by Andrew Johnstone
A nice tip for logging data against apache logs within requests. Apache_note is a wrapper for Apache’s table_get and table_set. It edits the table of notes that exists during a request. The table’s purpose is to allow Apache modules to communicate. if (function_exists(‘apache_note’)) { if (isset($_SESSION) && !empty($_SESSION)) { apache_note(‘session_id’, session_id()); apache_note(‘users_id’, isset($_SESSION[‘users_id’])? $_SESSION[‘users_id’] : […]
Vagrant is simply a wrapper around Virtualbox headless that allows for provisioning virtual machines with support for puppet, chef-solo, chef, and bash. This allows you to automate the deployment and sandboxing of development sites. Additional base box images can be found at vagrantbox.es. Installing Vagrant apt-get install -y ruby1.9.1 ruby1.9.1-dev ln -svf /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 /etc/alternatives/ruby gem […]
Every now and then I come across a problem with PHPs autoloading whereby class_exists fails to autoload classes. I’ve noticed this with a number of PHP versions, most recently with 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.9. Typically I’ve resolved this by simply upgrading the PHP version. In the following example the initial class_exists fails until you instantiate the object and […]
One of our clients Gorkana was bought by Durrants. As such I have been working on integrating and merging data. As a result I wrote a script to synchronize data between MySQL and Oracle, which is presently a one way synchronization. The implementation The script(s) to synchronize data was broken into a few scripts. Automatically […]
In: PHP
31 May 2010A while back a colleague and myself had a two week sprint to ensure that we could deliver 20k emails with up to 5mb attachments each. We experimented with 4k emails at 5mb each sending straight through the MTA, which we found to cause excessive load on the servers. Using exim filters we could add […]
In: General
2 Jan 2010I just read “How to use locks in PHP cron jobs to avoid cron overlaps” and I thought I would elaborate on this and provide some more examples. In order for a lock to work correctly it must handle, Atomicity / Race Conditions, and Signaling. I use the following bash script to create locks for […]
In: General
24 Oct 2009I recently came across a peculiar issue that meant dates and times were causing issues with a product we had developed within Australia. The issue being that within “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)” the date within PHP was being read as EST instead of AEST/AEDT, however running “date” from the terminal or […]
In high performance web applications you will always have bottlenecks within your application. Identifying these bottlenecks and optimizing is a tedious task and typically show themselves underload. A single bad/unindexed query can bring a server to its knees. A large number of rows will also help to highlight any poor queries, and on very large […]
Introduction Currently I’m working with stock market data, and its quite an interesting topic when we are getting to the point of real time data as it brings a number of new concepts into the mix. The first challenge is to import information from the feeds into our databases (MySQL), whilst this should be a […]
In: PHP
27 Mar 2006Well, i’ve been rather busy at work, which is nothing short of typical now, however I thought I would post up a script that I wrote to automate the installation of PHP on Windows. In general I’m a very lazy person, and found it irritating going to the PHP site, downloading and manually installing PHP […]
I have been a developer for roughly 10 years and have worked with an extensive range of technologies. Whilst working for relatively small companies, I have worked with all aspects of the development life cycle, which has given me a broad and in-depth experience.