Danny Angus

All work and no play ...

2008-08-14T14:29:00.003+01:00

... I don't think so, I forgot to add to yesterday's post that as well as all the new folk and new clients we've got new toys too.

We've got two 52" plasmas, one streaming the olympics and one with a Wii, and under my desk is an UrbanTerror server so my department can take out their frustrations by fragging each other at lunchtimes.

Oh... and if you've got flash actionscript 3 skills and can travel to out office get in touch, all this could be yours too.

Onwards and upwards..

2008-08-13T11:25:00.003+01:00

Yesterday we launched our now corporate website here.

The previous day we inducted two new php analyst programmers and a second business analyst.
Last monday we started a new sysadmin.
We're still looking for a flash actionscript 3 developer.

Now that the new site is up I can reveal that we're working on ecommerce for two exciting fashion brands Bench and Hooch. Its always a challenge working for established brands, but in this case its creating a real buzz in the office, they're going to be cool through and through, from the graphic design to the seamless integration with warehouse and financial systems.

Talking of challenging, the migration of a.n.other client seems to have gone pretty smoothly, some minor issues are outstanding, but (touch wood) everything that's needed is working.

And finally.. we've launched a redesign of Duchamp.

2008-08-12T15:52:00.000+01:00

We're hiring

2008-07-09T17:31:00.002+01:00

Business Analysts, PHP developers and an online marketeer, apply here
And join me here: :-)

Mysql Federated tables and Oracle Database links

2008-07-04T12:35:00.003+01:00

Taking time out from the Big Migration job to share this with you, and before you say anything *I Know* this is old news, but forgive me because I've been away from MySQL for 4 years, and just because you know this doesn't mean that there aren't other "late adopters" like me out there.

Over the past few weeks I've come across quite a few posts on the net from folks who wanted to use oracle style links between MySQL databases (I don't need to, I just spoted a theme). Researching the storage engines in Mysql 5 (we're upgrading as well as migrating) it seems there is now an answer in the form of the Federated storage engine.

The article also provided me an answer for the perennial problem of needing several instances of MySQL in dev and test, often for exactly the task currently at hand, migrating from one version to another, that answer is the mysql sandbox. Neat. Its a shame that I've already set up my dev environment, I'd like to play with that.

Sony Bricks PS3's

2008-07-03T14:03:00.004+01:00

Sam, who sits opposite me at work, tells me that the latest firmware update for the PS3 was bricking boxes yesterday until they recalled it. Her better half didn't manage to download it in time, lucky for them.

Apparently calls to Sony support (in the uk at least) were met with the response "we'll come and collect it".

I guess my nearest and dearest were actually saving me a headache when the didn't buy me one.

You can read a bit about it here.

Apache httpd & SELinux

2008-06-12T15:43:00.004+01:00

I'll admit straight away here that SELinux was news to me 6mths ago when I installed Centos5 (RHEL5 equivalent) for the first time. Since then I've found out a little, mainly because I had to.

SELinux lurks like a rake in the grass and whangs you on the noggin just when you're 100% sure you know what you're doing.

For example SELinux was the culprit when a pretty simple perl DBI script wasn't allowed to connect to a remote database when run as a CGI script, but the same script worked fine as a shell script. And the error was no more than an unhelpful and inscruitable "Can't create TCP/IP socket (13)".

Its been a real pain, so here are two things you may wish to read...

When pain strikes reach for: How to Disable SELinux turning it off is a sure fire way to find out if it really is an SELinux problem.

Then when you want to turn it back on again read this: Apache and SELinux to find out how to configure it to allow httpd to do some things without opening the door to everything.

For your listening pleasure...

2008-06-10T10:11:00.001+01:00

Why? Because I can.

Another year older... another ASF board elected...

2008-06-05T20:31:00.003+01:00

It hardly seems like a year since the ASF elected the board and here we are again.
The new board is a healthy mix of dedicated people from all walks of the foundation and looks like this:

Bertrand Delacretaz
Justin Erenkrantz
J. Aaron Farr
Jim Jagielski
Geir Magnusson Jr.
William A. Rowe, Jr.
Sam Ruby
Henning Schmiedehausen
Greg Stein

Botched Security Lifetime Achievement Award

2008-05-21T12:34:00.005+01:00

I wasn't going to add my 2c to the debate rumbling behind the OpenSSL defect, (summarised nicely here) Plenty of knowledgeable folks have raked over those coals already.

But then I came across this story, I don't know how old it is, Hardworking Locksmith In Prisons and it struck me that the OpenSSL problem was essentially the opposite of the locksmiths one.

On the one hand we have a security technology which was compromised because its secrets weren't known and understood well enough, and on the other we have a security technology who's flaw is that it relies to a large extent on practitioners keeping secrets.

So the award goes jointly to the guys who compromised OpenSSL without knowing what they were doing, and the guys who compromise our homes and offices just because they do.

I'm still not sure whether I'm happier to rely on knowledge or ignorance for my security though.

Using Apache2 as a reverse proxy

2008-05-14T16:57:00.000+01:00

It was years since I'd done this, and I'd forgotten everything about it but niq's article gets it all across nice and concise.

Microsoft iPod Carton

2008-04-30T15:20:00.003+01:00

Its old, but I only saw it the other day, and I laughed..
(If you can't see the video, perhaps you're reading this on a feed reader, click this link to you tube.)

OMG - java weenie goes LAMP!

2008-04-22T17:11:00.003+01:00

Well yes, I've spent the past week or so trying to apply a load of stuff that I want to do from the world of Java to the word of LAMP, or php to you and me.

I should also say that before I embarked on my career as a java-weenie I'd spent four years man-and-boy programming perl, so the php itself wasn't any kind of hurdle, my challenge has been to see if I could introduce all of the application architecture patterns which I know and love from Java world.

So what things have I uncovered?

1/ IDE - the Eclipse PDT, with zend debugger, is excellent. Not quite as robust as Eclipse java tools, there are still some flaky moments and the code completion can't always work out what class $this->thing actually is, but that is all made up for and more by subclipse and the zend debugger. Keep up the good work PDT guys. For others who want to investigate I followed these instructions.

2/ OOP Yes, PHP5's OOP is pretty decent, but (obviously) it is weakly typed which I find annoying coming from a strongly typed background. And surprisingly I had to write my own classloader, which was fun and instructive and it seems to work fine, but why? I haven't started using exceptions yet, hopefully they'll be familiar.

3/ ORM Oh yes, this is cruicial to my plans Mua hahaha, and it seems so far that the excellent Doctrine ORM is well up to the task, if not quite in the same league as Hibernate.
One thing thats puzzling me is where the transactionality has gone, but perhaps thats because I haven't read the manual fully yet.

4/ Logging, oh wow- log4php - in incubation at Apache this is the php sibling of log4j it works fine and smells very familiar.

5/ Unit testing, haven't tried it yet but while I was talking through my researches with the guys who will have to suffer the consequences of my decision making they said phpunit, which certainly sounds like the right thing!

6/ MVC I'm not keen to adopt a big framework wholesale, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explain now, but its been relatively painless to knock together an OO MVC framework using Doctrine, homespun controllers, and Views generated by the Smarty template engine which at least lets us bind, using simple {$my.attribute} syntax, display elements to objects from the model, not sure how far Smarty will suit at this early stage but its looking promising for now.

I have no stirring conclusions at this stage, but its looking good, stay tuned and I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Geek Heaven Award

2008-04-08T09:41:00.002+01:00

GSOC mentors have been introducing themselves to one another, and as always I've been avidly viewing the more esoteric web sites which this process introduces us to.

Today's winner (and its only 9:45 am) has to be Hironobu's HDD temperature graph here for its Zen like ability to ask us as many questions about the nature of life as it answers about the temparture of his drives.

Google App Engine

2008-04-08T09:14:00.002+01:00

Staking my place (I'm always well-behind-the-curve!) I just tried to sign up for the Google App Engine trial, after reading about it here, but its already full :-(.

However the docs make interesting reading, and at least I'll have time to figure out how to use it and what it might be used for as I wait for the program to expand.

@Work right now I'm thinking about things like code escrow, how to convince client's lawyers that they don't need to own the hardware, and business continuity. That all puts a different flavour on my view of stuff-like-this, I wonder what kinds of SLA's & other protections Google will offer commercial customers?

The Green Shoots of Common Sense?

2008-04-05T14:10:00.001+01:00

Digital Urban: US Census Drop's PDA, Adopts Pencil and Paper

New Studio

2008-04-03T13:42:00.001+01:00

Studio, originally uploaded by danny angus.

We've finally re-arranged the office, turning what was the programmers room into a photography studio. Now we have room for eight more people, they'll get a flat-pack desk and drawers as part of the induction pack ;-)

Dell PowerEdge R200 - Simulating hardware failure

2008-04-02T20:59:00.002+01:00

Warning, I'm not advocating that you *you* do this!
Determined to have a free (as in beer) operating system on the new servers I tried to put Ubuntu on them, but I couldn't get dell's open manage to work with the storage controller :-( so I've gone to CentOS 5.1 instead. Its more of a pain to get going with but probably a better bet in the long run.

Anyhow OpenManage installed fine, but being an untrusting guy I couldn't ship them off to the colo without knowing that I would spot a drive failure, so we simulated a failure by pulling out the cable. What do you know? It worked as advertised, and after pluging it back in again and rebooting (the R200's we've got don't have hot-plug drives) it rebuilt the drive quite happily.

Time to do the other R200 and the PE2950III, the 2950 has 8 hot plug 2.5 inch bays, we've only got 3 drives in there right now in Raid-5. How the hell can raid 5 possibly work?

Unless the third drive is like schrodinger's cat, in which case it would be a complete copy of whichever drive happened to be missing, my power of imagination is defeated by the idea that any 1/3rd of my data can be created from the other 1/3 and some meta-data bout the missing stuff. If thats the case why do I need the missing drive at all? It all makes no sense to me, but I'm happy to trust it!

Black Perspex

2008-03-21T20:56:00.002Z

Black Perspex, originally uploaded by danny angus.

The office was a frenzy of excitement yesterday because the black perspex was delivered for the photography.
So I took this picture of a baby's Converse Allstars on it with my phone.
Nice? I think so. Imagine what we can do with an actual camera.

Is the message getting through?

2008-03-20T16:08:00.003Z

One of the first things I did when I started here in November was to introduce Jira, prior to that we lacked a certain amount of structure.

This appeared on the divider between the (recently relocated) programmers and the photography area this lunchtime.

I think I'm winning hearts and minds! ;-)

Google Summer of Code 2008 - Apache James email Projects

2008-03-19T11:52:00.002Z

The Apache James team have submitted two proposed student projects for Google Summer of Code 2008, you can read them here.

In brief they are:

1) Develop a VERP Mailet to allow James to write VERP modified return addresses on outbound messages, and an inbound mailet/matcher to identify VERP bounces and invoke configurable "do something" code.

And 2) James' provided mailing list manager is fine for small closed groups, but lacks the functionality of a more robust MLM, the project is to add some all or more of the following features subscriber and message moderation, double opt-in and bounce handling.

Spread the word, James needs Students!

City 17 -Life imitates Art

2008-02-29T12:59:00.008Z

When I was in Manchester the other day I was struck by the resemblance between it and Half-lif2's City 17, largely as a result of the Beetham Tower. The top images is Manchester, the lower image is City 17

Manchester
(credit: Brian Micklethwait from http://www.brianmicklethwait.com/index.php/weblog/a_new_tower_in_manchester/)

City 17
(credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HalfLife2_City17_Street.jpg)

Iomart responded

2008-02-29T12:06:00.003Z

I received an email from Iomart in response to this posting about problems I'd had which, amongst the expected said this:

Customer Service is extremely important to us and as you can imagine the extended maintenance was disappointing from our own internal viewpoint, however it was at the same time unavoidable and we did everything in our power to restore services as quickly as possible.

Which is fine as it goes, but if they actually read the post they will see that my anger is directed at three things:

1/ We were not expecting to be affected, this wasn't "extended maintenance" for us it was unplanned downtime. Iomart advertise 100% uptime, how can they do that if they don't even know when things aren't working.
2/ Even if we had been expecting this we were not given enough time to come up with contingency arrangements.
3/ We couldn't contact anyone for several hours after we discovered the problem, and neither did they contact us to tell us that there even was a problem, therefore clearly not doing everything in their power, and it took several more hours to finally restore our services.

My correspondent also said:

is there anything we can do to perhaps help you find alternative solutions or ease the frustration you have clearly experienced with the maintenance on Sunday 27th January.

Which is nonsense because the two things which might have made a difference are clearly not going to be on Iomarts agenda,
a) compensate our clients who lost tens of £000's of revenue
or b) turn the clock back and warn us at least 10 working days before this happened.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that things can and do go wrong at times, I'm not complaining that things went wrong, I'm complaining that we weren't in the loop.
Customer service is about making your customers priorities and concerns your priorities and concerns. In this case Iomart's priorities and concerns were clearly their own.

Oh and if anyone from Iomart should choose to respond to this post, please use comments, and if anyone does choose to email me, don't try to be clever and use an address you discover, use the one advertised, find it using the "contact me" link, that's what its there for.

serendipity

2008-02-28T20:07:00.002Z

Went to collect my teenage daughter from her guitar lesson today for the 1st time, so I got Nikki to show me where it was on google maps. I took a good look at the satellite view so's I'd know exactly which house to go to, and how to get to the right street. Neither of us knew what the address was, and even if we did we're satNav luddites. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find the same maroon car parked in the same place in the drive as was in the satellite photo.

The Gratuitous Shoe

2008-02-19T15:51:00.004Z

I couldn't resist posting this picture, as you may guess we've got more shoe photography going on in the office today... but this time its going straight into the asset library, from where I plucked this beauty.

I still can't work out how to make Adobe Version Cue work with a linux samba fileserver, VC seems to use java and mysql, but for some reason even running the server on windows I can't select the network shares as the data location. :-(

I think I'll just admire the shoes and wait for inspiration ...