php

Today I had a chance to sit through a sneak preview of Theo Schlossnagle's new talk Scalable Internet Architectures, to be delivered next week at Velocity 2009 (Dev sessions are an underrated side benefit of working at OmniTI). As always Theo packs a lot of good information into his talks; I could probably do blog entries on half a dozen ideas I jotted down; but I wanted to highlight something that he mentioned with regards to scaling websites via asynchronous services.

Passing this forward for a good cause, hopefully some of you can help out.

The African Elephant Specialist Group (with the Asian Elephant Specialist Group) is working on the redesign of the AED to become a multi-species database, the first version of which is the African and Asian Elephant Database. With funding from USFWS we are hiring a developer to undertake the project. I've put a copy of the TOR and Functional Specification on my site, but for more information, please contact:

Diane Skinner
Programme Officer
IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group

PO Box 68200 - 00200
Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254-20-890605 - 12
Fax: +254-20-890615

Email: Diane.Skinner@iucn.org
Website: www.african-elephant.org

Note that the deadline for applications is May 11th, 2009.

Another quick blog update... I think search should now be fixed as well. After the import, I noticed all searching was broken, and also that many of the links when scrolling through the history would not work. This turned out to be two issues: the first was that my recent re-import of data uploaded this post which contained some invalid utf8 data. This meant that anytime the data was searched on, it would generate an invalid utf8 error, breaking the search. I'm unsure if I would have had this problem on 8.3 (we're currently running this on 8.2), but luckily I still have some code from a recent project where I had to ferret out invalid utf8 data, so that was relatively easily found and fixed, which fixed the search as a whole.

The next thing that I needed to fix was the broken permalinks. As it turns out, serendipity has a table to store permalinks based on configuration of your blog. As I hadn't dealt with that on the re-import, it was broken, so I simply needed to re-populate that table for the old (or is that new) entries. Much thanks to the guys on irc (particularly lluad) for helping me work through some regex issues.

So that should make it much easier to find and reference any of the old entries. As always, should you find any broken permalinks, please do drop me an email.

So, Wez tagged me for the 7 things, uh, thing. For some reason this chain feels appropriate given the turn of a new year, so here are 7 things (possibly wierd) you may have not known about me:

Over the Holidays I spent some time pushing forward with recovering my old blog posts and getting them loaded into the new blog. While the posts are now visible, not everything is 100%, so I thought a quick run-down of what works and what doesn't might be appropriate.

1. 90%+ of blog posts have been re-imported; I believe I have copies of the missing ones, but they didn't play nicely with the importer script. I'll probably get them up some day, but if you find you're looking for a specific one that doesn't show up, drop me a line and I'll re-import it by hand
.

2. Categories have been re-built for imported entries, so those following category specific feeds, you should see the related entries. I'm not sure it's 100%, but this is somewhat non-critical, so probably will be left as is. If you find something really wrong or think something is worth updating, just let me know.


3. Speaking of search, none of the entries show up in search results right now. I believe I need to store the text bodies in multiple places for the search code to work against it, but I haven't looked to closely at that. It is something I plan to fix though (actually I think all of search is broken now... woopsie)


4. Each entries unique identifier should have been preserved, which means that you should be able to map old entries to new ones with a little url hacking. For example, if you are looking for the old entry
   

   http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   you can find it on the new blog by going to

   http://www.xzilla.net/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   (This could probably be turned into a nice apache re-write rule, but that's up to the planetpostgresql.org maintainer, not me)


5. links and styles don't work in old blog posts; the links are there, but they got converted into some kind of wiki formatting during conversion. I probably won't go back and fix this, but again if you really need a specific post cleaned up, let me know. (Or if someone can come up with some generic sql replacement fu I can run, I'd be inclined to try it


6. Comments are all missing, but I think I have them all, and with the id preservation, this should be something that is recoverable, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Big thanks go to Magnus for the initial re-import script (even if it was in python). While I hacked it to do recovery in a different way, he worked out most of the hard parts which made things actually possible for me (although I am now much more familiar with python regular expressions than I ever imagined I'd be)

OK, I don't expect every Open Source community to be able to avoid overlapping conferences, but I sure wish these two could avoid it. Once again it looks like php|tek and PGCon will be butting heads, as both will be held the last full week of May, 2009. It's been awhile since I've made it out to a PHP event, and php|tek was one of my top choices, but alas, I can't pass on PGCon.

This is also a problem for me as someone who works with the PGCon scheduling committee. We get a fair share of Perl related talks and a nice smattering of other languages as well, but we've had a heck of a time getting more PHP related content to fill out the schedule; this doesn't make that task any easier. It's a shame too, because PHP and Postgres is a nice combination; PHP is used by the PostgreSQL project itself to power much of it's web architecture, and it's also used by companies to power some of the most popular websites on the internet (yes, even bigger than Wikipedia).

I guess I can hold out hope that the travel policies of the U.S. will inspire some people to forgo the trip to Chicago and veer toward Ottawa instead? sigh Here's hoping for better luck in 2010.

Soon after they announced, I'd been hoping to take [http://www.google.com/chrome Google Chrome] for a test drive. The [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html comic book] laid out a lot of interesting things, my favorite being the discussion of separate processes leading to detachable (and "retachable") browser tabs, something I have been touting for **years** as a long term [http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ Galeon] user. My big problem though? I run Linux, and Google has so far left Linux support on the back burner. Still, I figured that someone had probably made a Linux build available by now, so inspired by John McCain's speech on TV tonight, I set about seeing if I could get it set up.



Basically the process now for running Chrome on Linux revolves around getting some advanced [http://www.winehq.org/ Wine] machinery in place (links to follow), and then everything else works like a normal Wine install. One sticking point I ran into is that my Wine was configured as a win2k server, and Google requires WinXP or newer, so I had to reconfigure that before it would install. This was pretty tricky to figure out as there was absolutely zero error messages when trying to install, instead I just got a empty return to prompt. If you're giving it a try, make sure you're configured similarly.



Anyway, after getting it up an running, I ran through a quick checklist of sites I wanted to test; [http://news.google.com/ Google news], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Wikipedia], [http://www.slideshare.net/ Slideshare], [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI's] website, and several planets all worked fine. I then did some testing of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=demo phpPgAdmin], and it seemed to work fine. This was a concern I had, given a lack of Apple products on the dev team, we already have enough issues supporting Safari (donations welcome [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png alt=":-P" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]), and now PHP developers (really all web developers) now have yet another browser they can expect bug reports from. Yippee! But again, it worked well, and we have some fairly complicated javascript going on with the tree menu, so that seems good.



All in all I am happy with the experiment. I don't suspect I will really use it with any regularity, but it is interesting to play with (and who knows, maybe upgrading wine will make [http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home phun] run better). If you'd like to get it running on your Linux, I've put a screenshot and the help links I used after the jump; they're mostly Ubuntu specific, but should be easily ported to other flavors.






[[image http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/uploads/chrome-screenshot.png alt="Chrome on Ubuntu"]]



primary link I used was

[http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html]



the other links I looked at while going through the above were:

[http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb]

[http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks]

[http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html]

[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7]