Mostly Information Technology related stuff
LinkedIn has finally launched its applications area, clearly this has been in germination for some time.
Shame most of the ones I’ve tried are some what buggy – hopefully that will improve over time. Would be interested to know how your mileage with them goes…
Last time I looked the apps platform was a closed beta – will have to check and see if thats changed.
Post on their blog about it here: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/
I came across Alfresco a couple of years ago at the MySQL European Customer conference – at the time they were relatively new and didn’t look that relevant. I’ve kept one eye on them since and have recently had the opportunity at work to look at alternatives to Sharepoint. Alfresco is now looking very, very interesting in this respect.
Alfresco’s features cover:
Its not that often (although admitedly it is now getting more common) you find an Open Source product that is strong on features / usability and is technically strong. The reason I say it is technical strong is due to the way it embraces and leverages Open Standards and Open Source Java components (Such as Hibernate etc – which good PHP frameworks have borrowed heavily from recently).
One of Alfresco’s people writes an interesting blog on the Business/Politics of Open Source: http://news.cnet.com/openroad/
Another Interesting Alfresco blogger is John Newton: http://newton.typepad.com/content/ He has an article on CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) which sounds fantastic.
Look forward to learning (and blogging) more about Alfresco if I get the opportunity…
Work asked me to talk at the Green IT expo Tues/Wed this week at the Barbican in London – so I put together a talk on how we see IT being used strategically to address Environmental management and other business critical issues (eg cost minimisation).
I talked about how Green IT should be more than just trying to reduce IT’s energy/environmental footprint (through initiatives such as virtualisation) – but also how IT can capture critical business data (eg on Energy use, and employee behaviour) and also how it can help with the digitisation of products and processes (reducing energy/waste – eg through elimating paper production).
My first proper public speaking gig so a bit scary; but I’d love to do more of it! Photo is one of my colleagues managed to grab during my talk on Tues – I am holding one of our brochures.
The Green IT expo was an interesting event – IBM had a big presence and the general focus was mainly on the data centre and IT end of life equipment waste. Adobe did an interesting talk on focusing on the usability of online processes (eg those replacing paper) dovetailing quite nicely with some of my content. Learn’t more about their LiveCycle suite – http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/ which looks really interesting for creating paperless processes although it isn’t cheap unfortunately!
Today we put live the new Intranet at AEA which has been Kat’s major project (should get to spend more time with her now its launched!) with some support from me and impressive efforts from the dev team.
Previously we had a static HTML Intranet which wasn’t really serving the needs of the business as well as it could. The new site is based on the AEA Framework – which I’ve blogged about a bit before. Essentially an extension of the Zend Framework glueing Silverstripe and other 3rd party components together with a single sign on approach (in this case we are also using LDAP to do logins from our current Novell infrastructure). We built on our HTML content crawler tool to hoover in the static HTML into the Content Management System.
Over time we will leverage the framework to create more efficient web 2.0 style business processes and work with PPC to combine it with other off the shelf tools that they specialise in; and hopefully push it globally across the group…
I’ve also had some exciting news this week which I will share when I can.
All exciting stuff!
If your not having any joy when installing addons in Firefox 3 (sorry can’t remember the specific error message) – but nothing seem to fix it – even re-installing) we managed to confirm the fix today at work. Note that involves completely clearing all Firefox related info (so settings, bookmarks etc will be gone)…
* Uninstall Firefox
* Then make sure that the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox is completely gone
* Also clear out the C:\Documents and Settings\<<username>>\Application Data\Mozilla folder (it will probably still contain Firefox and Extensions directories)
* Re-install
Voila – you can install extensions again (like the brilliant FireBug)
This also works for Linux (had a similar issue at home with the Latest version of Ubuntu).
Or is it just Microsoft cleverly going for the resistant adopters? Certainly smacks a bit of desperation though! The advert links to http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/
Busy at work (lots of EU related stuff at the moment) and have now got some new toys including a PS3 80GB (one with the dual shock rumble pad) – so don’t expect many posts in the near future!!
I’m sure I’ll get the blogging bug again before too long………
If your a facebook user then you’ll want to check out the new design:Â which is a vast improvement – sharing content link URLs and photos is now mega easy compared to the old site.
Also I discovered badges on FB tonight too – here’s mine which I’ve inserted into the sidebar of this WordPress powered blog (this is easy to do in the admin – just edit the sidebar.php file in design -> theme editor). I guess I’ll have to watch what I put as my status message now though..!
Warning! Techy post – if your not into Web development you’ll want to skip this one…
I’ve been wanting to try out Zend Core (Zend’s standard PHP stack / extension or “Reliable PHP made easy”) for a while but as Ubuntu isn’t officially supported I’ve held off. A problem with some code running on the Ubuntu version of PHP 5 forced my hand – I discovered that its actually not that hard to get ZC up and running on Ubuntu. Thought I’d share in case this is helpful to anyone…
PHP5 Module
The ZC installer will have probably left your Apache configured with 2 LoadModule php5_module entries (one in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf – thanks to ZC and the other Ubuntu one in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load). So you can either do a sudo a2dismod php5 to remove the Ubuntu one or modify the Ubuntu one to the following:
LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/Zend/Core/modules/apache22/libphp5.so
In fact you can be cunning here by commenting out the Ubuntu PHP5 extension and adding the ZC one in this file – allowing you to effectively switch between the 2 different extensions should you need to.
MySQL extension – if you’re using MySQL then you’ll need to watch out for the fact that the bundled MySQL extensions look for the MySQL socket file in /tmp/mysql.sock rather than the Debian / Ubuntu location which is /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
In most cases changing in php.ini:
mysql.default_socket =
to
mysql.default_socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Does the trick; but alas not in all cases it seems (eg MySQL PDO). Really hacky fix to this (please do let me know if you have something better – other than editing the socket in the /etc/my.cnf file) is to run a scheduled (using crontab) symlink of /var/run/mysqld/mysql.sock to /tmp/mysql.sock
To do this run: sudo crontab -e
and add the following line:
5 * * * * ln -s /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
And for now that works for me. If you want a copy of some of the relevant config files / snippets (including the extra bit that ZC adds to the apache2.conf) then I have zipped them up for ease.
Zend Core itself looks like a good product – being able to access to php.ini options via web based tool is pretty useful, as is knowing you are working on a consistent & tested version of PHP. Its a shame MySQL doesn’t offer a similar free / unsupported version of their MySQL Enterprise in a similar way really…
…is brilliant, miles better than the standard Web Browser, although still not quite on a par with the iPhone (but then half the magic of that is the touch screen interface). Very fast and displays pages like a standard desktop browser, but the killer feature is that it allows you to see the whole website in a zoomed out view allowing you can click to zoom in/out and then move around the page really easily. Also has a handy bookmarks sync feature (where you can enter URLs online using your desktop browser for use later on the phone).
Grab it from http://mini.opera.com (using the standard browser on the phone). You can also check out a demo on PC here: http://www.operamini.com/demo/. This is also available for other devices other than BlackBerrys.
Getting the Wifi to work can be a bit fiddly (not the initial Wifi Connection but getting the device to use the WLAN rather than the GPRS). Look for options along the lines of “Prefer Wifi” in the phone settings menus.
Opera Mini behaves much better in this respect than the standard browser.
Was also very pleased to discover that I could buy a Sandisk 2GB microSD memory card for my BlackBerry for £6 on play.com! Brilliant deal! Also discovered that Sandisk do a really cool SD card that folds in half to allow it slot into your USB port so that has joined my gadget collection too!