I was originally excited about the embrace that Drupal seemed to have given to testing.

However after spending some time with it I’ve concluded that Drupal really isn’t very test friendly.

I’ve been using Drupal for a couple of years now, and know my way around it pretty well.

One of my biggest frustrations though is that it doesn’t really have an API.

Three interesting posts I’ve read recently

OK so it isn’t quite multi-threaded, but forking and controlling processes in the command line environment is still pretty powerful and something I’ve wanted to do on a couple of occasions.

When developing Drupal one often needs to pull recent copies of the live database into the dev environment.

Loading a dump into the dev database will update any existing tables, add any new ones - but it won’t remove tables from the dev environment that re not in live.

This is a great post by Cory Foy

http://blog.cornetdesign.com/2009/06/hope-is-not-a-risk-management-strategy/

Debian has a very strict policy on free and legal software. This helps keep everyone honest, but sometimes a pragmatic approach is called for. MP3 is a file format that is patent encumbered - but also in universal use.

I’ve just installed Debian Lenny and generally am impressed with how well things are auto detected and configured - so much easier than a few years ago - and in many ways easier than a Windows install where you have to constantly find 3rd party drivers to get things working.

However getting wifi running was a bit trickier (largely because of FCC regulations  affecting licenses and default settings).

This document got me most of the way

xdebug is an immensely powerful tool for exploring what your code really does.

You can get a long way using print_r but ultimately this always requires that you predict the path your code will take - and the tricky bit about debugging is you need it when your predications have gone wrong.

It’s generally pretty easy to set up

Most of the time I can get what I want out of SQL using the standard aggregate functions, but today I needed to find the latest timestamp from any one of three columns.

I achieved this using the GREATEST() function, it’s not part of the SQL standard but is commonly available.