Notes on codes, projects and everything
It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.
After publishing the previous note on setting up my development environment, I find myself spending more time in the CLI (usually via SSH from host). Then I find myself not needing all the GUI apps in a standard Ubuntu desktop environment so I went ahead and set up a new environment based on Ubuntu Quantal server edition beta-1. For some reason my network stopped working and didn’t really want to spend time finding out the cause, so I reinstalled everything again today using the final installer, as well as the updated Virtualbox 4.2.6.
I have been following this excellent guide written by Benjamin Thomas to set up my virtual machine for development purpose. However, when I am starting to configure a Ubuntu Quantal alpha machine, parts of the guide became inapplicable. Hence, this post is written as a small revision to the previously mentioned guide.
Been trying my best to stick to the well-known UNIX Philosophy – “Do one thing and do it well”, so I have been breaking down my projects into numerous pieces of small tasks and rely on existing tools whenever possible. One of the existing tool that I use a lot is the GNU sort tool. Generally sort utility is really doing fine and dandy without having to configure anything, at least not until I realize the problem that leads to this post.
Just a quick update to the previous post, the virtuoso storage engine works with redland provided the required packages are properly installed (yes, yes, yes, I know I haven’t release my PHP OO wrapper for Redland). Now that the package is installed, we need to do some configuration so that Redland can use it.
I wanted to try using virtuoso as the storage engine for Redland but unfortunately there is no librdf-storage-virtuoso package for Ubuntu. After getting some help from @dajobe, I attempted to build the packages myself. Although it takes quite some time to build packages, but not too difficult it seems.
Sometimes I really doubt about the advantage of recycling old stuff to fund for new units beyond goodwill. Sure you get to convince yourself that you are saving the environment by doing so, and it also saves money in the long run. However, I didn’t realize how much it generates it may be after trying to work out an answer for a fictional IQ question.
I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.
Maintaining state in Javascript is not too difficult once you catch the idea. However, as I am not a super brilliant programmer, it takes me some time to find a way to maintain state as YUI Event does in jQuery.
As the name implies, Resource Definition Framework, or RDF in short, is a language to represent information about resources in world wide web. Information that can be represented is mostly metadata like title (assuming the resource is a web-page), author, last modified date etc. Besides representing resource that is network-accessible, it can be used to represent things that cannot be accessed through the network, as long as it can be identified using a URI.
array_map function is a function that I use the most in my php scripts recently. However, there are times where I want to pass some non-array into it, therefore often times I have code like the snippet shown below:
$result = array_map(
'some_callback',
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_string'),
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_other_string'),
$some_array
)
It doesn’t look good IMO, as it makes the code looks complicated. Hence, after seeing how the code may vary in all different scenarios, I created some functions to clean up the array_map call as seen above. Code snippet after the jump