General

I managed to rope everyone in, Priscilla, Emma, Mat & Phil along with Bridget on the day and David keeping the dogs happy while we were in conference mode, thanks to all for playing their parts. All in all as a company we're very proud of what we've managed to pull off, all the hard work and planning has paid off, almost universally the feedback has been excellent with many people saying, to us directly, it was the best organised community conference they'd been to for years.

Sitting in the first session, K.I.S.S from Derick Rethans, I was aware of a very surreal feeling - the conference was actually happening, after months of planning, a little heartache and juggling some of the risky elements, it was actually happening right here, right now!

One of the main drivers behind PHPNW08 was to encourage junior developers to take an active path to their continuing professional development, with speakers sessions covering topics like MySQL EXPLAIN Explained and Regular Expression Basics being warmly received by many I think we achieved that objective!

My personal favourite session was Zoe Slattery's 'Index and Search, options for PHP programmers' which was a really interesting comparison of the Lucene search implementations in PHP and Java - not what the title suggested but a well delivered, complex subject delivered in an easy confident manner.

It was also good to have some fun at the socials on the Friday and Saturday night, even if I didn't quite manage to find any time to play on Mario Kart - with the open bar and food on the Saturday event it seemed to be a great way to round off the event.

While we still have to deal with some of the wrap up elements of the conference, videos, slides, handing out the last remaining prizes - the general aftermath of a very satisfying weekend, we're already looking forward to early planning for next years' event, PHPNW09 everyone?!

The conference will have a range of well known and local speakers with the aim of highlighting current best practice and emerging topics within the sphere of PHP and web development.

The event offers an opportunity for developers and those involved with PHP across the North-of-England to come together to discuss developments, innovations, techniques and the challenges faced in PHP and internet development.

The conference will feature high profile speakers within the PHP community, workshops and networking opportunities. Some of the key areas of focus this year are: Enterprise PHP, What’s new in PHP 5.3 and innovative solutions for a commercial world.

In addition to organising the event, Solution Perspective Media has worked in partnership with a number of sponsors including iBuildings, nti Leeds, Allegis Group, Pale Purple and Plusnet to provide an exciting program of speakers, networking and social activities.

The conference takes place on 22^nd November 2008 at Manchester Central (formerly GMex) – http://www.manchestercentral.co.uk

Those involved in PHP are invited to connect and network with other PHP professionals on the following groups:

Google Groups - http://groups.google.com/group/phpnw
Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17897252075
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/112906/3FCE41597A1B
Twitter - http://twitter.com/PHPNW

For more information or to attend the conference visit http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw08/

Continue reading "Solution Perspective Media Supports PHP North West Conference 2008"

Along with twitter, we' also got into Facebook over the summer, it's a little addictive and generally more fun than watching the telly! However, if some people are to be believed it could turn us all into narcissists!

We've also another member of staff to welcome aboard, Mathew Griffin who joined us in July, to help grow our PHP programming team. Mat's learning how we do things round here by diving in at the deep end - it's a good job he likes it that way as we've been continuing to work non-stop on a major invoicing and payroll system. So Mat is now brushing up on ZendFramework, YUI, ADOdb and XTemplate - so far so good, I just have to remember it's a tall order to get that lot under your belt

Anyway that's the catch up, well almost...

After some investigation, it turns out that the blog software in question had several run-away apache processes - chewing CPU cycles like they were going out of fashion and filling up the apache logs faster than quota could be allocated (e.g. read a Gb every couple of seconds!)  as the particular script looped and couldn't read from the file it wanted. The cause of this was to do with file permissions, in particular one file was empty and a bug in the blog code meant that it was in an infinite loop, several times over as the user kept reloading the screen! The marketing company bod was kind enough to point out that they had it working on other servers quite happily, even initially having the cheek to make out like it was software they had written, when in actual fact it was an open source (GPL licensed) piece of software.

So after working this out and telling them they needed to read their documentation and fix the problem, they instead set all the files and folders to world writable (e.g. 777 file permissions) in their FTP client. At this point I decided that it was simpler to fix the issue myself whilst giving them a lecture on how 777 permissions is never a blanket solution to anything. I got to the point of telling them I'd just remove the software if they were going to leave it like that which they didn't seem too happy about.

So after setting all the permissions back to what they should have been, 644 for files and 755 for directories, I then set the two or three folders that needed different permissions to be owned by the web server process. Hey presto! It all worked as expected. The marketing company bod was happy the situation was solved, however not even a word of thanks. Here's guessing they'll just simply 777 everything again next time they come across any snags rather than bothering to ask for some simple assistance! Oh well, some folk are dangerous when it comes to computers! If only their clients knew how incompetent they are, the world would be a better place as they'd avoid them!

Rant over, for today at least

Phil already knows quite a bit of PHP, xHTML and CSS and is starting to get his head round the approaches we use on top of those technologies such as OOP, Zend Framework and YUI. Additionally, at the beginning of this month, Emma Parker joined us, initially on a part-time basis, as an Account Manager - this should over time help us to keep in touch with our clients more, so if that's you, expect to be hearing from Emma in due course.

Alongside our own clients we continue to service other firms in the New Media sector, especially where they don't have the high-level technical skills in-house to deliver application level projects. This has recently resulted in a situation where we've signed an out-sourcing deal with a local marketing and design house. We now undertake their high-end projects on behalf of their clients - they get to provide best-of-breed approaches to them and the code developed is sound internally rather than creating a bunch of maintenance headaches as previously. For us it means we drive the direction of the code used and know things are backed up properly and we can keep the version control of the sites developed under a tighter reign. I've got a meeting next month that may result in a similar approach by an SEO / Accessability company from the South - so you never know, might be announcing more growth soon