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A bit slow off the mark with this one but Agavi 1RC1 has been released and it is of course looking very nice. The 1.0 feature set is complete and potential bug fixes are the only things standing between now and 1.0 in earnest. Features that I am particularly interested in include the recent refactoring of the configuration/routing files, the new validation interface and the addition of unit testing to the framework. Read more ⇒
A Good Windows Development Environment and Ubuntu Virtualbox
Often Linux just does it better! Often I find myself developing a Windows machine without access to a Linux development server, but I still need to access to some of the Linux binaries and features such as cron jobs, the at command and binaries such as imagemagick, pdftotext, etc. Some things can be emulated with ported binaries or through Cygwin, but I feel a lot more comfortable developing on a platform that is representative of the live server the web site will run on. Read more ⇒
Securing SSH with Key Based Authentication
Certificates are a useful way of restricting access to your SSH server because a user must have three things to log onto the server: Username Password Certificate Normally they would only need to have a password and username, which can be guess at or (potentially) brute forced. Forcing the user to supply a certificate on log on means that they must also have a tangible source of identification (without the key file they cannot log in! Read more ⇒
Linux to Windows Server - Migrating and securing your crontab
In the PHP development arena the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack is very common, but once in a while a client will come through the door with a Microsoft background. So what do you do if your CMS or framework was built with a Linux base layer in mind? Sounds easy, but what if you have jobs loaded into your Linux crontab for processing mail outs or after hours records processing? Read more ⇒
To install the new XAMPP ensure you firstly uninstall and remove your current XAMPP folder. Upgrades are not supported with this version due to the differences one of which is the removal of PHP4 support from the XAMPP package. I like to install agavi via the pear package that is available: Open a command prompt and navigate to your XAMPP directory eg. D:\xampp\php Execute: pear channel-discover pear.agavi.org pear config-set auto_discover 1 pear config-set preferred_state beta pear install -a agavi/agavi Wait for a bit as it installs Read more ⇒
Freelancers: Costing your work
Recently I have been a fly-on-the-wall in an interesting discussion on the Auckland PHP User Group regarding the process of costing freelance work. So I thought I would toss my hat in the ring and give my opinion and summarise the interesting aspects. Let me just say now that I cannot tell you how much you should be charging or what you are worth, but I can help you avoid some pitfalls. Read more ⇒
Displaying Syntax Highlighted Code in Wordpress
It is difficult to use both the TinyMCE WYSIWYG and post formatted code. TinyMCE will attempt to cleanup your HTML and it will therefore remove any tags it does not recognise so your XML code will be hacked up. To compound the problem further Wordpress has annoying habit of removing all your carefully laid out indentation and line breaks. There are many solutions to the problem out there including plugins that use BBCode to wrap the posted code up in. Read more ⇒
Here are some hints for those of you that use a XAMPP install for testing your developments on your local machine. I am using a Windows machine running XP Pro and this is how I setup my VirtualHosts. The conf file you need to amend is located at c:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf Open it up in your favourite editor and un-comment the following line near the top of the file: NameVirtualHost *:80 This will enable the creation of VirtualHosts in your XAMMP installation. Read more ⇒
Installing Agavi on XAMPP Windows
Having recently heard of the Agavi project from a web framework showdown at a PHP conference in the UK I have decided to trial it. My setup is a WinXP computer with a default install of the latest XAMPP which has thrown up some issues with installing and building Agavi. Please see my hints below to overcome these issues. Open a command prompt (type cmd in the run console) Navigate to your XAMMP PHP directory. Read more ⇒
Geographic Calculations in PHP
warning This library is now deprecated in favour of my new Navigator library. Please use it instead - its much better, tested and makes use of newer PHP features! Recently I have been involved with a project that maps yachts during an ocean race, which got me thinking about basic calculations and conversions that would be useful to fellow developers. I envisage this being useful in projects leveraging Google or Yahoo maps. Read more ⇒