Ibuildings Blog

My little cron Bash framework (locking and logging)

nospam@example.com (Boy Baukema) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:21:00 +0200

Occasionally, I have a maintenance task for one of my programs: something has to be done in the background every so often.
From rsyncing content between servers to importing data received from external parties into my application.

Most of the products we make run on Linux servers, so I use cron to make scripts run every x amount of minutes/hours/days/etc.

With most of these small scripts I want the following:

Locking (so if a script takes particularly long time, it won't be running twice concurrently)

Logging (Never blindly trust the machine, or a human for that matter, to always do the right thing)

Cleaning up aformentioned logs (because over time they can grow very fast)

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Shapeways: Print objects in 3D

nospam@example.com (Almer Kaasschieter) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:31:37 +0200

I'm sure most of you created one yourself once: the T-shirt, mousepad or mug with your custom print. There are so many webshops and creation tools available, Been there, done that. Ibuildings has been working on the Shapeways project, that is taking us one step (or even a few steps) further: the online creation of your own 3D objects.

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About Open Source software projects

nospam@example.com (Mikko Koppanen) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:23:25 +0200

I have been involved in several Open Source projects, some of which have been successful and some... less successful. I really enjoy starting new projects but absolutely hate maintaining and documenting the old ones, to the extent that someone even implied that I am allergic to documentation.

There are a few ingredients that make a project successful, the most important being a good idea. An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right? But of course there are exceptions. One of these exceptions is Magento [1]. It's an e-commerce tool in PHP that
does things differently: PHP5 only, uses a framework (ZF) and the code is nice and clean. A good implementation makes it easier to attract skilled developers to contribute to the project and to build a community around it.

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Wow, this is so cool!

nospam@example.com (Joni Overbosch) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:34:13 +0200

This week it was finally delivered and I had the honor to receive the first copy of the book in our office. I'm talking about php|architect's "Guide to Enterprise PHP Development" written by my dear colleague Ivo Jansch. Last year he confided in me, said he wanted to write a book. And he actually did, within the year, 275 pages describing the complete development life cycle. For each phase in the development cycle, Ivo describes the common pitfalls, ways to get around them and tools others use to keep things running smoothly. Because Ivo covers the whole development cycle there should be interesting pieces for every software developing company.

You can find more information about the book on the book's official website. And find out what others think about this book here and here.

T minus one

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:12 +0200

It's July the 8th.

Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

Last december, the community already stopped support for PHP4, but until the 8th of August, at least security fixes would still be done. If nothing has changed in the meantime, and I didn't read any evidence to the contrary, in 31 days from now,security fixes will no longer be provided for PHP4.

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Post-conference thoughts

nospam@example.com (Paul Wander) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:15:57 +0200

It is over a week since the Dutch PHP Conference, and I thought I would have plenty of time to gather my thoughts on the event, and put some wise words down. But since things are as busy as ever in the UK office, I guess this will have to do...

Conference organisation seemed top-rate to me - no one was looking lost or wondering what to do - all went very smoothly, and the sheer number of attendees was very impressive. Overall, people left with a great impression of Ibuildings, which is fantastic, and it seemed like our black polo shirts were everywhere, talking to each other and of course the community.

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MySQL Certification

nospam@example.com (Martin Roest) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:07:00 +0200

Finally after more then six months of rescheduling my exam appointments I had the time to do some proper preparation and took the test.
Getting your MySQL developer certificate means that you have to go through two tests. Each of them has 70 multiple choice questions. Both tests will take up to a maximum of 90 minutes.

At Ibuildings we use MySQL a lot. Being a PHP developer you're not always focused on advanced MySQL features. Especially with MySQL 5.0 you can benefit from using those advanced features. Often a developer prefers not to rely on database specific code and tries to resolve this in the application logic. Implementing MySQL's advanced features can benefit you and your users.

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Off-The-Shelf Server Setup

nospam@example.com (Ian Barber) — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:08:00 +0200

One of the biggest benefits of PHP is how easy it is to find servers that run it. The near ubiquity of the LAMP stack among hosting providers does, however, lead to quite a common problem with inappropriate setups.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

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Dutch PHP Conference news

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:52:37 +0200

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th):

1. Conference day - 95% mark reached

95% of the conference day seats are sold. There are a few places left. Register while they are still available.

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GeekUp Adventures

nospam@example.com (Lorna Jane Mitchell) — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:29:00 +0200

Over the last month I've been to quite a few of the GeekUp events which are local to me in Leeds, UK. These are where a selection of technologically-minded people get together, usually have a few small presentations, and then mostly chat and drink beer all night. I've been to these events as both a visitor and a speaker, and met lots of people and learned a lot.

The month started with a visit to the Leeds Geekup in April, where I gave a talk entitled "Enterprise Web Development" - the slides are available on slideshare.

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New partnership: php|architect

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:45:03 +0200

This week I'm at the php|tek conference in Chicago, organized by php|architect.

I'm happy to announce that as of now, we have a partnership agreement with php|architect! We will be adding the php|architect trainings to our existing training portfolio, which means that php|architects trainings can now also be delivered on-site in the countries where Ibuildings operates.

php|architect is a strong brand when it comes to PHP knowledge, so I'm very proud they teamed up with us!

The official announcement can be read here:

Press release

PHP Abstract podcast - Data Importing

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Sat, 17 May 2008 19:13:36 +0200

The latest instalment of the PHP Abstract podcast (hosted by Cal Evans from DevZone) is presented by our very own Lorna Mitchell.

In this podcast, Lorna talks about the process of importing data. Not the actual code you write, but the process in general.

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Platform to Platform

nospam@example.com (Ian Barber) — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:46:57 +0200

Recently, I've been working with a client as part of a major platform change they're making. It's the third time I've been involved with a big architecture shift, each at a different company, and each larger than the last, but there seem to be some observations that apply whether you've got five servers or five hundred.

1. Business carries on

It can be easy to get somewhat myopic when in the middle of an exciting architectural change. Major platform transitions tend to occur when there has been a realisation high up in the company that something needs to be done, so teams often have a fair degree of scope and freedom. However, it is even more likely that other parts of the business will need to continue to work on the existing system. If a new feature is required then it's going to get developed, even if that involves duplicating, or worse conflicting, with work that's being done as part of the platform change.

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Intimate PHP Seminar

nospam@example.com (Paul Wander) — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:05:44 +0200

So we decided that in order to get to see all the people who are interested in PHP leadership topics, we should run an intimate seminar and invite our contacts along. If there is demand, we could run these every month. Here is the invitation that went out:

Free Seminar: Enterprise PHP and Zend

Title: Enterprise PHP and Zend
Date: 10th June 2008
Time: 9:00 - 13:00
Location: King's College London (Hodgkin Building, Guy's Campus
Speaker: Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings and leading PHP expert

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Accessing object properties by reference

nospam@example.com (Harrie Verveer) — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:23:00 +0200

PHP is a loosely typed language. Most of the time this is very useful because you as a programmer don't have to worry about typecasting: it's done for you. However, on some occasions this can cause some unexpected trouble. These issues can be hard to track down because the error usually doesn't show up at the place where you define your variable, but at the place where you want to use them (which can be in a totally different part of your application).

In this blog I want to point out what can happen if you try to access object properties by reference when the object is not initialized. Although this is not caused by typecasting, the encountered problems can be pretty similar on some occasions.
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