All things Drupal, PHP, and ...

As the name suggests, this is a book about startups. I have never worked for any startup, but thanks to being a fan of Paul Graham's writings, I find them interesting.

We are now nearing 2012. If you look at the list of classics, it is clear that almost all of them are fictions. Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people is an exception in that it is a classic that is a non-fiction. Now jump to 2112 and have a look at the list of classics again. Harry Potter will surely become a classic. Perhaps Kite Runner will be too.

How I ended up with the book

I sometimes send money to my mom and most of the time I have used Western Union money transfer. Western Union's exchange rates are the worst in the market, but they are ubiquitous and punctual. So I have stuck to them for a long time rather reluctantly.

In 2008, one of my coworkers mentioned a book called My job went to India. I laughed at the funny title. But I did not realize it was written specifically for programmers and simply forgot it. Recently I bought a copy of Andy Lester's amazing Land the Tech Job You Love and immediately landed a new job partly by following the advice in that book.

"Trac" is not a spelling mistake. It is indeed "Trac" and not "Track". But this "Trac" is not referring to rail tracks, running tracks or track suits. This is a software and it is used for issue tracking.

Everything written in this document applies to Trac version 0.12.2. It may or may not apply to other Trac versions.

This writeup is for people who are already using Trac, trying to do what Trac does not do out-of-the-box, and finding it difficult :-)

[The first two parts of "Comet story" were backgrounds to why and how I came up to write a collaborative whiteboard. The application has now been taken off the web :-( This third and final part tells how I actually coded the app.]

[First draft]

[Update: Due to a latest code change in Drupal7's simpletest module, Drupal 7 support is now broken :-( ]

[The first part of "Comet Story" was the story of failure. This part is no different with a slight twist at the end.]

Forgetting Comet was not such a bad thing actually. In the aftermath, I ended up passing the Zend Certified Engineer exam :-) But after the exam, the itch was back; time and again, I'll start thinking about Comet and online whiteboards. Regarding Comet, I was probably thinking deep inside my mind that a magic solution will appear somehow.

A few years ago, I wanted to create a remote tutoring website. I even bought a domain name - remoteguru.info. Then after a long thought, I decided against creating the site and instead concentrate on AI (no, I haven't built R2D2 yet). But in the meantime, I have done some homework on this remote tutoring site. In this piece, I'll tell what happened during that time.

CruiseControl is a continuous integration tool. When any project is listed with CruiseControl, it looks for source code changes in that project at regular intervals and runs various tools everytime the codebase is updated. These tools include build tools, unit test frameworks, coding standard checker, source code documentation generator, etc. Any tool that has anything to do with source code can be in this list as long as they fulfill one criteria - the ability to generate XML output. CruiseControl is written in Java and its focus is also on the Java world.