Working with windows shares in Linux is kinda painful, especially if you are a console geek and don’t like all that magic Gnome and KDE network applets do for you during connection to some smb server(what even worse these connections are only “visible” in GUI not in console).

I just needed something as low-level as possible and at the same time simple and convenient. Using smbmount with friends(smbumount, smbclient) is a possible way to go but I’m too lazy to type it each time and remember all its options

After some googling around it turned out that autofs could be the right tool. I only had to configure it properly… It took several hours of heavy googling, reading scarce blog posts, hacking with autofs and tearing lots of my hear before I finally got more or less acceptable solution for this problem.

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Here are my Russian “AOP in PHP” slides from secon conference which took place on the 13th of the November 2007 in Penza, Russia.

Go grab it if you are interested in Aspect Oriented Programming in PHP or simply want to practice your Russian

Setting up Chiara_PEAR_Server with Crtx front end is a little bit confusing(even if you follow the official guide) but at least it happens just once

Another important matter is maintaining your lovely PEAR channel up-to-date which, of course, assumes nice and easy way of uploading new packages. Actually Crtx’s web interface provides such a way and it works just fine for a couple of packages but if you have more than a dozen of them uploading new packages quickly becomes a boring process(e.g. we have 20+ packages at Limb3 PEAR channel)

That’s why I hacked up a script which automates this process quite a bit

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I’m using Crtx_PEAR_Channel_Frontend-0.3.1-alpha as a PEAR channel front end and I’m pretty happy about it. However there seems to be a bug in the Crtx_PEAR_Channel_Frontend :: getPackageLatestReleases() method at line 500.

It reads:

unset($release[$states[$i+1]]);

While it should read:

unset($release[$states[$i]]);

I tried to email the original author Davey Shafik some time ago to no avail but at least now you are warned

I’m glad to announce the new release of the limb/tests_runner package which reached 0.8.7-beta version! This package ships with limb_unit - a SimpleTest tests “swiss army knife” console based runner. If you’d like to know more about limb_unit utility I would highly recommend reading its documentation since it provides quite unique features like nested fixtures, code coverage and so on(documentation it’s actual for 0.8.5-beta as of this writing, but that’s ok).

This release introduces some unique filtering features which can be quite useful for large sets of tests. Now it’s possible to use filters for the following entities:

• test classes
• test classes’ methods
• test classes’ PHPDoc @group annotation tags

In the rest of this post I’ll describe these new features in detail.
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After having used multiple template engines for the last 5 years I’m a strong believer that the best template engine is…PHP itself We just need some tools to make the usage of raw PHP in templates more friendly and readable.

I have used the forked version of WACT template engine for about 3 years and finally come to the conclusion that its runtime part is way too complicated and non obvious at times. However I do very like the idea of compile time tree of components which generate PHP code. At the same time I just wanted to simplify WACT and make the process of adding new tags much more straight-forward.

That’s why I have hacked up the initial implementation of {{macro}}. To be short, the main idea behind {{macro}} is to use C/C++ alike(but way more sophisticated) macro tags to simplify usage of raw PHP in templates.

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If you have ever tried to setup the Continuous Integration process using one of the well known ‘classic’ tools like CruiseControl you might have been wondering if there’s a simpler and quicker way. I have been wondering too, thus meet Buildman

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