To make it clear “proper JavaDoc” means having not only listings of classes and methods with parameter types, but having for each interface method a description of what that method does, even if it is a two-line description.

But don’t get it wrong, the description must be non-trivial and meaningful, not like the ones generated by IDEs like “This method gets the cost” on method “getCost”, as that is worth nothing. If some method can only have a trivial comment it can be safely left blank.

This lack of “proper javadoc” made me loose a couple of hours today reviewing code that created articles programmatically because the last version of them was not shown. We used the next method to get an article display instance for displaying it in one of our portlets:

JournalArticleLocalServiceUtil.getArticleDisplay(groupId, articleId, viewMode, languageId, themeDisplay);

After ensuring that our code was working right I took a trip into Liferay’s source code and after reading/debugging the method I found it returns the article display of the first article it founds that have a display date before the current time (Date()) and that is not expired, so instead of the latest version that was the last one in the list got from db it returned the previous one because it fullfilled these conditions, ¿but how could you know that looking at a naked JavaDoc API?

After a lot of googling for the error code, checking for similar errors, downloading tools, installing debugging tools, installing debugging symbols, getting the crash dump, messing with wercon registry keys and a load of try and error I got to the stack trace of the crash comming out of dynamiciprestrictions.dll being the source of an exception.

The problem turned out that our hosting company gave us the server with all the software we needed and some that we didn’t, like “Dynamic IP Restrictions” a IIS7 module (that is were the dll came from) wich was a BETA version more than a year old

Currently there is a BETA 2 out, but I’m not going to waste more time with this until gets out of BETA, so I’ve disabled it and sent a complain to the hosting company.

Anyways I’m glad I solved this this year

After wandering for a while what the heck was wrong I took a look at the output of ‘ip route’ and I discovered that there was not a default route, oh sh**!

It seems that NetworkManager didn’t set the default route after connecting, so no connection can be done with any ip address not specifically routed (a route for the local network is the only one added).

This can be easily fixed with the command ‘ip route add default via 192.168.0.1′. Here 192.168.0.1 is the gateway (my router).

After executing this I can connect to internet again.

UPDATE: Three months after, the bug is still there.

This bug is already solved in latest Fedora 14 updates and was half dhcp and half NetworkManager.

I think doing that as an optional feature is a fail for PHP as the whole point after type hinting is to force strict types in the parameters of a function call and force the caller of the function to cast&check the types saving time to the function developer and also keeping the peace of mind of knowing that an integer parameter will be always an integer. Also allowing devels to specify the semantic of optional hints can be a source of incoherent behaviour in APIs beetween applications.

PHP is a powerfull dynamic language, but has a lots of stuff that causes more suffering than benefit. I wonder when will came the time to clean up, break the damm backward compatibility and let it evolve to the next level.

For example today i tried this method definition that uses type hinting as I wanted only class instances as values for the $target parameter:

[code='PHP']
public function myMethod(object $target) {
... My Method logic ...
}
[/code]

But when you execute the method PHP complains at every defined class you pass, and that’s because in PHP each defined class doesn’t inherit automatically for object, so if you wanted that, you are in trouble and the only thing you can do is add a check in the method body:

[code='PHP']
public function myMethod($target) {
if (!is_object($target)) {
throw new Exception("Parameter $target must be a class instance");
}

... My Method logic ...
}
[/code]

But that requires wasting 3 lines of code and the time to type them with something the language could do itself and almost do, as you can put there your own class or interface and pass instances that inherit or implement them.

Hopefully there is more people interested in PHP getting improvements in it’s OO implementation and there is almost a working patch somewhere to add support for what I wanted to do and more. Maybe it can make it way into the long expected PHP 6.

In my case this happens because kmod-nvidia-2.6.30.10 (short for kmod-nvidia-2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.i686.PAE.i686) is a dependency of kernel-2.6.30.10, and that kernel is being removed because it was already the older one (always the two previous versions of the kernel are kept in case the newer one gives you any problem).
Then the dependency test fails because kmod-nvidia-2.6.30.10 was installed and yum is not removing that dependency before removing the kernel. This is something that I remember it to happen before, but it was some time ago and since then all the upgrades have been successful.

I don’t know why it happens again, but the fix is easy, remove kmod-nvidia-2.6.30.10 by hand and then do the update:
[terminal]
sudo yum remove kmod-nvidia-2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.i686.PAE.i686
…
sudo yum update
[/terminal]

Lately i’ve getting strange issues with the contributed rpm of songbird 1.4.3 for Fedora 12, so i decided to try 1.4.3 from tarball to see if it worked better, but it didn’t worked due to incompatibilities between the installed gstreamer libraries and the ones used to make the songbird build.
The fix is easier than you might think, you simply have to define and environment variable that makes songbird to use the libraries included in the package:

Or better, a launcher in your desktop. First create a launch script accesible from your path or add $HOME/bin to the path in $HOME/.bash_rc.

Give the script execution permission:

Then you only have to create the launcher using that script:

And you should be all set to listen to your favourite music.