Nigel made me aware of ZygoHubs today; basically it provides a 'group wide' number to which you text. This text is then relayed to all other people in your group. So, presumably it would provide a great way for people to stay in touch as a group - and have the ability to notify everyone else by only sending one single text message.

Naturally, users of the service can belong to multiple groups.

The 2008 UKUUG Spring conference is coming up soon (well, 31st March to 2nd April). It's focus is large scale systems admin, but some of the talks look appealing to a wider audience (e.g. anti-spam). The good news is that it's in Birmingham, which seems to be attracting a few more technical events lately :)

Well, thanks to the hard work of a number of people, PyConUK was a great success. Personally I didn't notice anything go wrong (the wireless LAN "just worked"; organisation was good; more people turned up than expected... everyone seemed happy etc etc!).

Highlights for me are probably :

• Stuart Langridge's Jackfield talk - I now know what it's about...
• Functional programming-isms via the Functional Programming introduction, and the Great Language debate.

One of the delegates on the marketing course was from a media/video production company based near Telford. In between the two sessions we had some homework, and in a round about way, I ended up emailing them pointing out that their website wouldn't be indexed by Google (and other search engines).

What's wrong with their website? It's 100% flash based and :

• It's not obvious that you can click on parts of it (at least in normal websites links are somehow set out from everything else)

Intro

Some notes on MySQL (v4.1.13) optimization where I managed to reduce the time of performing a task from 1 hour to 9.4 minutes.

Background

While working for one customer, a task I had was to consolidate (mergE) data from a number of separate databases into one. This involved importing a relatively large quantity of data into a central MySQL database.

Zend Framework - Cache module (quick review)

I've just about finished writing an article for Linux User & Developer which is an introduction to the Zend Framework's Cache module.

Phone spam.....

I'm no great fan of spam, in any variety (tinned, email, phone etc); so the other day I reconfigured our Asterisk server to require that inbound callers press '*' to speak to us, or get through to the answer phone. So far it seems to have cut out about 5 pointless calls - so that's good.

Postfixadmin Squirrelmail plugin

I found a Squirrelmail plugin for Postfixadmin the other day on Sourceforge. It provides support for setting vacation/auto-response messages, adding aliases/forwards and changing your password.

Unfortunately it didn't support PostgreSQL, and as we later found out, it was full of SQL injection holes....

Lately Firefox has been taking some time to start (~20 seconds); and this morning while running htop I noticed there was an 'md5sum core' running before each new instance opened (i.e. after I click on the firefox icon).

After investigating a bit further, it seems the run-mozilla.sh shell script which comes with Firefox runs md5sum on any core files in your home directory. I can't for the life of me think why this is a good 'feature'.

Linux Locale errors

For some reason, I keep coming across Ubuntu machines that are missing the language-pack appropriate to their end user. If you happen to 'acquire' one of these, you'll see messages like :

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_GB.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

or