A friend of mine was trying to install PHPUnit on his mac (OS X Lion), but unfortunately, he got stuck during the process.

At some point, he was faced with this error being displayed. We both looked at the problem and first made sure that said file existed. It was the case, weird...

A bit of googling will reveal that this is frequently fixed by appending the path to the pear folder to your php include_path (defined in your php.ini). But in his case, that was already done and it still wasn't working.

Next up was to check permissions problem. Not having read permissions on the file would of been an easy one to fix, but again, this was not the cause of the problem.

At this point you might be asking yourself, how come the file exists, you have permission to read it, but yet, you can't...

Well, the actual problem was that his OS was set up such that the maxfiles was set to 256 and PHPUnit had already reached that amount of open files.

To check if you have the same problem, try running phpunit using sudo dtruss -f -t open phpunit (Linux users will want to use strace -e open phpunit). In your output, you should see the files being opened. At some point, you'll find Err#24, which indicates "To many file descriptors opened". If you have this problem, then the following should help you fix it.

The solution to this problem is quite easy. What you'll want to do is increase the maximum number of descriptors that can be used by a process. You can do it temporarily with ulimit -S -n 1024 (to use 1024 instead of 256). Another way is to edit it and keep those settings (until you change them again) is to use launchctl limit maxfiles 1024 unlimited.

I've been using PHPUnit recently to test a Kohana application I'm developing as my last semester project for my bachelor's degree.

At some point during the development, code coverage generation decided to stop working on my desktop (my remote CI still had no problem).

I started diagnosing the problem, being on Windows, I thought it could be due to the "poor job" I had done on installing php, pear and phpunit. I didn't want to go through the trouble or reinstalling everything though and just did the minimum: uninstall and reinstall phpunit. No success at that point.

I decided to go back a week or two in my SVN revisions, have it generate code coverage and get to the point were code coverage generation would fail. Took around 2 SVN "update to" to get to that point. After that, I tried updating the tests, but the new tests were using new features. So I updated the code first, then started updating the test files one by one. After a couple of files, I hit an interesting message:

ErrorException [ 1 ]: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 543278 bytes) ~ C:\php\pear\Text\Template.php [ 134 ]

I never had that message show up before, which is kind of strange. I would have expected PHP to tell me that same message everytime it tried to generate the documentation but couldn't...

So, quick fix was for me to edit my php.ini so that the memory_limit = 256M instead of 128M.

I was recently interested in getting C# objects to serialize into XML so that I could save and load a configuration out of a file. Sadly, C# support for XML and serialization is far from the best stuff I've seen in programming. But anyway, here's what this post is about: using DataContract with a bit of extension magic to get anything to be serializable into XML!

One small problem when you use the Serializable attribute of C# is that you cannot serialize dictionary directly and we all know dictionaries are a VERY useful structure to have serialized. One easy way to have serializable dictionaries is to use the DataContract attribute instead. It implies a bit more code compared to the version where you use the Serializable attribute, but not that much more (mostly the WriteObject and ReadObject lines).

I haven't coded any of this, so thanks to user Loudenvier from Stackoverflow.com! This solution allows you to turn ANY object into an XML string representation. It also allows you to turn that string back into an object representation. Very useful.

public static class SerializationExtensions
{
    public static string Serialize<T>(this T obj)
    {
        var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(obj.GetType());
        using (var writer = new StringWriter())
        using (var stm = new XmlTextWriter(writer))
        {
            serializer.WriteObject(stm, obj);
            return writer.ToString();
        }
    }
    public static T Deserialize<T>(this string serialized)
    {
        var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));
        using (var reader = new StringReader(serialized))
        using (var stm = new XmlTextReader(reader))
        {
            return (T)serializer.ReadObject(stm);
        }
    }
}

How to use example

// dictionary to serialize to string
Dictionary<string, object> myDict = new Dictionary<string, object>();
// add items to the dictionary...
myDict.Add(...);
// serialization is straight-forward
string serialized = myDict.Serialize();
...
// deserialization is just as simple
Dictionary<string, object> myDictCopy = serialized.Deserialize<Dictionary<string,object>>();

Source: http://www.stackoverflow.com

I've just stumbled upon a series of articles from Richard Fine that were written in 2003 which describes the basics of a game engine he calls Enginuity. It lays the foundations to basic memory management, logging, kernel and tasks management and much more. An extremely interesting read. Sadly, you can read in the articles that this was projected to be a series of more than 8 articles, but it seems it stopped at the fifth article. If anyone knows where to find the rest (if it exists), I'd be grateful!

On GameDev.net: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must be a software developer," says the balloonist.

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's of no use to anyone."

The man below says, "You must work in business as a manager." "I do," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're in the same position you were before we met but now it's my fault."

Source: Coding Horror