sun has declared that this version is ready for widespread adoption in production environments, MySQL creator Michael Widenius says that it [...]

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Spent an interesting morning in the company of many Perl mongers at the London Perl Workshop. Although I don’t use Perl as my primary language any more, it was was interesting to learn about the current movements of its London-based community. The talks I attended were:

The Complete History of the Perle Mongers of [...]

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Prompted by a question posed by one of my colleagues today, “has anyone ever used Lisp?”, I surprisingly found myself being the only person that had.
I played around with it many years ago after being inspired by Eric S. Raymond’s seminal article, “How to Become A Hacker” in which he explained that “getting” Lisp is [...]

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