Category: Technology

Mostly Information Technology related stuff

Categories
Linux Ubuntu

Adventures to fix Ubuntu & RAID boot up

Yeah finally fixed an annoying issue with my Linux Server at home (nice to flex my Linux admin skills!) documenting it here in case I ever need the commands again or its useful to others:

Problem:

Ubuntu 9.04 no longer booted after a minor update (from .15 to .16) with my Software RAID setup as described in these reported bugs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/330298

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/158918

Fix:

Following the instructions on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/136252/comments/5 fixed the problem but you need to run update-initfs -u so it updates.

Amazing what you learn when having to fix this kind of stuff – for one I now understand the memory based file system that linux uses during boot better.

Categories
Open Source PHP Technology Web Development

PHP Conference UK 2010 Notes and Thoughts

Here are some notes / interesting products/thoughts that were mentioned (apologies this is more of a set of notes for me than a proper blog post – if I get time I will refine this!)

Started the day on a conference call back to the office so had to miss the keynote which was a shame as it was by quite an eccentric guy who Microsoft have hired (as a UX Architect Evangelist) largely about keeping thing simple and usability from what I gathered of the end of the talk.

Day was very tough as a I had a late night catching up on various things to allow me to free up the Friday – its difficult sitting through talks when really tired!

Met with several former colleagues from my last company (and former colleagues from my current company) so was a bit of a blast from the past at times.

There appear to be a lot of development and interest around NoSQL / document based databases at the moment – definitely something to keep an eye on as it matures as a technology.
http://www.phpconference.co.uk/talks

RDBMS in the social networks age
by Lorenzo Alberton

Database Graph Structures via advanced features of SQL, using SQL-99 and SQL-2003 functionality that certainly MySQL doesn’t have any many other DBs won’t have the 2003 extensions. Obviously using this kind of advanced functionality will have an impact on Database server load.

This talk felt a bit like it was flying in the wind of most new thinking at the moment (although to be fair – this is partly what Lorenzo has now put on his website below) which is to keep your database tier minimally loaded as it’s the part that has most issues with vertical and horzontal scalability (keep most of the CPU load in the web app tier as its easier to add more nodes there).

Slides available at:
http://www.alberton.info/talks

Legacy Code Talk by Ibuildings
doxygen – code documentation for any language not just PHP

ctags.sourceforge.net

BOUML bouml.free.fr (reverse engineering capabilities)

phpcs – Codesniffer (part of PhpUnderControl)

Thoughts for tackling older PHP4 based projects and code bases – get them in Source Control, start to apply Continous Integration type approaches.

Suggestions made around
Full isolation (separate server)
Using wrapper classes
Possible code rewriting routes for legacy code:
Going from random mix of PHP business logic and HTML outputting to neater procedural based code
Procedural to OO
OO to full OO

CouchDB
Early sight of the possible future of web application data persistance and replication. Interesting that CouchDB makes uses of HTTP as the connecting protocol. Might be possible (but probably not desirable apart from specific cases) in the future to create web applications that are JS direct to CouchDB in certain cases?

http://couchdb.apache.org/

Web and mobile application monetisation models / Paypal X

Paypal appear to be launching a new platform / API

  • Adaptive Payments
  • Pay multiplerecipients at once
  • Partnership
  • Chained payments (e.g. commission based payments)

Bit disappointed by this one as it was about PayPal’s API (https://www.x.com) rather than strategies for monetisation which is what the title lead me to believe.

Web Services Best Practise
At the beginning lots of stuff about basic HTTP (eg HTTP headers, Verbs)that ever developer should know about.

Lorna (also from iBuildings) who gave this talk seems to have a bit of a sarcastic talking down to you type tone I found slightly annoying – maybe she gives training to newbies all the time or something. Or maybe I was just tired. She had some interesting things to say about Web Services design particularly towards the end of her talk. The talk was caveated as being a bit of “a rant” and it was exactly that in places – felt like she was having a go at everyone a lot of the time!

Beers at the end sponsored by Facebook were a nice touch though, although I only had time to grab a quick one whilst chatting to Mark Schaschke from iBuildings and a couple of guys from my previous company. Think next year I will sit this one out to allow more developers to attend as think they will get more value out of it.

Categories
MS Windows Vista 7, 8 etc Open Source Samba

Fix for Windows 7 offline files and Samba

Further to my blog posts involving vista (and the tweaks that can help make Vista/Windows 7 compatible with Samba) I came across a registry setting that needs to be changed to get offline files to work correctly:

“Set the following registry key on the Windows Vista client to prevent files from getting pulled down to the client again right after synchronizing changes to the server (due to Linux file systems having coarser timestamp resolution than Windows):

Create a DWORD value named RoundUpWriteTimeOnSync under the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache key (create the key if it does not exist) and set it to 1.” from the Storage Team at Microsoft’s Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2007/03/16/using-offline-files-with-samba-emc-servers-nas-devices.aspx

Categories
Cycling Gadgets

Nice shot of Donnington Castle

One of my better recent shots taken on the SLR:

Taken on a recent bike ride to Donnington and Bagnor

Info on Donnington Castle here and here on Wikipedia

Categories
Open Source Technology Web Development Wireless

Options for sending & receiving SMS from web applications

One of my projects at the moment is to look at our options for building SMS enabled web applications (specifically for us around our Zend Framework based apps). Both for data capture (Inbound) and as an alerting / notification system (Outbound).

Thought I’d pull together some of my thoughts and reference material [not exhaustive or complete yet] in case its of use to anyone else in a similar situation. But first I’d like to thank my good friend Jem who helped identify some different angles on this…

Research Material:

As always the first place to start is Google and Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateways

LinkedIn Q&A is a great reference – here are a few relevant threads that I came across (you’ll probably need a Linkedin.com account to get to these) there are lots more if you search around with SMS related keywords.

Implementation Options:

There are 2 main options – and as always its the struggle between D.I.Y and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself – or my version DRY-OFF – DRY or others [for f sake? I just wanted it to be OFF as it sounded better; anyway I’ll shut up now!])

Roll your own

The Kannel FAQ covers this point quite well – http://www.kannel.org/faq.shtml#1.2

pros – complete control over messaging and ability to iron out any kinks in connectivity etc, potentially cheaper to run / only costs you what you use (rather than having to buy credits)

cons – more complex to setup in the first place, need to buy & setup some hardware somewhere etc

Useful article on Kannel on Ubuntu with PHP5: http://www.chipmunkninja.com/Setting-up-Configuring-and-Using-13@

Outsourced

Pros – ease of getting it up and running if the integration API (eg HTTP, XML/E-mail based) is easy to pick up

Cons  – my concern around these guys is how do you how good they are – will they disappear tomorrow? What gateways are they using, how reliable are their channels etc.

Guide to Gateways (US focused) but has some nice general considerations) http://www.developershome.com/sms/howToChooseSMSGateway.asp This site also has a really nice comparison table – which you could also use as a template for doing your own matrix/scoring comparisions of these services.

We will probably go with a combination of the 2 options – using our own system for the development of services (as we have greater control) and then making use of a partner once the message volumes go above what is finanically viable/scalable in house…

Once the technical bit is out of the way you then need to consider the usability and process flow around the app – eg if users are sending in data, queuing, acknowledging their submissions, correcting mistakes etc…

Hope to post more on this topic if I get the opportunity! If anyone has any insights or good resources on this topic then by all means please comment on this post!

Thanks

Categories
Linux Open Source Ubuntu

Running Windows via Linux to improve performance (fixing VirtualBox on Ubuntu 9.04)

Screenshot of VirtualBox running XP under Ubuntu
Recently I’ve started using Virtualisation – for those who don’t know this is running an Operating System or OS for short (such as Windows) as an application (so you could think of it as running a computer within a computer). I’ve started doing this as I’ve got frustrated with Windows slowing down after being installed for a few months. This way I can run Linux which is very stable and performs consistantly as the main Operating System (or the “Host”) and then run various “Guest” OS installations – such as Windows. You can take snapshots or save the state of the Guest machines – which is ideal if you want to go back to how your Windows install used to be (but unlike reinstalling all your applications and settings are as they were).

Generally Windows runs at the same speed as it does normally – so long as you don’t run too much stuff on the Host OS at the same time – but of course there are limitation – eg Games or software that needs access to devices that can’t be provided via VirtualBox. And of course you could run the reverse setup – if you fancy trying Linux as a Guest OS but keeping the safety net of Windows as your main Operating System.

Anyway I’m posting this as I’ve been using VirtualBox on Ubuntu Linux to run Windows XP. On a recent upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 to the latest version 9.04 VirtualBox failed to run. This was fixed by running the command given in the error message (its nice to get a very useful error message in software!)

The command I had to run was sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Once VirtualBox was working again I noticed that the Host key (which is the key used in different combinations to switch between the Host and the Guest OS) was not working. Instead it was flashing the Ubuntu desktop and pulsed some circles – like radar – from the cursor. At first I didn’t twig that it was simply the new mouse settings in the latest version of Ubuntu. By default it now seems the tickbox below in System->Preferences->Mouse for “Show position of pointer when the Control key is pressed” :

Mouse Settings in Ubuntu
Mouse Settings in Ubuntu

Hey presto – the host key works again! Hopefully this is helpful for anyone else confused by this one!

Also note the position of the sliders in the above screenshot for acceleration and sensitivity – I find these settings make the touchpad on my Vaio behave in a similar way to Windows (previously my mouse felt too sluggish).

I’m now actually using Windows less and less now at home (Evolution is a decent email client and of course Firefox offer pretty much the same browsing experience – apart from some differences with fonts, and OpenOffice allows for opening the odd Office attachment). The true acid test though is how much the wife moans as previously she’s never been happy without the familarity of Windows…! (But then it is still available in a couple of clicks).

I’m sure there will be more on my adventures of using Ubuntu on the desktop in due course – if I find time I’ll share anything I think others might find useful…

Categories
Environment Technology

Some recent browsing (Green Issues, SOA, Dashboards)

Some sites that I found interesting recently…

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of Green IT/Business type issues recently www.climatechangecorp.com is a good site (even if it does heavily promote its events on the content).

Carbon Calculators article: http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=5119 Its disappointing it mentions AEA only in the context of providing the emissions factors – we actually do a whole lot more including building online carbon/emissions data platforms (and calculators) ourselves.

Great article from Adobe on Web 2.0, SOA etc – gives a great overview: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/web_end.html

Sun Microsystems came into to talk to us about their Java CAPS recently and it looks really interesting. We’ve already started to look at NetBeans IDE more closely (particularly the PHP plugin and its SOA/Business Process (BPEL) diagram/visualisation to BPEL XML code features…

See http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Dashboards, Flex with PHP etc:

One of my current projects is update our (data) visualisation and dashboard piece of our offering – as such we’ve been researching whats out there that we could use to enhance our technology stack:

Flex and PHP http://devzone.zend.com/article/3580-Building-Dashboards-With-PHP-and-Flex

Zend Framework/Adobe Media Remoting – http://corlan.org/2008/11/13/flex-and-php-remoting-with-zend-amf/

Interestingly Microsoft seem to be about to launch a new Dynamics AX product which is focused at Environmental data management – interesting to see the main IT vendors start to move into the space that we’ve been in for some time. This is really good news as it will give more deployment and integration options moving forward (eg for customers already using Dynamics).

Categories
Open Source Technology Web Development

Wowed by upgrade to WordPress 2.7…

Have just upgraded to the latest and greatest WordPress and was shocked as it has wowed me again in terms of user interface. The pace of improvement of this Open Source product is incredible. Just as I think wouldn’t it be good if… they’ve done it in the next release (and improved stability / fixed bugs).

They’ve introduced a turbo button which makes use of Google Gears (the offline/browser enchancement) and added more time saving shortcuts and a better post writing interface (particularly for re-using existing tags on new posts – this UI for tagging taxonomy might have to be borrowed on some of my projects…) Read their blog post here for more info on features (includes a video).

Below is the new dashboard – compare the below to WordPress 2.5 that I upgraded to back in May 08

fireshot-capture-5-olivere28099s-yard-ollie-cronke28099s-blog-e280ba-add-new-post-e28094-wordpress-blog_cronky_net_wordpress_wp-admin_post-new_php

The new dashboard is below – it now has dragable “modules”

wordpress_wp-admin

Trouble is it now makes me want to upgrade the design of my blog – but I know I have way more important things to do with my time before I faff with that again!

Categories
Gadgets Sony Stuff Technology

Exciting Playstation Updates (Iplayer & Playstation Home)

The latest firmware upgrade for the PS3 (is it me or does the thing love to spend half its time updating itself or something or other?!) is worthwhile – whilst the last one added Life with Playstation (which is an enchancement to the folding@home application that puts spare processing power to use) this one adds Playstation Home (think Second Life) and the ability to play Iplayer videos (although not download) which is really cool and very useful.

Playstation Home looks really good although it must be struggling with increased demand – as most of the time it fails to connect which is a shame.

Can’t help but think though that some of these products – Life@Playstation, Playstation Home could use better more imaginative names…?

Categories
Technology Web Development

Future Browser Wars – Internet Explorer 8 (Beta) and Google Chrome

Internet Explorer 8 ScreenshotSeems the web browser market is hotting up again, what with the recent launch of Google’s chrome browser (which I suggest you check out – and the cartoon – if you haven’t already – although I have pretty much stuck to Firefox due to some extensions I can’t live without – link). And now Microsoft have IE 8 in public beta: – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

Will write more once I’ve tried the IE8 beta out but more it would seem that it has (in classic Microsoft style) “borrowed” quite a few features from elsewhere – including some of the stability enhancements that Chrome has introduced…