Use phpunit’s bootstrap option to tear down & recreate your database prior to each test run, not fully isolated but it does give you a test database to work from rather than running your tests against your dev db.
As a kind of follow up to my Digital Region post the other day, I was trying to track my recorded delivery letter through the post office website, and was met by this on the front page of the Post Office website
Why are the Post Office advertising mortgages on the front of their website?
Oh well, on to find out where my package got to:
hmm, so I posted a first class recorded delivery letter a week ago, and it’s “being progresses through our network”, but at least I can get a Post Office mortgage. Maybe my payments each month would be progressed through my own delivery network too.
Here is a copy of the text of a comment I left on the above ISPReview article.
Digital region would do better if the concentrated on installing their product in places where there were people to use it.
I went to their Twitter feed looking for a specific example of an install in the middle of nowhere near where I live but I didn’t need to find it, their latest tweet was that this caravan park & storage land in Doncasternow has fibre broadband.
Or perhaps this farmhouse in Barnsley (tweet) or this one over the road. These are all examples of places that have been enabled since late/end of January.
If DR can honestly say that these kinds of places are all that’s left to enable now that the rest of the populated areas of South Yorkshire are covered then fine, but as a resident of an area that only got ADSL2 at the end of last year and a BT fibre install date for our exchange of “2013” (and even that’s slipped from 2012) then you can understand why I feel a bit cross about postcodes with single farmhouses and dog tracks being enabled with tax payers money.
Are BT seriously going to consider spending the large amounts of cash to upgrade exchanges in areas covered by Digital Region? They’re either holding on in the ever decreasing hope of taking over their network, or leaving the rollout as long as they can because the competition of DR means their ROI is much lower, meanwhile large areas of South Yorkshire are left to become digital backwaters.
In vim you can use
g; g,
to move backward & forward through the changes in the current buffer.
Mum,
I don’t usually send things round asking others to sign them, but I think this is important enough to do just that!
A little back ground.
Richard O’Dwyer is a student at one of the unis in Sheffield, like many others he ran a website in his spare time. Richard’s site let people search for links to TV shows on the internet. The US wants to extradite him to stand trial where he faces up to 10 years in jail.
What he did is not a crime in the UK, he has not been arrested & has not been charged with any crime in this country, and none of the equipment used for his site was in the US. For example, click on the link below, it will show you links to places where you can download CSI New York, exactly the same as Richard’s site did, the difference being this is Google.
The treaty which is being used to extradite him was put in place to make the extradition of terrorists easier, it was set up by the Extradition Act 2003, you can read more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Act_2003
Have a look at the kinds of people who are being extradited, none of them are terrorists, except Abu Hamza and HIS extradition has been blocked all the way through.
Why do I think this is important enough to spend my whole lunch hour researching & sending this email? Because this amounts to censorship, and we cannot allow something as valuable as the internet to be censored on the mere accusation of copyright infringement. Linking to other content is what the whole internet is based on and if you let someone tell you you can’t link to something because it’s copyright, then the whole internet breaks.
All those photos & jokes you send out Mum? Someone owns the copyright on those, and you do not have the original creators permission to use them, in that sense what you are doing is worse than what Richard has done, you are distributing copyright material which is a civil offence, linking to them on the internet is not.
Please take the time to sign it, and once you have, you have my permission to distribute this email ;-) in fact I actively encourage it!
Not © Stuart Grimshaw 1012
For my talk at Gistlab next week …
At last years PHPNW, @LornaJane did a presentation that introduced most of the audience to Link Tuesday, where basically everyone in the department sends round a bunch of interesting links every Tuesday. It’s even spawned it’s own website http://linktuesday.com
Here’s my email I sent today:
First off a handy glossary for CDR related terminology that I found useful over the weekend:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/CDR+mediation
A quick guide for creating & using GPG keys to sign & encrypt email. Who else has a key that they use?
and finally, something to make slide shows a lot more interesting:
Here’s my idea for a Reality TV show, and if anyone wants to pick it up, you’re welcome to it.
Week 1: Open auditions, any budding football manager can come and pitch how they would bring success to Chelsea Football Club, those with the right attitude, the right CV and the right experience will be chosen by the show’s 4 judges, John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and head judge Roman Abramovich. Succesful applicants will be taken on to week 2: Boot Camp!
Week 2: During boot camp, the candidates are put through a series of gruelling trials. They must coach Chelsea’s junior team with all their tantrums and all the weirdos, managers with too little experience, too little stubble, not enough dress sense and Sven Goran Ericsson are told they won’t be making it through to week 3.
Week 3: In a dramatic twist, John & Frank persuade Roman to give Sven a 2nd chance and they’re installed in their Japanese style pods at the Cobham Training Facility
Week 4-10: The Live TV Show airs on Sky Sports 5 in 3D, and Chelsea fans are invited to ring in and vote off their least favorite manager.
The 8 remaining managers, Roberto Dimateo, Jose Marinho, Pep Guariola, Rafa Benitez, Gus Hiddink, David Moyes, Sam Allardyce, are put through their paces each & are set challenges by the judges. They all do well until they have to coach Fernando Torres and they come unstuck as Fernando loses all the balls into the river.
Week 11:The show hits crises point as the Chelsea fans have voted off all the managers, leaving just Jose, who storms out when he can’t choose what biscuits are served in the green room.
The current plan to take over Blackburn Rovers by us fans has stepped up a gear today with the the official announcement of the formation of Blackburn Rovers Supporters Investment Trust, it’s a brilliant initiative, and one every Rovers fans should get behind, it represents our best hope for a positive outcome to our troubles.
In that vein, I’m going to present a way in which the club could better engage the fans and better use the website to communicate in a way that no other club currently does. The club would need to ditch their current partner and bring the website under the control of the fans.
The club’s website should be about 3 things, selling tickets, selling good quality merchandise the fans want to buy & be the focal point of the club’s online community.
Lets start at the beginning, and get rid of that awful “Click here to enter” page at the beginning, they didn’t work back in 1997 when they were popular, and they do nothing but confuse visitors. Imagine having to walk round a hairdressers before you could enter the supermarket, it’s the same thing and equally a waste of potential customers time.
Next, the website should be a portal for fans to feel part of their club, so I would ditch all the adverts for credit cards, gambling & financial products, give the ticket store & club shop more prominence and improve the usability of the store in general. I worked as a Senior Engineer at one of the UKs leading online electrical retailers for 3 years, and the lessons learned there would apply equally to selling club merchandise.
Players should feel as much of the community around the club as the fans, I’d want the players to provide content for the site, but not the normal PR spun stories we get now, let them post what they want, let them be honest about the performance, tell the fans what happened in training.
I’d give the youth team a couple of video cameras and let them make videos to post on the site, get the local schools & college involved in editing and uploading the video, learning what it takes to produce good quality videos. I’d give all players access to the club’s Facebook & Twitter accounts and let them post. I’d make it clear when players sign hat they are as much a part of the community around the club as the fans.
I’d start to use technology like Google Hangouts to have live 2-way conversations with fans, all press conferences would be broadcast this way too, with fans able to ask questions as well as journalists.
News and articles could be written by fans, there is a very healthy community of bloggers, fan sites & fan reporters and most of not all the writers for these sites would jump at the chance to write content for the official site, especially if they got the kind of access to the club that is currently reserved for “real” journalists. The site should link out to these sites as well, become another site in the network of Rovers related content on the internet.
So to summarise, the club site needs to drop the advertising of non-related products & services, re-focus on being a place for fans to gets news & merchandise and to be able to interact with players and staff at the club.
What do you think? How would you improve the clubs website? How could it become a better tool for making fans feel more involved with their club?
