Solution Perspective Media Blog - General

PHPNW08: Post PHP conference blast

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:14:50 +0000

On Saturday 22nd November I was in Manchester at Manchester Central (formerly GMex) for the first UK PHP conference outside of London: PHPNW08. The conference started as an idea back in February this year and went from concept to reality over the summer months as the PHP North West (PHPNW) user group was formed and started it's first meeting in July.

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?!

Solution Perspective Media Supports PHP North West Conference 2008

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:32:15 +0000

Solution Perspective Media is proud to announce that it is supporting the first annual PHP Conference in the North West, phpnw08 on 22^nd November 2008.

phpnw08 is a one day conference for developers, designers, managers and anyone else with an interest in the PHP programming language. 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"

Catch up, social networking, new staff ...

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:37:56 +0000

It's been ages since I've blogged, partly since I've continued to keep up with twitter.com, which is a little like blogging but in text message size bites - some call it your life between blog posts. We've included a feed on the right hand side of this site or follow me or Priscilla directly.

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...

777 file permissions not a solution for those without knowledge

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:19:39 +0000

Got a call today from one of our customers suppliers, a marketing company, who were trying to upload some blog software and wondered why their account quota had maxed out. The implication was that we'd set the quota too low (already at ~750Mb).

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

We're hiring

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:35:09 +0000

In case you've not noticed on our main site, we're hiring - a PHP web developer (OOP).

New Staff - again!

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:34:00 +0000

As usual things are busy round here, however, things are getting better since we've added two new staff again. Firstly at the beginning of last month, Phil Wastell joined us as a Web Developer and has already started to have direct impact on my over-heavy work load. 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

Access all Areas! The life of a Business Analyst

nospam@example.com (Priscilla Coates) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:07:22 +0000

Being a business analyst in a team with developers and designers there are interesting times when structure competes with creativity.

I was reading a book by "37signals" called "Getting Real" and they propose that developers of software should move away from paper based documentation such as functional specs and move straight to Real development of screens. They suggest creating mock ups which are then developed, amended and fixed from there and that we should dispense with useless functional specs. www.37signals.com

I like this concept and am excited by what they propose. It is certainly upside down from how I have previously worked, but I like it!

What are your thoughts in living with that tension in regards to holding the end users nerves whilst they see development going on with less structure, no functional spec and only near the end is the spit & polish added?

Psychic Interruption

nospam@example.com () — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:44:44 +0000

I was visiting Cedar Farm (www.cedarfarm.net) a few month ago and came across a mixed media art exhibition (very good it was too - abstract and colourful with clever use of language and text and partial objects) where the artists incorporate the concept of 'psychic interruption' into their work – the idea that 'voices' from another realm, time or place can have input into todays creative/design process...

Anyone had any experience of this? Interesting possibility or a load of rubbish?

Comments please...

Metamorphosis

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:16:01 +0000

Just an intro for those who know us already as Co-Comp Ltd, well we're still that as a legal entity but we're now going by the name of Solution Perspective Media as that better reflects who we are and what we do these days. The new site, to go along with the new name, should be ready in a few days time, however I'm just putting the finishing touches to our revised content management system first - based on a combination of ZendFramework, ADOdb and XTemplate it's becoming a great tool - ask me for a demo when you see me!

Cool Firefox plugin

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:08:44 +0000

Just discovered a new Firefox extension plugin today - ScribeFire (formerly performancing) which lets you create and edit blog posts direct from within the firefox interface. In fact this is my first post using it, so it's a bit of a 'test' post!

It's pretty cool as it supports a wide variety of blogging APIs and does a 'split' window mode. This mode is quite cool as it allows you to have ScribeFire open at the bottom area of your window and the site you're browsing at the top - which makes it easier to get accurate context when writing. Nice

Anyway give it a go and let me know what you think about it.

Netgear Wireless Access Point woes WN802T

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:47:07 +0000

I've been having issues with Netgears WN802T wireless access point - there's a full rant on Netgears' forums about it - I'll see what comes of that.

It's really annoying when QA suffers as it seems to have done with these devices, hopefully a later firmware update will start to rectify things but for now I'll stick with my old access point (WG602 v1). The worst thing is the wasted time one spends trying to rectify these problems, compounded by talking to muppets in a call centre outside the UK who only know how to follow the scripts they've been given rather than actually understanding anything about the products they're 'dealing' with.

Rant over (for now!)

New Staff

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:11:00 +0000

We've just taken on a new member of staff Rachel Williams as a designer / coach. This action should help out lots round here - things have been way too busy for a long while (hence the scarcity of blog entries!). Welcome aboard Rachel.

Her role is partly design (especially web design) based and partly as a business / life coach and so it's not the usual skill mix you'd find in a single person. However find that person we did, as Rachel is a fully qualified life coach and has done quite a bit of design work - she's now got to learn how we do things (HTML templating with XTemplate! ). Hopefully there'll be many new developments as things get settled in.