David and Katherine Goodwin

It seems Linux User and Developer will have another issue out soon; which, if things go to plan will have a column written by me on whether being free (as in beer) is a good thing or not for open source adoption. I suspect after the magazine has been published, I'll publish the article on here too.

Today was day 1 of LugRadio Live 2008 (UK edition).

Headline news - There will be more LugRadio Live conferences, and the implication of more LugRadio episodes.

As per normal, we met all the usual suspects, and had a good time. I only attended two talks - one on Women in Open Source, and the other was about bzr. Perhaps the schedule wasn't worded too well, but it was hard to get excited by any of the descriptions given - I needed more info goddamit!.

The following is effectively an online version of a talk I gave to phpwm in July 2008.

Disclaimer!

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere

This is just a documentation of what I/we as “newbies” found ...

Today, I was giving a one-on-one PHP training course covering databases (we were trying to get mssql to work with PHP on Windows, but various factors seemed to conspire against us - possibly permissions related, as it seemed to refuse to allow us to select from a table that fricking well did exist.). Anyway, the amusing story was.....

Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.

This is just a quick note, incase it helps someone else in the future.

It seems that MySQL server, when using MyISAM tables doesn't truncate the index file when you run "ALTER TABLE x DISABLE KEYS", so when running "ALTER TABLE x ENABLE KEYS" you end up with an MyISAM index file (xxxx.myi) which keeps growing. In my case this hit 90gb on a customer's server.

Ways to fix this :

1. Upgrade to MySQL 5.0.52 (apparently ... see
   http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4692 )
2. Run "optimize table xxxx"

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.

I'm in the process of creating (or at least, thinking of creating) an XMLRPC interface to an existing (third party) application at work.

As with 'normal' web applications, I need to use HTTP sessions to support some form of persistence (e.g. to tell who a callee is) across requests.

My fictional API would ideally look something like the following :

Awaking at 3:30am, arriving in London at 8am and parking in a car park that would by the end of the day cost £41.50 (argh!), we went to the 2008 London php conference.

After an email out of the blue from someone at Packt publishing, here's a review of "Object-Orientated Programming with PHP5"

I don't think I've done a book review before, so apologies in advance if it's not structured in any logical manner.

Contents

Briefly summarised, the book's chapters are :

1. OOP vs Procedural Programming (what is OOP?, why?, differences between etc)
2. Kick Starting OOP (objects, inheritance, polymorphism etc)