function

Introduction

Most software companies run in that dilemma. In order to write software that works, you want to write some tests. The question for many of these companies is: what kind of tests are most efficient for my business?

Here we talk about seven common test practices in the software industry.

1. Unit Testing

Probably the most used form of testing is Unit Testing. This is easy to write and very effective in discovering bugs. If you are looking at verifying correctness, this is 100% what you need to have to test your software.

Why is it easy to write?

In most cases, Unit ...

I've been using metaprogramming for a while now. An interesting aspect to the ability to define an invalid (unavailable) type, allows you to declare functions that do not get selected by the C++ template system.

The following is a simple example where you want to test a version where the major, minor and patch version numbers are defined as an undefined type T which could be a signed or an unsigned type while compiling. If unsigned, the return value < 0; statement will generate a warning and for safer programming, you should not allow any warnings (we use the -Werror command line ...

While programming, one of the best thing to do to make sure that your software works as expected is to write tests.

Actually, if you write enough tests to make sure that the code works as expected, it should take you between two and three more time to finish up your project. So if it takes you one day to write a function, it will take you another two days to write good tests for that one function.

Many of those tests, especially as you construct more and more complex software, require large amount of input and output data. It's easy enough to test a function such as strlen(). It has one ...

There's nothing more frustrating in business than waste. The opportunity cost of your workforce devoting hours to unproductive tasks is something you can't ignore.

So, to help you reduce waste and improve productivity, here are 5 simple ways to help make your business more efficient.

1. Get Software to Manage Your Deliveries

Getting your product delivered to your client is the most important part of your business, but if you don't manage your delivery system carefully, it can also be the most expensive.

Installing job scheduling software allows you to ensure your delivery ...

For a very long time now, we have been using languages that support having functions that one can call. That was not always the case, although even really old versions of BASIC had a GOSUB instruction, which it had no concept of local variables so it was rather difficult to use safely.

Functions allow you to avoid repetition. You write a small snippet of code (or maybe not that small) within a function and then you call that function to reuse that snippet over and over again. Good programmers tend to do that even with one liners. However, many others often think: well, it's just one line, why don't I return copy & paste that wherever I need it, it's going to be faster.

What is a Queue

In software a queue is a container which is used to add items on one side and remove them on the other in a very efficient manner.

Sorted Queues

When used by a Journal, a queue is often going to support some kind of sorted order. Some jobs are more important than others and these should be built sooner. In other words, we give those jobs a higher priority and we sort the queue by priority first then using the time at which the job gets inserted.

Note that the C++ std::queue and std::unque containers do not offer anyway to support a priority. Instead you have to use ...

We found out today that RedHat LE7 requires the use of the "ssl://" protocol instead of the default "tls://". The error we are getting from PHP looks like this:

PHP Warning:  stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:
error:1409442E:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert protocol version in .../lib/http_request.php on line 294
PHP Warning:  stream_socket_client(): Failed to enable crypto in .../lib/http_request.php on line 294
PHP Warning:  stream_socket_client(): unable to connect to tls://secure.efaxdeveloper.com:443 ...

The PHP eFax system uses a class that ease the communication between your software and eFax. The developer system is not too complicated, but there are tricks to it and the class hides most of them.

Today a customer contacted us as they just purchased a copy of our PHP library and had problems sending faxes. The fact is that they used the set_fax_id() function with a hard coded string. Imagine doing something like:

$efax->set_fax_id("Test Fax");

This looks pretty good, only after the second time the sending of the fax will fail because eFax considers that it was already ...

As e-Fax is updating their systems further to be compliant with various security systems, some new problems may arise on your servers.

The main one is an SSL error that is quite unclear.

Warning: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed in /path-to-php-efax/http_request.php on line 294

As we can see, the error mentions a server certificate function and says it could not verify a certificate.

If your server is not 100% up to date with newest SSL versions or your web ...

Menu Settings

Menu

Select the menu to be displayed as the Simplemenu. By default, we display the Navigation Menu which makes the most sense for administrator (as the Simplemenu was primarily created for administrators wanting to quickly go to all administration pages.)

Theme

Select a theme to display your Simplemenu items and dropdowns. The default is called original.

The themes reside in the module sub-folder named themes. Each theme is defined in a specific directory named after the theme. That name is what appears in the dropdown in the settings.

It is possible to add new themes as