So we’ve all probably blindly followed the directions of one tutorial or another at some point in time. Whether it was for some programming technique or to get a mail server up and running. Have you ever stopped to think about how damaging the tutorial could be if it contained wrong information?

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Apress are sponsors of The No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Series, the premier technical java/agility conference is coming to London, England in the First European NFJS eXchange 2007, August 29th-31st! The NFJS eXchange will cover the latest in trends, best practices, and newest developments in Enterprise Java, Java/Groovy, ESB/SOA, Enterprise Ajax, Architecture and more. This year’s symposium has increased emphasis on the role of XML, JEE, Web Services, Agile Methodologies and Open Source technologies in modern enterprise software development. There will be over 50 sessions featuring leading industry experts, who share their practical and real-world experiences. The event is set up to allow for maximum interaction between speakers and delegates during sessions and breaks.

Apress readers get a free Nintendo Wii when booking a ticket! Just quote: NFJS-APP643.

I’m happy to announce that Pro Drupal Development has published and is available for purchase. This excellent book is written by John VanDyk and Matt Westgate, two key contributors to Drupal. Dries Buytaert, the Drupal founder, wrote the foreword.

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About three weeks ago, I posted my initial thoughts on the Zend Framework. One of my complaints was the Zend_Cache did not accept lifetimes on a per object basis, but rather the lifetime was at an application level. I just received notice in my inbox that the issue has been fixed! The change is currently in svn, and should be in the 0.80 preview release. Thanks go to Fabien for the fix.

I recently had the need to stress test a hard drive because I thought it was failing and needed to prove that to a dedicated server provider. I wasn’t able to replicate the problems I had been seeing with straight file copies and such, so I decided to really hit the disk with a benchmarker. bonnie++ did the trick. Within 5 minutes, I was able to duplicate the errors I had seen during heavy load of the disk. I could then phone up the dedicated provider and tell them to replace the disk. So, if you’re in need of a benchmarking tool, or just something to put some heavy load on a disk, check out bonnie++. Available in /usr/ports/benchmarks/bonnie++/ for those with a superior operating system.

Any FreeBSD user that utilizes the ports system should be reading /usr/ports/UPDATING after every ports tree update and certainly before they update any port. It amazes me the number of problems people encounter that could be easily answered or avoided if they just grepped through that file for the name of the port they were having trouble with.

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Andi Gutmans approached the php-internals mailing list with a proposal to add a new syntax for array declaration. The current split among the big players in PHP development looks to be about 50/50. The general thought of the opposition is that it is an unnecessary change that will only lead to confusion in the future. Why create two ways of doing the same thing? I personally agree with the opposition. I don’t see anything more elegant about the new proposed syntax. Adding such a new syntax will only makes scripts less readable (because you would have to pay attention for two different methods). Those for the change cite that other languages have this syntax and they personally believe it is more clear. Are those two reasons really enough to justify such an addition?

In an unprecedented annoucement on Greg Kroah-Hartman’s blog, he announced that the Linux kernel community would development free Linux kernel drivers for any company willing to simply give them some specs and (maybe) some hardware to development against. This is simply wonderful. Personally, I think this is the biggest announcement of 2007 for Linux. Sure, many people will say, “Well, that’s the way it has always been! If they would give us specs we would write the drivers.” Well, sorry, it hasn’t been happening. Sometimes, it takes an announcement like this to wake people up. When people install an operating system, they like their hardware to “just work”. This can get us there.

The project formally known as PHP IDE is now known as PDT, or PHP Development Tool. Essentially this is a PHP development environment for Eclipse. If you haven’t checked it out, I urge you to do so. This is the best PHP development environment I have used (and still use), free or commercial.

I came across this interesting proposal for an application generator built on top of the Zend Framework. It is called Primitus and is the brainchild of John Coggeshall. It looks very interesting and could quiet down those that complain about Zend Framework not living up to the ease of use they imagined it would. I’ve heard all too many people think that ZF should be as easy to use as Rails. In many ways I agree and this could provide that hand holding many want. Of course, those that still want more flexibility can use ZF without this (or another) application generator. You’ll find a first release of Primitus at the end of the propoal.

I have a server with 4gigs of RAM and because of the way memory is addressed, I need to utilize PAE support in my kernel. So, obviously I build a custom kernel for this box that uses PAE. Everything runs great and I normally have no issues at all with this setup. Until today that is.

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The authors of the upcoming book, The Definitive Guide to Symfony, have posted a sample chapter for you to get a sneak preview. The sample chapter covers Unit and Functional Testing and should be a treat for anyone interested in Symfony. (hint: you can find a different sample chapter at the first link in this post)

Oh, how I depise mailing list nazis. You know, the ones that feel like they simply must tell everyone else what is and what is not the proper way to post to a mailing list. Yeah, the ones that refuse to help someone with a problem because, gasp, that person top posted! The horror!

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It’s been a long standing belief that MyISAM tables are significantly faster than InnoDB tables when performing mostly read applications as would be the case for the majority of web applications out there. It’s one of those things that everybody just took at face value. Well, the guys over at MySQL Performance Blog have shot down that myth.

In a posting titled InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1, their primary goal was to benchmark the new Falcon storage engine against MyISAM and InnoDB. Of course, the by-product is that we also have benchmarks for MyISAM vs. InnoDB. The results they present should make anybody think twice about which storage engine to use in their next project.

I’ve been using the Zend Framework to recode a large website and I’ve generally been very pleased with the results and ease of use. I’ve found that using the framework has significantly decreased my development time and really just given me cleaner, easier to maintain code. Of course, these are the goals of any framework. I do have a couple of issues I’ve come across and it is those I’d like to talk about.

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