I am not usually fond of doing much frontend stuff, but I do like to dable in some javascript from time to time. Nothing fancy, no node.js, coffeescript and the likes for me. I still feel like making applications on the server side, and have the client just show things to the user. If needed some 3rd party javascript library or framework to make my life easier, and that’s about it.

For a while I was trying to figure out how to convert the Gnucash XML file to an SQLite3 database. From version 4.2, Gnucash supports PostrgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite3. Since then, the conversion is apparently simple as choosing File -> Save As … and picking a different data format. Thing is, my Gnucash instance didn’t have that! After some google-fu, turns out I was missing a library called libdbi-dbd-sqlite. After installing the missing library, suddenly the save works as it should. Why Gnucash didn’t pull this dependency (even if it’s optional) when I first installed it, is beyond me. But it’s there now and I can be on my marry way to draw fancy graphs with all this easily accessible, sweet data.

From time to time I browse through the local board shop’s website, especially the “Longboard” section, because, well, I have recently developed this passion for longboarding. Few weeks back, just sometimes before Christmas, I was doing the same. Just casually browsing around, nothing that would catch my interest. And then, there it was, at the bottom of the page. A banana board. “Oh my, a real beauty”, I thought to myself. The price was also in the affordable range. But, a problem was that I really couldn’t, justify to buy it.

2012 was a real fine year, filled with travel, friends, work, longboards, books. A couple of beers found their way in my belly, too. The best part is that I honestly can’t remember that a single bad thing happened this year. Most likely because it didn’t. Pure awesomeness.

I've graduated from Subotica Tech back in 2009., and earned a BsC in electrical engineering, or some such. Even though I had the opportunity to continue my academic studies, I decided that I had enough of schools for a while, and that I should start working. Turns out, that was a pretty smart move from my side, as I ended up working for two years with an awesome team, and later on started my own company, which is now over a year old! Yey!

Porting this blog to Zend Framework 2, I decided to write some unit tests as well, while I’m at it. Not that the current code base doesn’t have unit tests, just it doesn’t have much of it… Anyway, I’d like to show how to get unit tests for modules up and running, as well how to throw in Mockery in the mix, as it can help us greatly with mocking out objects. Some of the parts shown here probably could be written in a more cleaner/nicer way, especially the autoloading bit, but so far it works for me.

Zend Framework hit a big milestone as version 2 was released last week. Sadly, I didn’t have time to contribute to it, or even to poke around it much. I decided to slowly, as time permits, port this blog to ZF2; it should be a good enough learning playground.

One hundred and two kilometers, and three hundred-ish meters, to be precise. I just got home from my latest “run", and that is the total number of kilometers I made (and tracked) on my longboard since I got it back in July. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but if someone would have told me 2-3 months ago, that I would do this much physical activity and actually like it and enjoy it, I would probably tell it’s just crazy talk. Me, getting up my arse from the chair and doing something outside? No way, dude.

For a while now I couldn’t really make myself sit down in my spare time and do some programming just for the sake of programming. I’d rather read a book, cruise around on my longboard, or whatever. So, this past weekend I decided to try and “hack” together something in a weekend. To see can I still just sit down and write a piece of software, just because I like love doing it, and not because it’s my job.

Last week I was on a vacation for a couple of weeks, and decided to spend a couple of days in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. The fact that Swizec was on his way home with a car then (he’s from Ljubljana, mind you), made the decision easy. Thus, on the 18th of July, I woke up early in the morning, and by 7AM was off on the road for the trip.