The watch Linux command line tool

I'm sure everyone else already knows about watch, but it's new to me. This little utility executes a program repeatedly at a set interval and displays its output. I've been using it with mysqladmin's processlist command like this: watch -n 1 /usr/bin/mysqladmin -uroot -pMYPASSWORD processlist Note that this does put your password on display at the top of the command window whilst watch is running. If you don't want that, you could write a little… continue reading.

Posted on 24 July 2009 in Development, Software

Bootstrapping modules in ZF 1.8 and up

I've started to play with modules in a Zend Framework 1.8 application as the new autoloader means that all your model directories no long have to be on the include_path for autoloading to work. What I'm specifically interested in is being able to instantiate a model that is within a module from within another module. Setting it all up isn't that hard, but I couldn't find a concise description, so these are my notes on… continue reading.

Posted on 8 July 2009 in Zend Framework 1

I'm speaking at ZenCon 2009!

I'm speaking at ZendCon 2009 this year! I'm doing a tutorial session called Zend Framework Certification Bootcamp where I'll be highlighting key sections of Zend Framework that you'll need to know in order to pass the the ZFCE exam. I'm also presenting a standard session, Getting a website out of the door (aka Managing a website project) which will be a non-code talk about the realities of project management in a small web development company… continue reading.

Posted on 1 July 2009 in Conferences

Some notes on Zend Server CE for Mac OS X

I've installed Zend Server CE on my Mac to see where it's got to and it's looking quite usable. The installation puts everything into the usr/local/zend directory which is fairly well laid out so that you can find what you are looking for. There's also a a nice admin system at http://localhost:10081 which allows you to restart PHP, view phpinfo(), configure extensions and php.ini. There's also a phpMyAdmin to help administer the bundled MySQL server.… continue reading.

Posted on 22 June 2009 in PHP

DPC '09

The Dutch PHP Conference is over and so it's time to write a short wrap-up. Day 1 The conference was opened by a cool animated video and then Cal Evans welcomed us, with a nice short speech. The keynote was given by Andrei Zmievski of Digg. Andrei is a core devloper and gave an interesting overview of what we can expect to see next in PHP. I then listened to Paul Reinheimer talk about some… continue reading.

Posted on 15 June 2009 in Conferences

WinPHP wrap-up thoughts

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. The WinPHP challenge come come to an end and I'm fairly happy with how SuccesSQL has come. I wish I had realised exactly how little time I had in May though. Somehow I managed to forget that we had three… continue reading.

Posted on 1 June 2009 in WinPHP Challenge

SuccesSQL demo online

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. The WinPHP challenge comes to an end around now, so I've put up a demo installation of SuccesSQL (v0.01!) at http://test.successql.org. The test site takes a lot longer to display the first page than version running in my VM and… continue reading.

Posted on 31 May 2009 in WinPHP Challenge

Metadata from Zend_Db_Table_Abstract

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I finally found some more time to work on SuccesSQL and can now display table structure information: Zend_Db_Table provides all this information directly which is quite useful, however the intended use-case for Zend_Db_Table is that you extend Zend_Db_Table_Abstract for each… continue reading.

Posted on 28 May 2009 in WinPHP Challenge, Zend Framework 1

Retrieving a list of databases from SQL Server

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I need to get a list of databases from SQL Server for the currently logged in user. Initially, I found a built in function sp_databases. This looked promising, until I discovered that it didn't work for my user. I'm pretty… continue reading.

Posted on 19 May 2009 in WinPHP Challenge

SQL Server troubles

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I'm now at the stage where I'm writing code and came across an error: Message: 2 [Microsoft][SQL Native Client] Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2]. That seemed a little odd, so I fired up… continue reading.

Posted on 16 May 2009 in WinPHP Challenge