Weekly roundup: going 64-bit

I finally have installed Ubuntu 10.04 in its 64-bit version on my work/home machine. After the usual initial tuning - uninstalling a lot of packages and installing back my favourite ones previously saved with Synaptic - it seems to work well. I had a 32 bit processor until May of this year, when the old box broke down; I started using (K)Ubuntu amd64 in the office in Siena and I see now no reason to going back: Dropbox, Teamviewer and Skype are examples of non-standard applications which now support the amd64 architecture.

Here are my articles published this week on DZone.
Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Assertion Message - explains how and when to write a custom message for assertions.
Double Dispatch: the next best thing with respect to Dependency Injection explores a little known technique for achieving collaboration between objects.
Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Testcase Class
Zend_Locale for the win shows a little bit of localization goodness built in Zend Framework.