After a bit of discussion on the php.ie mailing list, Kae Verens and David Coallier set up http://planet.php.ie to bundle together blog postings from people within the Irish PHP community – a big thank you is deserved for them.
If you want your blog added to this ‘planet’ please contact either Kae or myself.
On other news, I’m going to start documenting PEAR_Size real soon.
My darling wife told me when I got home from work today that the laptop, running Ubuntu, was a bit slow.
On a hunch, I ran free -m and saw that the swap file wasn’t being used. I rebooted it, and sure enough saw the phrase “unable to find swap space signature”. This generally means that the swap file needs to be regenerated (this can happen with some laptops if they unexpectedly drop into hibernate mode), so I rebooted into Recovery Mode and:
fdisk -l to ascertain which partition the swap space was on (/dev/hda3)mkswap /dev/hda3‘ and activated it with ‘swapon /dev/hda3‘/etc/fstab and edited the line referring to the swap space so it would be referred by /dev/hda3 rather than the UUID value.Everything worked just fine.
Travis asked What did you do today? recently – and what he did all sums up to an amazing level of work.
I felt a need to answer this question myself. This is what I’ve been keeping myself busy with recently:
A while ago packt sent me another book to review – this time it was “Code Igniter for Rapid PHP Application Development” by David Upton.
Similar in size to the PEAR Installer Manifesto, this book weighs in at 240 pages, is aimed at developers new to CodeIgniter, and is split into 15 chapters:
Chapter one is a bare-bones introduction to what CodeIgniter is and why it was initially developed.
Chapter two details how to set up an initial site with CodeIgniter.
Chapter three introduces the reader to the concept of the MVC pattern, what it is about and how CodeIgniter implements it.
Chapter four details the ActiveRecord class for interacting with databases.
Chapter five shows the reader how to specify a View, how to nest them for better reuse and demonstrates CodeIgniter’s Validation class.
Chapter six is about session management and securing applications.
Chapter seven, if the reader requires a refresher, explains Object Oriented Programming and through some examples shows that CodeIgniter does not take advantage of PHP5′s enhancements in that regard. It also looks at the object model in CodeIgniter.
Chapter eight details how to perform unit tests, benchmarking, profiling and how to use mock database objects for test purposes.
Chapter nine is about various machine-to-machine communications: FTP, mail and using xml-rpc for providing webservices.
Chapter ten focuses on internationalization, caching and string manipulation.
Chapter eleven is about file uploads, downloads, compression and image manipulation.
Chapter twelve discusses various topics relevant to migrating your code from your development servers to production.
Chapter thirteen details CRUD operations in CodeIgniter.
Chapter fourteen takes an objective look at what the book has covered as regards CodeIgniter’s abilities and what the author chose to not cover – one admitted omission is a lack of focus on AJAX.
Chapter fifteen, the last one, provides a list of resources and extensions that the dear reader will want to investigate. These include, but are not limited to, graphing and AJAX classes, methods of authentication and CRUD libraries.
The book is written well and the inevitable – yet thankfully small – number of spelling and grammar mistakes in the books don’t detract from the book as much as in the SOA one. I got the impression while reading chapter eleven that the author is not particularly knowledgeable about file permissions on linux/unix and specifies the most permissive options for those platforms which is a bit worrying.
I was amused to find the book “PHP Programming with PEAR” gets a mention in the “Resources and Extensions” chapter, more so because CodeIgniter seems to be a framework that has a chronic case of “Not-Invented-Here” syndrome and attacks the PEAR framework on the main page of it’s website and userguide.
All in all, I found the book to be a straight-forward, educational read and that it works very well alongside the CodeIgniter online documentation.
Well worth the read if you are new to CodeIgniter.
Addendum: Kae asked if reading this book might make me inclined to use CodeIgniter; while I found it very interesting I was also shocked that there is no inclination of embracing and utilising PHP5 enhancements and the chronic NIH present in the framework makes me feel very reluctant to use CodeIgniter. There is a spin-off or fork of CodeIgniter called Kohana that takes advantage of PHP5. It may well be worth investigating.
Today was Document Freedom Day.
Book Review: The PEAR Installer Manifesto by Gregory Beaver – Packt Publishing.
When I was asked by a Packt representative if I would review the book “SOA Approach to Integration” by Poornachandra Sarang, Frank Jennings, Matjaz Juric and Ramesh Loganathan I was told I could pick a book of my choice as a “thank-you” for writing that review.
I jumped at the chance to obtain a copy of “The PEAR Installer Manifesto” – and have now been asked to write a review of it, so here goes:
The book is approximately 270 pages long, split into six chapters, and is aimed at PHP developers who “want to understand how the PEAR Installer works and what it can do for them” and also for those “seeking a better way to deploy their applications and manage updates”.
The six chapters are:
Chapter one explains what PEAR is, how to install the PEAR installer and how to deploy PEAR packages remotely onto a server over FTP – proving that no matter what way you access your production servers you can, and should, be using the PEAR installer.
Chapter two covers versioning, package.xml and roles; teaching how to turn software written in PHP into discrete distributable packages.
Chapter three focuses more on version two of package.xml (chapter two briefly covered both versions 1 and 2 of the package definition file) and explains how to bundle a package with its dependancies.
Chapter four is about source code control and performing roll-backs on pear packages – essential tasks when it comes to managing a complex website.
Chapter five details how to set up a channel server, outlines various ways to distribute packages and applications using channel servers and discusses related security issues.
Chapter six closes the book with an explanation of why you might want to embed the PEAR installed, a discussion of several methods of handling plug-in systems and designing a custom PEAR channel-based plugin system.
As a PEAR developer who’s going through the process of getting a new package proposed and accepted I found the discussion of package.xml enlightening – much more so than the current online documentation.
As a developer who has occasionally needed to rollback changes pushed to a production server… well, if chapters two and three weren’t eye-opening enough; chapter four definitely was as it details how to employ the PEAR installer to update and rollback live code so you can quickly revert back to a known working version of the site.
Though they are relatively few the book is not without its flaws: there is a small number of spelling mistakes present and considering the book was published in 2006 I don’t think it unrealistic to expect these to be corrected in an on-line errata. Other than that I found “The PEAR Installer Manifesto” to be a nicely focused, well written book grounded with good case studies and real world examples.
Authored by the authority on the PEAR installer the book couldn’t get much better. Highly recommended.
I noticed just now that Kae blogged about our participation at the Irish Web Technologies Conference.
As Kae mentioned, this was the first time that we represented the Irish PHP Users Group at any such conference and we learnt a lot – from the mundane to the slightly more insightful.
It was a good day and I’m sure the next time we participate in a conference we’ll come better prepared.
Book Review: SOA Approach to Integration by Poornachandra Sarang, Frank Jennings, Matjaz Juric, Ramesh Loganathan – (Packt Publishing)
I was recently asked by a representative of Packt Publishing to review this book on Service Oriented Architecture and I looked forward to reading the review copy they sent me.
While I waited for the book to arrive I searched the packt website for the errata for it – and found none. I thought “Either the book is perfect or they haven’t gotten around to publishing a list of corrections yet”. Quite an omen.
The blurb on the back of the book says that it is intended for “architects and senior developers who are responsible for setting up SOA for integration for applications within the enterprise and applications across the enterprise”.
The 360 or so pages are split into six chapters:
Chapter one focuses on integration technologies, approaches and patterns – pretty much laying the groundwork as you would expect an introductory chapter to do.
The second chapter attempts to drill down deep into what SOA is about.
Chapter three details the Best Practices that should be followed when using XML for Integration and seems completely out of place considering the intended audience that this book is written for – it is far to low-level for a book aimed at software architects.
Chapter four focuses on web services and does a very good job of it, advising for example to stick with approved Standards rather than using proprietary extensions of say SOAP and WSDL. Amusingly though, while advising that web services should remain independent of programming languages and application platforms the book soley gives examples in Java and .net.
Chapter five details BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and the Process-Oriented Approach to Integration in a rather comprehensive manner.
Chapter six, discusses the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in depth. Just as with chapter 4 I was amused with this one. There is a subsection to it about how ESB helps avoid vendor lock-ins yet there is no discussion of open source offerings that are available for EBS, BPEL etc etc.
“SOA Approach to Integration” focuses in detail on the WS-* standards and references SOAP very often. There is an anomaly in that there is no mention of REST and while the authors, with their collective experience in Java and .NET, focus on detailing use and interoperability between those platforms I would have expected at least some Open Source technologies and programming languages to be referred to – the ESBs Apache Service Mix, Mule for example; along with perl, PHP and python as some of the programming languages that can be used.
If PHP was to be mentioned I would expect the “WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP” to be listed as well as, perhaps, the SOAP and UDDI packages from PEAR.
I found myself reading some sections of the book repeatedly – not because the technical content was too complex to understand; but due to it being too verbose, due to bad grammar, spelling mistakes and poor punctuation. I also felt that the diagrams and figures in the book should have been identified better, both in the text and individually. A glossary and a more complete index would have been nice too.
On the whole, although I did enjoy reading portions of the book, it seems to be a lacklustre introduction for software architects and senior developers that are new to Service Oriented Architecture but that’s pretty much all that it is.
The monthly Irish PHP Users Group meetings are on tomorrow, Wednesday, night at 8 o’clock at the following venues:
Pádraic Brady, of Patterns for PHP et al, will be making his debut appearance at the Dublin venue.
It seems that my recent post about Date_Holidays has evolved into a request-fest for Drivers and Filters to calculate when the national and public holidays for various countries.
On the list to be developed so far are:
* Iceland
* Romania
* The Ukraine
Email me or leave a comment below if you are interested in this 
Date_Holidays 0.17.2 was released today; with two new drivers and some bug fixes!
Date_Holidays is a PEAR package for PHP that is used for determining whether a specific date is a [public] holiday in some specified country, listing all such holidays and for these reasons is a useful component for scheduling applications.
This is driver based, one per country.
Currently there are drivers for: Austria, Denmark, England & Wales, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands (new) , Norway (new), Slovenia, Sweden and the USA.
There are also drivers for Christian and Jewish holidays along with special ‘UN’ celebrated days such as “World Health Day”.
It’s very easy to write new drivers for Date_Holidays, heck I wrote the Ireland driver So if you’ve noticed there is no driver for where you are I’d recommend that you do so.
For the last few weeks I’ve been meaning to install ezPublish, a PHP based Content Management System from the guys working for eZ in Norway.
Well, because I have a number of different systems already running on my laptop I didn’t want to run the plain wizard/installer – just in case something got overwritten that I obviously should have made a backup of, I found the Manual “installation on a Linux/UNIX based system” documentation elsewhere on their site.
Thought I’d share the link as it may come in useful for someone else.
My digital camera, a Kodak Z710, stopped working under ubuntu a while back; the error message “Could not claim the USB device” was cited.
A quick google brought up the solution, on Ubuntu Forums – apparently the line relating to the camera was no longer present in /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules.
I inserted the relevant line,
SYSFS{idVendor}=="040a", SYSFS{idProduct}=="05b3", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev",
at the bottom of that file and, after reloading those rules with /etc/init.d/udev restart. This final step is important – otherwise you’ll have to restart your PC
I got the idVendor and idProduct values from the output of lsusb. They were also present in the post to Ubuntu Forums.
As Chuck Burgess says, “The sad state of U.S. Homeland Security…”
The Linux Counter project has been going for some time now and is an attempt to determine how many people are using Linux worldwide.
It is also used to estimate how many machines Linux is installed on.
I received an email this morning asking me to update my details, this is not uncommon as I had not logged in for quite some time, and felt compelled to blog about it to remind others who might want to ‘stand up and be counted’.
The Irish Linux Counter Homepage details how best to register yourself if you are based in Ireland.
So go on, what are you waiting for?
Tomorrow is the last Wednesday of the month – the day the three PHP Users Group meetings are held:
Other details are available on the Irish PHP Users’ Group website.
Inside the next seven days two things that I am very excited about* are going to happen:
*Never said it wouldn’t be something geeky
I recently discovered sshfs; which is a useful way to mount remote systems via ssh.
I wanted to have some systems mounted automatically on my laptop whenever I am online but not have any timeouts or attempts to connect when I am not. This ruled out simply adding a line or two to my .bashrc file or the /etc/fstab file.
The solution?
I already use the whereami package to selectively mount nfs shares and do other things depending on my location so it was just a matter of editing the /etc/whereami/whereami.conf file to include the following:
#mount /media/server1 =home sudo -u kguest sshfs server1.example.com: /media/server1 -o workaround=rename #mount /media/server2 =home sudo -u kguest sshfs server2: /media/server2 -o workaround=rename
The ‘home’ location is defined in my /etc/whereami/detect.conf file if the access point at home is detected:
if wlan
testap example-ap-name home,wdhcp
notat wlan,wdhcp
fi
Combined, these mean that if the whereami script detects an access point named example-ap-name (original isn’t it?) then those remote systems are mounted into the /media/server1 and /media/server2 directories.
Adam Harvey posted about listing which PEAR packages are installed. This inspired me to spend a few minutes coding a solution to check for a specific installed version of a package.
This is useful for where you provide a system that uses certain packages and you decide to not bundle those packages with the system you developed [so you don't have to manually apply upgrades for security fixes etc] and rely on PEAR itself to install and upgrade those packages as need be.
Peter Goodman has written a quick blog entry on “15 Cool Things About PHP That Most People Overlook” at http://ioreader.com/2007/08/17/11-cool-things-about-php-that-most-people-overlook/.
It’s an interesting read.
