Alexis Wilke's blog

I have been wondering, for a little while, how can I properly test my PHP code?! Only my server can run it, right? Well, no, there is CLI. Okay, but how can I make that work in there?

The best answer I’ve got so far: simpletest. This PHP library let you write a test a la C++. You simply create a class derived from a SimpleTest class, and voilà. You are done. Well… you still have to implement test functions. But that is still a breeze.

I used this library to test the PHP eFax classes and got about 4 bugs out (not too bad, considering I wrote over 1,000 lines of code and ...

Today, I found a good one. Internet Explorer has a “Save As …” feature that let you save a page that you are visiting.

The page I have includes a table with a cell that has the align and valign attributes set to center and middle respectively. Once saved with Internet Explorer, these change to vAlign and align and center and middle respectively. Yes. Meaning that the values are swapped. Now the valign says center instead of middle, which will work with most browsers, but the worst is the align that is set to middle. That should never happen.

Have you ever thought that it would be great to write one document including all the translations in a single file? Outside of the fact that this makes the document relatively large, it makes the translation really fast, the translator can see the sentence in all the other languages and translate from that.

I actually wrote an HTML test file with two styles. One is named English and the other is named Français. And since a style entry can depend on the currently selected language, you can write style entries that get hidden when on or the other language is selected.

So, if you ...

Many people think of the Internet as an incredible system that let people of all nations communicate without a problem.

The fact is that governments are in control, as always.

The Internet was born in 1995 and, with it, cheap worldwide communications. The truth is that the Internet, very early, was used as much by programmers as it was by marketers and political minorities. This is where the problem started.

In 1997, France arrested 3 business men of a newly formed Internet company. The charges were: your website is displaying discriminatory information about Jews. They were ...

I heard of Voyager 2 and the fact that it was still functional: 30 years after it left Earth! Just that is amazing to me.

The craft went through the termination shock several times now (5 if I’m correct). This is far. Further away from the Sun than Pluto. And Pluto is on average around 39.5 AU from the Sun. It is even further than Eris and Eris lies at about 67 AU on average.