For various reasons, I have a customer that would like to try out a Xen virtualization server. Not a big one, more of a test bed for some ideas and also a chance to experience how Xen is to work with. I’m happy to help, I’ve just finished setting up a VMWare ESXi system for a company and that was fun and exciting. Virtualization is the way to go. Anyway, I took a look around for some providers of small size solutions, here are some notes:
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I spent the evening looking for some online storage. I currently make use of spare disk space on the hosting servers (for client storage) and Amazon S3 for backups (using Duplicity). Amazon is great for having one, unlimited account where I can back almost anything up, but it’s not so useful for clients as they need to have a login to up- and down-load files. And using space on the hosting servers has got to be about the most expensive way of handling storage needs. Time to check out some alternatives… Read the rest of this entry »

I want to try a PHP framework for a job that is coming up. It’s an online booking system and needs to fit into an existing web site and have it’s own admin system. So which PHP Framework to try? A quick google gave me dozens of articles on the subject and it quickly became clear that the leaders, at this point in time, come down to: CakePHP, CodeIgnition, Symfony and ZendFramework. There were others that sounded interesting (WACT provide a pretty full listing here, Wikipedia here) but many seem to be in the dreaming phase or have gone to sleep some months back. Others of possible note include Fusebox (for fans of ColdFusion), Prado or Seagull.
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Thunderbird is one excellent mail client and sometimes it would be useful to have, at least, a look up into a calendar or such like. Mostly I like programs to do one thing and do it well, so an email client would handle email and a calendar would handle dates and appointments. But Thunderbird does have a plugin that handles calendar functionality and makes use of the Sunbird calendars so giving the option of using Sunbird or of using Lightning. There is just one small problem: I run 64 bit Thunderbird on a 64 bit system, and Lightning is only packaged for 32 bit. Read the rest of this entry »

I was just renewing a domain at Easily.co.uk (a large UK registrar) and after the process followed a link to the “Top 10 sites at Easily”. Number 3 was a site cattleprods.co.uk, which seemed a little bit odd unless the British have got a taste for animal (or crowd) control. You can discover the site for yourself, but from a technical standpoint, it’s an excellent use of Flash and from a personal point of view, I’ve just wasted an hour there…

First session today was called “Is FP for me” and covered the areas in which functional programming might be useful. The session was given by Hubert Matthews and gave an excellent overview of when and where to use a functional programming language. He started by discussing the different types of language, using as examples Fortran (for mathematical calculation), COBOL (for business applications) and Lisp (for more algorithmic and abstract programming). Although all three languages were created in the 1950s, they are still with us today, COBOL having inspired the creation of imperative languages such as C/C++ and Smalltalk, Lisp providing ideas which have developed into Haskell, OCaml and similar. When asked which language would give a neophyte a good introduction into the techniques, Hubert suggested Haskell.

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Interesting session this morning, from Schalke Cronje, on RPM package management. One of those sessions that cover a subject I know something about but have never had time to look at in depth. Schalke covered the basic command line usage of RPM and then showed us how to create spec files and build packages that could be distributed over multiple platforms. Nothing stunningly new, but all explained clearly and it will certainly give me the confidence to try packaging up some of my stuff with a few more deployment features.

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One of the tracks at this conference has been on functional programming and today’s sessions covered FP in general and more specifically, Erlang and Haskell. Every conference has a special track, in the past there has been template programming in C++, C# and .Net programming, or open source software. The special tracks often are on subjects which are not mainstream at present. But if they are well attended, it’s usually an indication that they may be in the next couple of years. And the FP sessions were very well attended (I spent a couple sitting on the floor) so expect to see more of these languages in the future.

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So it’s April, I’m in Oxford… it must be the ACCU conference again. This is a leading conference for programmers in the UK and Europe and brings some of the brightest and best in one place for four days of talks, meetings and after-hours wining and dining. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometime back I wrote about comment spam in the blogs and using fake comment pages in order to catch automated spambots and record their IPs. Over the months I clocked up a few thousand spambots and I thought it might be fun to do something with them. Like block them for a while. Read the rest of this entry »