A Baroque interlude

November 15, 2008 in tawmas | No comments

Yesterday I heard a beautiful concert on period instruments. An ensemble made of two cellos, organ, luthe and theorb played music by Vivaldi, interspersed by three of Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. After the official program, they played two more pieces by Vivaldi and ended with a transcription from Alessandro Marcello by Bach.

I loved the warm and intimate voice of the cello, and I was amazed at the rich sound of such a small ensemble.

Overall, it wasn’t your average concert, not even your average “authentic performance” concert. A very refreshing experience — and excellent music, which is what matters the most to me!

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Gardiner users mailing list active

November 11, 2008 in gardiner | No comments

The Gardiner users group is now in Launchpad and the mailing list is active. Any discussion related to the design, implementation and use of Gardiner should take place there.

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Trunk is up for scrutiny!

November 10, 2008 in gardiner | No comments

I just pushed Gardiner trunk to Launchpad, and I’m going to push an experimental branch as well as soon as I’ve written down in this blog a few ideas I want to try out.

Gardiner is far from being ready for public consumption, but it could use some scrutiny for interested eyes. If you want to have a look, you will need bazaar 1.6.1 or later to checkout the code, a recent PHP 5.3 snapshot to run the code, and PHPUnit 3.3.4 to run the tests.

Go grab the code with bzr branch lp:gardiner!

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One hour breakage

November 9, 2008 in programming | No comments

Today, I decided to upgrade my development environment to PHPUnit 3.3.4, only to find out that a large part of my unit test were now broken. No, this is not a spectacular bug. Buried under an innocent looking log entry (The mock object code generator has been rewritten), the PHPUnit developers have implemented support for \ instead of :: as namespace separator.

As this move was all I was waiting to upgrade Gardiner to the new namespace syntax, I took the plunge, grabbed the latest PHP 5.3 snapshot, compiled and… suddenly all of my code was looking like gibberish to the interpreter!

Fixing it all was not a matter of find-and-replace alone, but it didn’t take long and was not especially painful. The feeling was funny, though… All of your good code turning into a burning pile of syntax errors is striking. And the corrected code is still looking a bit silly to my eyes. :-)

Now, back to our regular developing.

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« Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. »

(Martin Fowler, Refactoring. Improving the Design of Existing Code)

November 5, 2008 | No comments

One more step towards going public…

November 2, 2008 in gardiner | 2 comments

I just registered the Gardiner Framework as a project in Launchpad and published a teaser page on the Gardiner Project website. This also involved some more non-code work, such as cooking a temporary logo for the project that will make do for the time being.

The code is also getting in shape for hackers to have a look at it (nothing that you can use right away, I’m sorry). I’m going to publish the trunk by November 15, and I might publish an experimental branch very soon. More details on this experimental branch, and the very first code samples, to follow soon.

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