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Testing PHP properly...

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 ...

Change the encoding of a Postgres database

Ever wondered how you could change the encoding of one of your Postgres database?

I have had that problem several times, and in most cases people tell you to:

  1. Dump your database, may have to use –encoding on the command line
  2. Drop the existing database (or rename it)
  3. Create a new database with the proper encoding
  4. Restore the database

The problem is that there is no support for altering the encoding of a database. The ALTER DATABASE does not include that option. And since it should be really rare, it makes sense.

Now, there is an easier way ...

Security Issues with the US government

Some people, I have noticed, have been skeptical about the amount of care taken by the US government and agencies in the last few years. Companies are also catching up. The security measures change every year, when not every semester, every month and for some, probably every day.

For sure, making sure that the most wanted information remains top-secret, you need top level security features on your network. I do not know how much data is of interest, but I found out today that there are hackers attacking the federal websites quite a bit…

“The Pentagon last month acknowledged ...

Server Switch!

For the last few days, Doug and I have been working on switching from our old server to our new server. The new one is with JohnCompanies.com that offers VPS (Virtual Private Servers). It was a nice surprise, the computer we have access to has 8 processors running at 3Ghz (”proven” by the Linux Bogomips computation: 5985.31) And so far, I’ve seen about 0.8% of one processor being used. The rest is 100% idle most of the time!

Made to Order Software Corporation unveils Order Made!®

John Barakazian—owner of lunchtime hot-spot Café Dolce in Rancho Cordova, California—was looking for a way to make it easier for his customers to place orders for the busy lunch rush. m2osw Vice President Doug Barbieri suggested a system where busy office workers could place orders in advance using the Internet so their food could be ready and waiting for them. Made To Order Software then developed Order Made!®, and now the Café Dolce website features a new link to the fast, secure, and easy to use Order Made!® System.

With Order Made!® customers can ...

Cross-platform software development and engineering

Well, It certainly seems that Dell and HP are defining the trend of the future by offering their computers with Linux pre-installed. For software developers to catch up to this trend, .NET and other mono-platform development tools will not cut it! Retooling of code is inevitable so when you are faced with this crossroads do not spend the time and money on a band aid. Check out molib and sandbox and learn how your software development efforts can go cross platform once and for all! Save expensive development hours, improve the quality of your code, and make your code base more safe and secure. ...

New Professional Developer Tools

Made to Order Software Corporation is proud to present three new products, announced at the Linux on Wall Street conference in New York City, New York!

  • molib™

A robust application toolkit library, molib gives you the power to develop cross-platform applications quickly and easily. It abstracts operating system calls through C++ objects (i.e. moFile and moDirectory abstract access to the file system, moDatabase to a database of your choice and moApplication to the system environment). This lets you write code once to create applications which compile and ...

Increase Security with a Reverse Proxy Server

What is Reverse Proxy?

There are three excellent reasons to switch to a Reverse Proxy Server right away:

  1. Protect all of the sensitive data on your servers;
  2. Have only one gateway to the outside world;
  3. Ease the load on your web server by allowing the reverse proxy server to distribute the requests.

Figure 1 below presents a simplified setup of a Reverse Proxy Server.