The Yellow Peril

Back when I was a young whipper snapper, the first person in my life to own a ‘real PC’ was my granddad Roy.

Being an accountant, he needed to be able to work on his spreadsheets (I assume) from home, using a computer I could not begin to remember the make nor model of.

It had a green screen, so this was a while ago.

It also had that keyboard.

IBM Model M Mechanical Keyboard

I distinctly remember the sound the IBM Model M keyboard made. Such solid build quality.

I wondered for about ten years why his keyboard had sounded and felt so different to the keyboards I used at home, school, and at work.

Then a few years ago, I heard about Mechanical Keyboards through a forum, and began doing a little research.

It turns out that these things aren’t cheap. Your modern day equivalent is about £100 or more. That’s a fair old chunk of change for a keyboard.

But, I figured, I use my keyboard every day. I do a lot of typing – whether it’s video write ups, blog posts, and / or coding – my keyboard(s) get hammered.

filco-majestouch-2

Anyway, I treated myself to one. Sorry for the terrible crop. And yes, it is a bit dirty (did I mention I hammer my keyboards?).

What a fantastic keyboard this is.

Recently I have been umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether to ditch my home PC in favour of an iMac.

It turns out ol’ Steve and his crew didn’t get so rich by throwing in a keyboard and mouse Apple iTrackpad2 Pro for free. No sir. If you want an £1800 Apple computer then being able to actually use it is going to cost you £100+ more.

I’ve used the Apple keyboard. I’m not a huge fan. It’s all right but it’s not in the same league as my Filco Majestouch 2. I heard they released a new keyboard also, which I managed to try recently and couldn’t see how it was any different to the old one.

As it turns out Filco actually do a Mechanical keyboard for the Mac. Good stuff.

But what caught my eye even more was this beast:

filco-majestouch-2-yellow-key-cap-version

That’s something else, isn’t it?

What immediately sprang to mind:

only-fools-and-horses-the-yellow-peril

only-fools-and-horses-yellow-peril-paint-sceneI’m swaying away from buying an iMac currently. Dual booting Ubuntu (work) and Windows 10 (gaming and music production) seems to be a good way forward.

I record all the content for this site on a Macbook Pro, so that’s not affected by this change.

And it means I don’t need to shell out another £100+ on another mechanical keyboard.

Whilst the yellow keyboard is a little on the crazy side for me, I do think this looks really cool:

filco-blue-keycaps

Only £4.99 as well. Quite the saving.

Does anyone out there own the Filco Delboy? Pictures please!

How to fix: You have requested a non-existent service “test.client” with Behat 3

So, it’s been a long day of development.

And the last 50 minutes have been particularly painful.

I’ve been bringing FOSUserBundle, Dunglas API Bundle, Lexik JWT Bundle, and Behat (amongst a good few others) together into one project for the first time.

Most of today has been productive. I’ve solved two of my big headaches, but as the hours have gone by, tiredness has set in.

And rather than call it a night, I did my usual “I’ll just see if I can…” once too many times, and buggered everything up.

If I had been behaving, I could have quickly done a little git bisect magic and found the source of my woes. Alas, I had not been behaving.

Anyway, the issue:

Run bin/behat , encounter error:

  [Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Exception\ServiceNotFoundException]
  You have requested a non-existent service "test.client".

Wot do?

Well, there is a major shortage of Google help on this one.

The two most likely answers were not it.

Behat had been working just fine. I knew it was my mistake. But the project is growing and there’s just a ton of possible files that could have changed. When will I learn?

As it turned out, I had changed my behat.yml file in my tired stupor:

# behat.yml 
 extensions:
    Behat\Symfony2Extension:
      kernel:
        env: "test"
        debug: "true"

I’d changed env to a new Symfony Environment I had created so as not to keep messing up my local dev database every time I re-ran behat.

In my case changing back to env: “test” solved all my problems.

Ok, well not all of them… plenty of work still to do. But that’s it for this evening.

I hope that saves someone a headache in the future.

Time to commit and go to bed.

#PHPNW15Nelly Visits the USA

phpnw15 side questBack at the start of October (time flies) I spent the weekend at PHPNW15.

One of the available side quests was to send the PHPNW nellyphant off to unusual locations, in order to win one of 8 licenses for PHP Storm.

Being quite the fan of PHPStorm, the challenge was dutifully accepted.

But what exciting and unusual places could I get Nelly of to within the time frame?

As it happens (and with the help of a very generous relative), I managed to get my Nelly about 4200 miles away!

Amazingly, with America’s ultra-strict airport security, Nelly made it through without having to provide finger foot prints or retina scans.

#PHPNW15Nelly At The Magic Kingdom

php nelly at the magic kingdom
Nelly visits the Disney Princess Castle at Magic Kingdom
php-elephant-at-tomorrow-land
Nelly journeys to Tomorrow Land, where PHP7 is already an actual thing (probably)

#PHPNW15Nelly Visits NASA

php-elephant-atlantis-shuttle
Nelly harbours ambitions of going into orbit
php-elephant-hitches-a-ride-on-atlantis
PHPNelly says “Auf Wiedersehen”, and that was the last time we saw her

If only I could have smuggled myself in to their suitcase.