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Links for 2008-11-18

Posted by mattc at Nov 19, 08 05:05 AM

• Maven: Broken By Design - The Fishbowl

  Maven: 'It's like walking up to a shop assistant and asking him to help you find a book, only to watch him dust shelves for fifteen minutes first."

Maven Notes

Posted by mattc at Nov 18, 08 09:40 PM ... Comments (0)

I'm trying out Maven at work, it's not much fun.

It solves some of your problems quite neatly, like JAR dependencies. The subscriber concept works conceptually (ie. in Ant terms, targets listen out for standardised events rather than having to chain them together), but all the documentation I've read explains things in such a roundabout way that it just confuses matters. Here's a helpful quote from the O'Reilly Maven book (page 182),

The interesting phase in the clean lifecycle is the clean phase. The Clean plugin's clean goal (clean:clean) is bound to the clean phase in the clean lifecycle. The clean:clean goal deletes the output of a build by deleting the build directory.

Got that? Rather than,

<target name="clean">
<delete dir="${build.dir}"/>
<target>

One good thing: Maven has a published XSD, which I don't think Ant has ever bothered with.

Maybe I'll get it in a week or two.

Links for 2008-11-17

Posted by mattc at Nov 18, 08 05:05 AM

• Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - ScottGu's Blog

  First acknowledgement of Silverlight penetration from MS: about 25% worldwide of either version. Very probably lower than this in the UK due to a lack of mainstream applications, certainly according to my own stat's. Still, quite positive figures, considering v1 was only launched this time last year.

• Openstage IP Phone User

  My telephone has an IP address, this is it. Toaster soon to follow.

• Summary of the two current CSS Constants proposals - CSS3 . Info

  This will make things a little more convenient but I'd prefer to concentrate on some higher level representation of CSS, bundled with the rest of your view logic (in xsl, php or whatever)

• Ditching the Semantic Web?

  Ack, rarely do I see a use case that couldn't (or hasn't) be acheived in some non-semantic-web way, but maybe I just don't get it.

Links for 2008-11-12

Posted by mattc at Nov 13, 08 05:05 AM

• Ant XInclude task

  Testing out xinclude to create modular xml documents rather than custom xml+xsl solution of slurping one file in to another via xpath's document() function.

Links for 2008-11-11

Posted by mattc at Nov 12, 08 05:05 AM

• Creating Applications with Amazon EC2 and S3 | O'Reilly Media

  Walkthrough of bundling process.

• XInclude, xml:base, and validation

Links for 2008-11-10

Posted by mattc at Nov 11, 08 05:06 AM

• Lovely Systems » sysadmin

  EC2 walkthrough.

• Selenium Grid - Run the Demo on EC2

  Selenium + EC2 as the Forge's CI environment.

EC2 running Windows running on OSX

Posted by mattc at Nov 10, 08 10:13 PM ... Comments (0)

I copied what Paul did.

It's ok for browser testing, I guess you want to build a custom image with your favourite browsers rather than the off-the-shelf one. My main exploration is to see if I can use it to host an instance of Selenium RC to which I can point our CI server, otherwise we'll have to continue to use a bespoke underthedesk^tm solution.

Links for 2008-11-05

Posted by mattc at Nov 6, 08 05:34 AM

• Kallahar's Place: PHP XSS (cross site scripting) filter function

• Bob calls the US election.

Links for 2008-11-02

Posted by mattc at Nov 3, 08 05:05 AM

• BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Food Programme, The El Bulli Effect

  Great musings on creativity at El Bulli.

Links for 2008-11-01

Posted by mattc at Nov 2, 08 05:05 AM

• TOP Pagerank List | XSSed.com

  A list you don't want to be on.

Links for 2008-10-31

Posted by mattc at Nov 1, 08 05:05 AM

• phpquery - Google Code

  XPath is a bit of a performance hit, and using the native DOM is too much like code munging, so perhaps a nice middle ground is nicking the jquery DOM api selectors to access parts of the xml you are consuming.

Links for 2008-10-30

Posted by mattc at Oct 31, 08 05:05 AM

• PHPUnit Book

  Free...

Links for 2008-10-27

Posted by mattc at Oct 28, 08 05:05 AM

• Mozilla Labs » Ubiquity

  Finally had a chance to play with this today, it's a bit like Opera's custom search functionality with a much slicker interface, nice editing tools and shareable too. So it wins.

Links for 2008-10-26

Posted by mattc at Oct 27, 08 05:05 AM

• HTML Purifier - Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way!

• Category:OWASP CAL9000 Project - OWASP

  Test runner for web security.

• OWASP developer security guidelines

• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet

  Test suite for XSS.

• Benjamin Holmberg » Blog Archive » Sanitizing User Input in PHP: Bobby Tables Strikes Again!

  Bobby Tables.

Links for 2008-10-25

Posted by mattc at Oct 26, 08 05:05 AM

• Information Design Patterns

  The display patterns section is interesting.

• Polar and Cartesian Coordinates

  Thinking about the semantics of geospatial information. Polar coordiantes better model everyday conversation than Cartesian, Eg. you might say, 'x is 5 miles noth-west of y', whereas you wouldn't say, 'x is 3 miles west and 5 miles north of y'.

• Beardyman Makes Synthesizers, Drum Machines, Musicians Obsolete » Synthtopia