Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Attending PHP UK Conference 2009

Security centered design

The conference day.  We woke up early to get in queue at registration which opened at 08:30.  When we got to the Olympia Conference Center, which was about 5 minutes walk from our hotel, it was full of people.   More than a hundred people already, and we were early.  Got our badges and notepads, grabbed a coffee, and started wondering around.  There were a few sponsor stands, so we had something to do.

Honestly, I thought there would be more stands, and from companies which are closer related to web development.  We got to O’Reilly to buy some books at 35% discount (I was the first customer of the day, beta-testing the receipt issuing procedure, hehe).  Looked at iBuildings stand briefly.  Looked at Sun MySQL something to do with reporting tool something.  It was crowded over there and I had a cup of coffee in my hands, so didn’t get too close.  Saw a few people playing with Wii and some more with MS Xbox 360.  Seemed like fun.

The conference itself featured a few talks, and it was a double track, so each attndee had to chose from one of the two concurrent speeches which to attend.  Here are the ones that I went to:

  • Keynote talk: The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades by Aral Balkan. It was a bit too lengthy for the points it made, but inspiration non-the-less.
  • Sharding Architectures by David Soria Parra.  Very interesting discussion on scaling database across several servers. Sharding technique described can be applied to much more than just that.
  • Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits by Sebastian Bergmann.  A look into some advanced features of PHP 5.3.  These will make writing PHP code a bit more fun, and result a bit more pleasant to look at.
  • Living with Frameworks by Stuart Herbert.  Nice, balanced look at why frameworks are important.  It was a bit misplaced though, since it was more for people who don’t yet use frameworks, while most of the audience was from the frameworks camp.
  • Myphp-busters: symfony framework by Stefan Koopmanschap.  An overview of Symfony framework, which made me love CakePHP even more.
  • Security-Centered Design — exploring the impact of human behavior by Chris Shiflett. Interesting descussion (with cool examples) of social part in security approaches.

Sharding Architectures and Lambda Functions were two of my favourite talks for technical insight.  Security-Centered Design and Living with Frameworks were the two favourites for non-technical inspiration.

After the last talk there were a few free beers at the venue, and after that there was another beer session at Brook Green Hotel.  Quite a few people, quite a few pints, quite a few interesting conversations and contacts made, excellent buffett, and overall a time well spent.

A note to conference organizers: I know you guys worked hard to make this happen, and that you are a bunch of hobbyiests who are not getting paid to do this, so, first of all, thank you.  I really enjoyed the event.  Here are a few things that I think could be improved, just in case  you will have control over them the next time:

  • WiFi coverage.  Yes, it was there and it was sort of working, but it was also slow and unstable.  At the beginning I thought that was just me for some reason, but then heard a few more people complain.
  • Power sockets.  I remember seeing only 3.   Maybe I just didn’t find them, of course, but they are sort of important.
  • Beer is the ultimate conversation maker.  Have it nearby from lunch on and more magic would happen.  (It doesn’t have to be free)
  • Mechandize.  Stickers, t-shirts, badges, etc to help remember and promote the event.
  • More stands.  I wanted to see people who do hosting, consulting, trainging, build tools, and more of the related.

As I said, I had an excellent time, learned a few new things, got inspired, met interesting people, etc.  An event was definitely a success and I’d gladly attend the future ones as well.  Oh, and I made a few pictures, which are available in my PHP UK Conference 2009 Flickr set.

Another look at KDE 4

Last time I wrote about KDE 4, I said that it wasn’t very usable for me.  Recenlty, the much praised upgrade to KDE 4.2 became available via Fedora updates.  So I got it and switched to KDE for a couple of days.

What can I say?  Quite an improvement indeed.  Mostly stable, with only a few issues, which are nicely balanced out by nice desktop effects, overall graphics, and plasmoids.  A few things moved around and I had to look for them (such as keyboard shortcuts for switching between desktops), but overall it was a pleasant experience.

Why am I back to Gnome for now?  Because of the following:

  • couldn’t manage to make KDE 4.2 work properly with two monitors (major issue)
  • got a bit annoyed by KDE 4.2 not waking up properly from suspend  (not always, but often enough)
  • also got annoyed by it not always coming back properly from screensaver mode
  • couldn’t find graphical configuration for power managment (my laptop kept suspending when idle for 5 minutes with no power plugged in)
  • a few other minor things here and there

I’m sure I’ll be back to KDE very soon.  The progress between KDE 4 and KDE 4.2 is huge and if it goes like this, then I won’t have to wait long.

A better world with multiple inboxes in Gmail

Google has recently added a super mega cool feature to Gmail – multiple inboxes.  For me, it was an instant boost in productivity and huge improvement in the way I handle email. However, while I was sharing my excitement with friends and co-workers, I’ve received quite a few cold looks and “so what?”s.

Multiple inboxes in Gmail

So, what’s so cool about multiple inboxes?  Here is how I enjoy them so far.

I’ve setup forwarding on all my email accounts so that all messages end up in the single Gmail account of mine.  This means that I have the same mailbox for personal emails, work emails, blog related emails, spam, and so on and so forth.  All that email is handled with a multitude of labels and filters.  And overall it works pretty well.

However, there was a little annoyance in my daily routine.  As part of my job I have to review and monitor Subversion commits from several programmers that work in our office.  Commit notifications come to me in the form of emails, and since they are rather high priority, they are labeled automatically, but not archived.  They stay in the main inbox until I read and archive them manually.  Also, as part of my consulting work for another company, I have to go through their commits as well.  These too are labeled separately, but end up in the main inbox.  And, additionally, I am using Gmail as a task manager for things that should be done eventually.  For that I have emails with tasks, labeled separately, and starred.   Not a huge mess, but not the ideal solution, especially when it mixes up with direct messages from work and friends.

Once Gmail got the multiple inboxes feature, I modified my filters to archive commit messages from both companies automatically (but not mark them as read).  Then I created three additional inboxes – one for tasks, and two for commit messages.  The tasks inbox lists all starred messages with a certain label.  Commit inboxes list messages with labels for each company.  Now I have my main inbox for direct messages from friends and work, and the rest of the things that I need to keep an eye on are right there, in front of me, but re-organized a bit to give me some breathing room.
With this new feature I can keep my main inbox message count much closer to zero, while still have some lose ends in case I need to argue over a commit or keep a few more things on the task list.  Excellento!

Big thanks to Gmail team – well done.

Fixing advanced search performance in RT3

It’s been bugging me for a while now that advanced search is extremely slow in our RT3.  I thought it was something related to the famous Perl bug, but apparently it wasn’t.  Then I was I waiting for Fedora 10 to come out, so that we’d upgrade our RT3 installation to version 3.8.  And that didn’t solve the problem either.  Finally, we got bored and annoyed enough by this problem to actually do soemthing about it.  The solution was, as often, just a Google search away.  Here is the quote from this discussion:

Faulty rights on a specific queue caused the owner list to be quite long, which RT didn’t like. (By mistake someone had given the own ticket right on the queue to all unprivileged users)

I went through all the queues to check the rights, and there it was – a test queue had “Own Ticket” assigned to “Everyone”.  Immediately, after remove this access levels things got back to normal.