Solution Perspective Media is proud to announce that it is supporting the first annual PHP Conference in the North West, phpnw08 on 22^nd November 2008.

phpnw08 is a one day conference for developers, designers, managers and anyone else with an interest in the PHP programming language. The conference will have a range of well known and local speakers with the aim of highlighting current best practice and emerging topics within the sphere of PHP and web development.

The event offers an opportunity for developers and those involved with PHP across the North-of-England to come together to discuss developments, innovations, techniques and the challenges faced in PHP and internet development.

The conference will feature high profile speakers within the PHP community, workshops and networking opportunities. Some of the key areas of focus this year are: Enterprise PHP, What’s new in PHP 5.3 and innovative solutions for a commercial world.

In addition to organising the event, Solution Perspective Media has worked in partnership with a number of sponsors including iBuildings, nti Leeds, Allegis Group, Pale Purple and Plusnet to provide an exciting program of speakers, networking and social activities.

The conference takes place on 22^nd November 2008 at Manchester Central (formerly GMex) – http://www.manchestercentral.co.uk

Those involved in PHP are invited to connect and network with other PHP professionals on the following groups:

Google Groups - http://groups.google.com/group/phpnw
Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17897252075
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/112906/3FCE41597A1B
Twitter - http://twitter.com/PHPNW

For more information or to attend the conference visit http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw08/

Continue reading "Solution Perspective Media Supports PHP North West Conference 2008"

It's been ages since I've blogged, partly since I've continued to keep up with twitter.com, which is a little like blogging but in text message size bites - some call it your life between blog posts. We've included a feed on the right hand side of this site or follow me or Priscilla directly.

Along with twitter, we' also got into Facebook over the summer, it's a little addictive and generally more fun than watching the telly! However, if some people are to be believed it could turn us all into narcissists!

We've also another member of staff to welcome aboard, Mathew Griffin who joined us in July, to help grow our PHP programming team. Mat's learning how we do things round here by diving in at the deep end - it's a good job he likes it that way as we've been continuing to work non-stop on a major invoicing and payroll system. So Mat is now brushing up on ZendFramework, YUI, ADOdb and XTemplate - so far so good, I just have to remember it's a tall order to get that lot under your belt

Anyway that's the catch up, well almost...

Got a call today from one of our customers suppliers, a marketing company, who were trying to upload some blog software and wondered why their account quota had maxed out. The implication was that we'd set the quota too low (already at ~750Mb).

After some investigation, it turns out that the blog software in question had several run-away apache processes - chewing CPU cycles like they were going out of fashion and filling up the apache logs faster than quota could be allocated (e.g. read a Gb every couple of seconds!)  as the particular script looped and couldn't read from the file it wanted. The cause of this was to do with file permissions, in particular one file was empty and a bug in the blog code meant that it was in an infinite loop, several times over as the user kept reloading the screen! The marketing company bod was kind enough to point out that they had it working on other servers quite happily, even initially having the cheek to make out like it was software they had written, when in actual fact it was an open source (GPL licensed) piece of software.

So after working this out and telling them they needed to read their documentation and fix the problem, they instead set all the files and folders to world writable (e.g. 777 file permissions) in their FTP client. At this point I decided that it was simpler to fix the issue myself whilst giving them a lecture on how 777 permissions is never a blanket solution to anything. I got to the point of telling them I'd just remove the software if they were going to leave it like that which they didn't seem too happy about.

So after setting all the permissions back to what they should have been, 644 for files and 755 for directories, I then set the two or three folders that needed different permissions to be owned by the web server process. Hey presto! It all worked as expected. The marketing company bod was happy the situation was solved, however not even a word of thanks. Here's guessing they'll just simply 777 everything again next time they come across any snags rather than bothering to ask for some simple assistance! Oh well, some folk are dangerous when it comes to computers! If only their clients knew how incompetent they are, the world would be a better place as they'd avoid them!

Rant over, for today at least

As a recent fan of twitter (you can follow me if you like) as a short (read text message length) form of blogging, I was quite interested to spot a blog post from Andy Davies about using twitter to mashup with traffic data feeds. I used his technique, though in a simpler format e.g. I didn't bother with the Yahoo! Pipes element, to create a traffic alerts feed. As we're in the Northwest of England, I wanted to use a traffic feed relevant to this locale. To this end, I used the Northwest UK RSS feed from the Highways Agency traffic feed list.

So let's cut to the chase, how do I do this? In a nutshell: Create a new twitter account; link that to a twitterfeed.com account (a service that turns RSS feeds into twitter posts) and an RSS feed; then follow in your normal twitter account the new twitter account just created and, if you want text alerts of the data (e.g. when you're actually travelling round the area), turn on device updates for the following of the new account (assuming you've already registered a mobile device for this purpose in your main account).

Then you get new tweets and or text alerts each time there's a new RSS entry in the source feed. Sweet

If you want to subscribe to the results for that feed simply skip all the setup above and just follow NWUKTrafficAlrt in your twitter account.

In case you've not noticed on our main site, we're hiring - a PHP web developer (OOP).

I'm currently sat in the PHP London 08 conference and just thought I'd post a note. I'm currently listening to Rob Allen enthuse about the Zend Framework in the 'my framework is better than yours' session.The three frameworks under discussion where Code Igniter, Symphony and Zend Framework. Having listened to all the debates, I'm still glad we've settled on the Zend Framework for our day to day work, just seems more flexible for existing and new projects at the same time - the others seem only to have relevance when starting from scratch.

The morning sessions in the main track seemed a little basic over all, however you have to pitch at a wide audience level so that's to be expected. Fortunately, Marcus Bointon after lunch (which was really quite nice for a conference) talked about mail() and all the things that go with that, handling bounces, VERP and a few other niceties. It was unfortunate that he ran out of time towards the end as it turned out to be informative and quite in depth without getting to the point of boredom - I've found his slides on-line which should help finish the learning.

I'm now looking forward to the 3rd annual UK PHP conference this Friday. I went to the conference the first year it ran and it was good to truly geek about the language, I couldn't make last year as I was on my way back from Australia (was actually between Syndey and Dubai at the time!) so I'm over-ready for another PHP geek dose.

My only problem now is deciding which track to follow on the day - choice is sometimes not a good thing! Perhaps the sessions will be videoed and I can see all of it.

While I'm in PHP geek mode (I am every day but that's what I get paid for), I've just discovered the PHP Podcasts web site - I've got that linked in the feed reader and am already starting to enjoy the aggregated content.

We've started to use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) a lot here at SPM and so I was intrigued when the Leeds branch of GeekUp were having Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! to speak about it.

Whilst Christian's talk was an introduction to the YUI posing the question Javascript Evolved?, it was fairly basic for anyone who's used it in anger however it was a good talk, light hearted and well presented, ideally suited to the level of the audience. Christian took a straw poll of who had used the YUI to date and there seemed to be about 10 hands that went up around the room of about 70 attendees. This surprised me quite a bit as I thought it would have had a wider exposure - I'm sure it will after the presentation. For me it's the enterprise approach to the framework model that is YUI that won out over the other libraries out there. One of Christians' key points was that YUI is more than a library, in fact a true framework - JavaScript, CSS and widgets all available from a single source. The other thing I like about YUI is that it's developed by Yahoo! - who set a high standard in terms of cross-browser compatibility as well as understanding the nature of scalable solutions for their own sites. I'm looking forward to getting into the new features of the latest release of YUI version 2.5.0 out today! I hope that the new version doesn't break too much as I'm just in the testing phase of a project with a client and would like to get the new version in before it goes live - we shall see. If you missed the event, then Christian's slides are available on-line.

The man from Yahoo! also kindly brought some promotional merchandise along to the event - we all were then invited to put our names in a hat and a draw was then held. To my surprise my name was called out third and better than the t-shirts and beach balls that were won by some, I'd won one of the two copies of Christian's own book: Web Development Solutions - Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy (published by Friends of Ed from Apress). I shall look forward to getting into that once I've finished my current read: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 also from the same stable.

As usual things are busy round here, however, things are getting better since we've added two new staff again. Firstly at the beginning of last month, Phil Wastell joined us as a Web Developer and has already started to have direct impact on my over-heavy work load. Phil already knows quite a bit of PHP, xHTML and CSS and is starting to get his head round the approaches we use on top of those technologies such as OOP, Zend Framework and YUI. Additionally, at the beginning of this month, Emma Parker joined us, initially on a part-time basis, as an Account Manager - this should over time help us to keep in touch with our clients more, so if that's you, expect to be hearing from Emma in due course.

Alongside our own clients we continue to service other firms in the New Media sector, especially where they don't have the high-level technical skills in-house to deliver application level projects. This has recently resulted in a situation where we've signed an out-sourcing deal with a local marketing and design house. We now undertake their high-end projects on behalf of their clients - they get to provide best-of-breed approaches to them and the code developed is sound internally rather than creating a bunch of maintenance headaches as previously. For us it means we drive the direction of the code used and know things are backed up properly and we can keep the version control of the sites developed under a tighter reign. I've got a meeting next month that may result in a similar approach by an SEO / Accessability company from the South - so you never know, might be announcing more growth soon

Discovered today that a previously working ethernet driver for the IP1000A chipset stopped working when upgrading to the latest Fedora 7 kernel (2.6.22.1-41). When compiling the driver there's now output indicating a problem:

ipg_main.c:4045: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘pci_module_init’

If you've installed or upgraded to Fedora 7 (or are running a 2.6.22+ kernel) along with an ethernet adapter using the IP1000A chipset (e.g. from /sbin/lspci getting something similar to "Sundance Technology / IC Plus Corp IP1000 Family Gigabit Ethernet" - running on an Abit motherboard here) and are using the drivers as found at http://www.icplus.com.tw/driver-pp-IP1000A.html (and this zip file in particular) then you'll need the following mod for the source code:
Continue reading "IP 1000A ethernet driver Fedora 7"

Being a business analyst in a team with developers and designers there are interesting times when structure competes with creativity.

I was reading a book by "37signals" called "Getting Real" and they propose that developers of software should move away from paper based documentation such as functional specs and move straight to Real development of screens. They suggest creating mock ups which are then developed, amended and fixed from there and that we should  dispense with useless functional specs. www.37signals.com

I like this concept and am excited by what they propose. It is certainly upside down from how I have previously worked, but I like it!

What are your thoughts in living with that tension in regards to holding the end users nerves whilst they see development going on with less structure, no functional spec and only near the end is the spit & polish added?

I was visiting Cedar Farm (www.cedarfarm.net) a few month ago and came across a mixed media art exhibition (very good it was too - abstract and colourful with clever use of language and text and partial objects) where the artists incorporate the concept of 'psychic interruption' into their work – the idea that 'voices' from another realm, time or place can have input into todays creative/design process...

Anyone had any experience of this? Interesting possibility or a load of rubbish?

Comments please...

If like me you're using the Beryl window manager for linux (extremely cool eye candy) and have misbehaving Java applications that don't show windows properly, the title bar draws but the rest is blank, then you'll need to employ the fix as detailed in several places on the net including Arch Linux Wiki - Beryl.

Basically add the following to your .bashrc file or /etc/profile (then restart X)

export AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolkit"

As I'm running on x86_64 I also had to install a 386 library (libXp) as well (as the Java in use was a 386 version) for the Java apps to work. This cured things for blank windows with the Zend Studio IDE and Business Accountz both of which I use daily!

Just an intro for those who know us already as Co-Comp Ltd, well we're still that as a legal entity but we're now going by the name of Solution Perspective Media as that better reflects who we are and what we do these days. The new site, to go along with the new name, should be ready in a few days time, however I'm just putting the finishing touches to our revised content management system first - based on a combination of ZendFramework, ADOdb and XTemplate it's becoming a great tool - ask me for a demo when you see me!

Just discovered a new Firefox extension plugin today - ScribeFire (formerly performancing) which lets you create and edit blog posts direct from within the firefox interface. In fact this is my first post using it, so it's a bit of a 'test' post!

It's pretty cool as it supports a wide variety of blogging APIs and does a 'split' window mode. This mode is quite cool as it allows you to have ScribeFire open at the bottom area of your window and the site you're browsing at the top - which makes it easier to get accurate context when writing. Nice

Anyway give it a go and let me know what you think about it.