XP Day

This was my second year at xpday and I can honestly say it excellent. This year’s programme really suited my personal agenda of lean software development, kanban and test driven development (TDD). Also the programme’s open space structure changed, but in a good way for me. The open space sessions occupied most of the second day this which I personally thought was good, as last year the open sessions where spread over both days. This ment that it was possible to get into more sessions as there where less of them. Read the rest of this entry »

I just installed the latest Debian, and realized that the packages are not as up-to-date as I would like. For example I installed PHP and MySQL. PHP was at version 5.2.6 and MySQL was at version 5.0.15a. Considering PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.1 are already released, made me think am I better off compiling from source?

After going down the compiling route, as in my previous post due to the same out dated problems I actually found a useful and up-to-date repository. Along with this, my bias towards Debian drastically strengthed. Which after many years of working on a a variety of other distro’s never quiet happened. Read the rest of this entry »

To install APC is usually straight forward:

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install apc

If your using nginx make sure you enter no to install using ASPX (apache dynamic modules).

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When I first looked at how old the nginx package in the debian repo was I thought that I should compile nginx. However, I eventually managed to find a more recent repo which I will post later.

Download nginx and install dependencies

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Finally after nearly one year I have managed to publish my first book. And I am proud to say, its all about the PHP Symfony Framework.

The Symfony framework allows you to build modern web applications and web services easily and rapidly. The MVC components separate the logic from the user interface and therefore make developing, changing, and testing your applications much faster. Using Symfony you can minimize repetitive coding tasks, optimize performance, and easily integrate with other libraries and frameworks.

For people wanting to share content between two or more computers, try dropbox. I currently share files between Ubuntu and windows, and on occasions share documents with others. Dropbox easily caters for this, and best of all is free for up to 2GB.

Intalling dropbox on Ubuntuu 9.04

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I know there are loads of methods to getting this combination working.

Download eclipse J2EE edition

One unziped, move the eclipse folder to the /opt directory. Add to the applications->programming menu eclipse.

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After upgrading the kernel, booting into it left me with a black screen. The first time that I can honestly say ubuntu has shocked me. The problem is the nvidia 177 driver. To get around it, boot up into the previous kernal and install the Nvidia 180 packages. Once its done, reboot into the latest kernel version.

One of the key tools for ssh automation is keychain, which is pretty much available in most flavors of linux. Its usually not installed by default, therefore using your package manager install ‘keychain’

Ubuntu users:

$sudo apt-get install keychain

After its install, you set it up by entering the keychain command followed by your private key (not the public key).

$ keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
KeyChain 2.6.6; http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ Copyright 2002-2004
Gentoo Foundation; Distributed under the GPL</pre>
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-csh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-fish file...
* Starting ssh-agent
* Adding 1 ssh key(s)...
Enter passphrase for /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa:
Identity added: /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa)

Keychain then creates three files which correspond to various shell environments. As I am using bash, the file I will be referencing will be /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh.

$ source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

To make sure everything is fine run the following to make sure the the environment is in fact set up:

$ env | grep SSH_A
SSH_AGENT_PID=9607
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-bMoLeb9606/agent.9606

Of course you will want this to happen automatically on login so add the following to your ~/.bashrc

keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

The last step is to add the following line to your backup script (including the .)

. /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh

Backup Scripts
Ill only mention the two methods that i use.
1. scp: To copy files from one location to another
2. rsync: To sync a remote location to local location

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My first experience of XP was excellent. Both days revolved around open space sessions and several other talks

Thursday’s talks

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