PHP Conference 2005

Just back from 2 days at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt.
This is the first event of this type I've been at and I must say that it was a bit odd :) Normally at the evenings of conferences ppl mingle in the bar, takes a couple of drinks and discuss the day.
Here the bar was filled with groups of developers hacking away at their notebooks...
Not sure how many ppl there was, I heard 3-400 but that sounded a bit high.

So how was it?
Pretty good, went to two seminars on PHP Performance and PHP 5 by Ilia Alshanetsky that was really good. He's not only extremely knowledgable on PHP, he's a good speaker as well. These two was the highlight for me.

I also went to How PHP Ticks with a speaker from EZ Publish, also a knowledgable guy but not really my topic.
Refactoring and State of the art development by Stefan Priebsch that covered PHPUnit tests, Phing and more was also interesting.

I went to a couple more as well that was fair to far from good though, sometime I whish that speakers would prepare just a little bit before holding a seminar...

One thing that surprised me was that while both Oracle and Zend was there as sponsors, only Oracle took the chance to speak. One would think that Zend as "the PHP company" would take the chance to demo their productline in a seminar, but nope. Just a small stand with some demo cd's and broshures...

Some pics:
The keynote:





This is just about what the exhibition was, a few more tables, but that's it.



And here's the hotel, from the entrance and upwards :)



Unfortunately the pictures from the bar of all the participants banging away on their computers turned out all too dark :(
One really fun thing was that a guy I know from www.ozoneasylum.com "Tyberius Prime" lives close to Frankfurt so he dropped by the hotel for a chat. Really nice guy.

Well, that's it for now, laters! /Dan

Hey, this Linux stuff is pretty fun...
Since my last blurb I've managed to do quite a lot (in my no0b eyes anyways)

- Install AMP (Apache2, PHP, MySQL), Still some configs to go there before it all works as I want.
- Config the system so it auto mounts 2 windows partitions for shared files.
- Installed & set up Samba to share a folder for transfers over my local network.
- Installed Firefox plus flash plugins in FF and Moz.

Right now I'm installing Eclipse with WebTools and the PHP plugin for development.

Perhaps a walk in the park for you, but hey! I'm an old Dog and you all know how easy we are to get to sit down ;)

Anyways, back 2 work... I can see the eclipse updater is nearing the end...
/Laters D

Debian installation.
Well, this has been an interesting experience to say the least.
I've learned tons and had fun and frustrating moments.

A Summary:
I used debianpure from http://www.debianpure.com/ which basically is a simplified way to get a "real" Debian install up and running with the normal packages (visual, audio, web, dev, office etc) that a normal user needs.

It starts out with basic setup and partitioning etc which was easy to understand, as you get to the apt-part of the install you stop the basic installation and reboot. As root you then run 1 of 4 different sh-scripts (gnome from cd, kde from cd, gnome from net, kde from net), these scripts retrieve the needed packages and installs them.

After another reboot you get to configure screen, sound etc which also worked just fine.

After that you are up and running! Nice package indeed.

Needless to say I've had some problems, but these where 95% me using a notoriously bad wireless card for Linux, had I used a std ethernet card I'm sure it would have been a breeze.

The last 5% of trouble was the fact that all paths in the sh-scripts has hardcoded paths starting with /media/cdrom/ As I had one dvd-drive and one cd-drive mine where labeled cdrom1 and cdrom2... Doh, none of the scripts worked.

Not knowing if/how you could rename these in bash I went to my trusted mac, copied all content from the CD, altered the scripts and burned a new .iso
After that it all worked.

For the wireless card (D-Link DWL-510 11Mbps PCI card), this is what I found out:
The ndiswrapper worked with the std windows dlink-drivers as described in the FAQ at debianpure, however the /etc/network/interfaces needed to have the correct "wireless_channel " and "wireless_mode managed" asides from what was specified in the faq at debianpure. I suspect, but not confirmed, that when I used ad-hoc for the mode it tried to connect to another of my machines up and running on the LAN.

At some points during the install in bash, the system will lag and not echo your input at the prompt, it comes back without you doing anything though.

There is one more snag, the card refuses to start on boot, it needs an su "ifup wlan0" after you've booted everything to kickstart it and to get an IP, omit this and it will not recieve an ip from the router... go figure... As for how stable it is, I don't know yet, I've used it for about 1 hour without problems so far.

At this point I havn't enabled WEP yet, I've heard that there might be problems with the 128 bit encryption and that you might need to set a lower level, havn't confirmed that yet though.

All in all, basically a nice way to get up with Debian 3.1 Sarge using kernel 2.6.8x.
If you unlike me have a clue when you start, you'll have an easy time with it.

Cheers/Dan

Finally, I'm on Linux...
I just finished a debian 3.1 sarge install and after a sh*tload of trouble everything works, 99% of all trouble was about the wireless, I'll post more later but here's a pic.



Cheers /Dan

Church vs Science...

This Open Letter to Kansas School District must be one of the more creative arguments posted so far in the US debate of teaching Intelligent Design vs Evolution theory in schools...

In short, if you replace the word god with another and take two unrelated (but true) statistics and put them together to prove a point you will get this...

It's absolutely breathtakingly funny while scary since it shows that people will grasp any arguments to prove a point they desperately need to be true...
Go read the Open Letter :)

/Dan

After my site being down for a couple of weeks due to massive hardware failure it's fixed and up again. Unfortunately the ftp has changed in a way that doesn't allow my old blog here at blogger to publish to it... Sigh, so here we go, a new one at blogspot...

On another note, I'm into a new tutorial for www.gurusnetwork.com this will be a pattern based PHP/MySQL guestbook.
It will be available as Open Source as well when it's done :)
'til the next blurb... /Dan

Finally the server is back up...
My friend Rob who is gratiously hosting www.dmsproject.com has totally rebuilt the server after some critical parts blew up and now it's up and running again :)
Super thanx!

So what's up now?
I'm just back from a 4 week vacation, it was superb!
Then as I got home my 80Gb hd blew up... it just clicks and cannot be found anymore :(
That's all the mails from 2001 and forward... Documents and more...
Luckily ALL my digital photos & webcode are safely stored on another computer...

Bummer, I'll tell you that!
Now I'm off to shop for 2 new big drives and a raid controller to mirror ALL data from now and onwards, never again will this happen to me! (I hope...)
'til the next time, Cheers
/Dan

Finally, it's up :)
16'th march we released the project I've been managing for the last months, a complete rewrite of what's probably the biggest poker community around today. 100% OOP/PHP multi-tier architecture, a super sweet db-design that purrs like a cat with 100 selects/sec and 15-20 inserts/updates/deletes/sec...

It's the work of 3 ServerSide coders, 1 dba, a designer and a template maker and little 'ole me + some assorted help. 2,5 months designing & coding plus a lot of planning and here it is :
Pokah! PokerRoom.com
Whoo :)
/Dan

AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) on USB.
I've been thinking of getting a small, working portable development enviroment up and running for a while now. Something that I could take with me and use on what ever PC I was at for the moment. What I didn't want to do was to install the whole package on a PC that wasn't mine so I started thinking of using an USB stick.

After reading a short tutorial over at firepages where he described getting PHP5, Apache and MySQL onto USB I got to work.

After a lot of hacking and cursing around problems with not using the drive letters in php.ini and httpd.conf I decided to try a ready made package:

I went with xampp lite, an appr 50Mb large package that can be found here:
http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampplite-win32-1.4.12-pl1.exe

I unpacked the zip through the downloaded .exe into a folder on the desktop, copied the folder xampplite to the root of the USB, entered the folder and clicked xampp_start.exe

Whoops... a complete WAMP install on usb that works...
This install offers quite a lot, phpmyadmin for example so I uploaded my CMS-beta, loaded the db and started...
It works! Smarty and everyting :)

I'm using a 128 Mb USB 2 memory stick and that's probably minimum if it should be usable.

Now, what are you waiting for... Go try it :)
/Dan

Hi there, long time no writing... Sorry...

Life good to ya? Mine is :)
Remember I told you I got a new job? Well not only that, I got a promotion as well! It took 4 months, heck I'm still on my 6 month trial period...

From regular programmer to doing oop system architecture for a complete rewrite of a section of the site, plus running a 6 person project as technical project manager.

4 weeks into that project and we are 85% ready and meeting deadlines, the manager steps up and says "I'd like you to work full time as technical project manager, how about it?"

Guess what, I said yes :)
Sometimes it pays off to take that extra step.

'til the next blurb/Dan