These days I'm doing some Asterisk work, creating AEL dial plan scripts for call center agents: Logging in and out, checking if the hotlines are staffed before allowing a pause, logging agent events to a separate logfile. For the scripts I'm using my favourite cross-platform editor jEdit. At the moment, jEdit has no syntax highlighting for AEL files, so I put one together myself. For a while, the file was hosted on snippets.dzone.com but since I improved on it, I'd rather host it on GitHub for easier download and modification.

When developing XSL-FO stylesheets sooner or later you will see something that doesn't look as intended: It has the wrong margin, padding, line height, floats in the wrong place, etc. If you have no visual debugging tool, the quickest way to check for errors is setting a border or background attribute on the element in question.

The PHPUnit database test case allows to create before- and after-states of your database in XML or CSV files. Writing those files can be tedious if you need to describe your complete database schema from scratch and its not a very DRY approach. Fortunately the PHPUnit classes for XML files have methods to persist the database schema. I have written a small shell script for generating the PHPUnit XML schema files from an existing database.