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Archive for October, 2009

How Do Professional Programmers and Developers Test Their Work?

Oct 29

Posted by softeye in Computer Software | No Comments

This article will cover a few of the techniques and tools used by professional web developers, designers and programmers in their work to test new code and improve their software/websites. Many people don’t know about this, and end up spending much more time on testing (uploading, changing code, troubleshooting) than needed.
This will be very useful to you if you are just starting out in any web development language like PHP, ASP, Javascript and others or if you just have a site that you want to maintain and improve yourself.

Let me start by saying that professionals rarely change and test their code via an FTP client right on their web server. This is because it takes a lot of time to download, edit and re-upload a file via FTP (especially when you’re changing just a line or two of code, or your Internet connection speed is less than stellar) and because they don’t want their visitors to notice any strange things on the website while they are testing the code.

So, what do they do?
They work and test everything locally, which means they have a copy of their website and database in a folder on their computer and they change those files and see the results immediately in any web browser. I’m going to show and explain a few tools used for this purpose in Windows (Linux and Mac OS X are a little different, although you can easily use the tips here for those Operating Systems, too). Read the rest of this entry »

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Cleaning & Restoring Classic Nintendo Games

Oct 26

Posted by softeye in Game Systems | No Comments

The members of the original Nintendo generation have begun to enter their 20s and 30s. Many of them even have children of their own. For many, the onset of adult life comes with an occasional desire to revisit some of the simple pleasures of youth, and there can hardly be a better way to do this than by replaying some of the classic console games that gave us so much pleasure in childhood. Unfortunately, classic Nintendo and Super Nintendo games were cartridge-based and extremely sensitive to dust and corrosion, and when the delicate metal contacts on these cartridges were dirty, the games would often refuse to function at all. When buying a classic Nintendo game on the secondary market today, this problem is even more likely to occur as the vast majority of used cartridges that are available have been improperly stored for two decades or more. Thankfully, with just a few household items, it is possible to restore these games to their original operation while avoiding the inflated prices that are charged by game retailers for cartridge refurbishment. Read the rest of this entry »

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What are the Absolute Best Free FTP Programs for Windows

Oct 22

Posted by softeye in Computer Software, ftp | No Comments

FTP clients are indispensable tools nowadays, especially for web developers. We use them to transfer all kinds of files, including documents, scripts, web pages between our home and office computers and data center servers. The first clients were CLI (Command Line Interface) based, which made them unsuitable for 90% of the people, who were unable or unwilling to learn all the commands that were needed to operate them (which were like a language in their own right, and how many of you want or have the time to learn a new language?).

Then the GUI (Graphical User Interface) versions were developed, which helped ftp clients get to the number 1 spot in the file transfer category, and they are still there today, even though more advanced web interfaces & protocols are slowly taking over.
The drawback of most of those clients was that they were not free. You had to pay a per-user license fee, which could sometimes mean tens of thousands of dollars spent for small businesses (the enterprise sector was already spending millions getting licenses or developing their own tools).

Everything changed when open-source software (which is basically free software, like Linux, of which most of you heard) became more widespread, big companies started supporting the movement and its quality & functionality started being on par or even higher than paid solutions. Suddenly everyone had access to a big list of FTP client software, and a lot of developers started working on their own projects.

There are now hundreds of working FTP clients available, most of them abandoned, but the best ones are still free and being constantly developed. A lot of former paid software is now becoming free, too, which means users have free access to tools which used to cost $30 and more per license. Read the rest of this entry »

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