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The latest version of VMWare Fusion lets you run virtual machines in headless mode. The strange thing is that it’s not enabled by default. To enable it you need to run the following on your console:

defaults write com.vmware.fusion fluxCapacitor -bool YES


A Mac OS X style HUD window. There is a base class that you extend for whatever component you want. Check out the work in progress here. I will be making this open source under a liberal license in the coming days, along with the Sheet style window.

I’ve been working on a project that has really put me through the ringer in terms of ultra lean code (both html and JavaScript). Having toolkits like MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, and the like, who needs to do any ugly JavaScript code anymore? I didn’t realize how spoiled I had become until quickly realizing that even in their smallest form any library was simply too large for this project. (This is for an embedded browser with very tight CPU/memory limits). So I had to roll my own, and was not happy about it. I did however learn some new tricks, like the delete operator in JavaScript.

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on implementing interesting views of data. Some ideas I am working on will be interactive, others will not. I have finally found a neat solution that will probably work for both in most cases. Here is a demo (nodes are double-clickable). This is more of a proof of concept showing tree and leaf; the actual graphical display is probably going to be a combination of size and spectrum colors (think heat map).

You would think that a heavy-traffic site such as CNN would want to have everything tuned up for speed, response time, etc.. Not to mention best practices, but anyhow. So what am I talking about? Gobs of resources, and gobs of requests. Take a look at their JavaScript alone! 34 requests topping out at OVER 1 MEGABYTE!!!!:

Amateurs.

I’ve built a couple of utilities to monitor my production web servers and a few select web applications. The server monitor polls the server on a 5 second 10 second interval and displays the goods. The web application monitor (not pictured) shows current work queue, number of users online, and other application-specific information both in textual data as well as graphical representation (3D pie, and histogram). Here is what the server monitor looks like:

I’ve been using this debugger for 3 or 4 years now (and adding to it, making it better, etc., etc. for at least that long). I started working on it mostly because when I was doing some development work in Cold Fusion (blek!) I really liked the debugger, especially for looking at executed queries and profiling. So I took some of those ideas and built some plugins for ADODB, Memcache, an exception handler, and a profiler with multiple counter support. Here is what it looks like (image cropped, but the debugger is displayed inline after the footer of an HTML template):

I am a little surprised I had not heard of eAccelerator before. Turns out it is a fork of the older Turck MMCache (no longer under development). Anyhow I installed it on my development server and production server tonight - with very promising results.

I recently saw a Prototype/Scriptaculous version of this and wanted something like it to use with MooTools. This is still very much a work in progress, but I’m putting up a little demo now. I am planning on adding multi-sheet support (with tracking and auto-switching), and maybe a couple of other simple things. After that I’d like to package the class and support files up and offer it for others to use. Check out the demo!

I haven’t talked about my PHP framework in quite a while. One feature that I really like is the unit testing and functional testing components. Using the framework, you can easily write unit tests that automatically get run from the test harness, complete with output. The functional testing works using the Selenium web runner. If you aren’t familiar with Selenium, you should be! I use the Selenium IDE (FireFox extension) to record a given test and using the custom formatter it produces PHP code for use in the web runner. What you end up with in the framework is a complete automated testing facility.

I am also using the log4php logging mechanism in the framework. Anything Log4J can do, Log4PHP can do too. Even Chainsaw. I can fire up Chainsaw and get remote logging from my webapps, as well as remote logging/debugging within any JavaScript I am using. I wish I had the time to properly document, clean up, and package the framework for distribution. But then again, I guess it would be “Yet Another Framework”. Either way, it’s a better framework for me than any of the popular ones.