Rick Ogden

Netbeans 6.9 Beta + Zend Framework

Having just got my brand new MacBook Pro, I’ve been setting it up as a development environment (blog post about that to come). I decided to install the new Netbeans 6.9 beta. The main reason for this is the Zend Framework (and Symfony) support.

In the past I have found Netbeans to be pretty good with code-completion when being used with Zend Framework, however with the release of Zend Tool (something I do really like), you’ve had to switch from Netbeans to the command line in order to create the project and then create a new Netbeans project from existing sources. This was a bit of a hassle.

Now, all you need to do is download the Framework, go into the Netbeans preferences > PHP > Zend tab, Zend script box should point to the zf script (from within the bin directory of the ZF downloading). On Mac and Linux it wants the zf.sh file (on Windows it will probably want the zf.bat file, although not tested). Once that has been set up, you can now create brand new Zend Framework projects from within Netbeans, and it preconfigures everything for you. Lovely!

Rick Ogden

Backup Server Slow Down

Recently I noticed that my backup server was slowing down. Doing system checks told me that it wasn’t running out of memory, nor was the CPU being highly utilised. It was only when I went into the server room and noticed that the hard drive activity light was persistently on that I realised what was causing the slow down.

I ran iotop and analysed what process was continually writing to the disk. I noticed this process was updatedb.mlocate. This is the Ubuntu indexing process, which goes through all the files indexing them to make searching much quicker. As this backup server uses backuppc and has years worth of backups, it has many thousands of files to be indexed and meant that updatedb.mlocate (which is run daily) was taking longer than 24 hours to index.

To solve this problem I edited the file /etc/updatedb.conf and added the backuppc directory to the line that tells updatedb.mlocate not to index files within a certain path. This is simply done by adding “/var/lib/backuppc” to the end of the line that starts off with “PRUNEPATHS=”.

So mine now reads: PRUNEPATHS=”/tmp /var/spool /media /var/lib/backuppc”

Rick Ogden

RIP Internet Explorer 6

The time I never thought I’d see is now on the horizon. The web moving away from supporting Internet Explorer 6.

Many web developers are all too aware of the pain of getting their websites working correctly in all web browsers and THEN having to make sure they work in IE6. This is not only inconvenient and irritating, but expensive. However, with Google announcing it is no longer supporting IE6 and now Amazon following their lead, it is appearing that very soon (not immediately) people will be forced to update/change their web browser to use these large and prominent websites. Many other sites have also dropped IE6 support (list at http://idroppedie6.com/).

Finally we will be able to spend our time on functionality rather than legacy support.

Rick Ogden

Define: “Computer Scientist”

I was in a meeting the other day, and something cropped up which was cause for much debate. This was attempting to define exactly what a “Computer Scientist” is. This is of course very relevant to the BSc (hons) Computer Science degree programme.

The question is: What skills should a graduate of this discipline have at his/her disposal? It’s all well and good saying “a bit of everything to do with computing”, but in practice an approach like that is very hard. How do you balance? Is there a bias? If I refer back to my Breadth Vs Depth post, I am talking about programming in specific. However, there is a lot more to “computer science” than just programming.

The “Science” part of “computer science” suggests that this is far more analytical than, say, a “software engineer” which is more development orientated. That is not to say that a “computer scientist” shouldn’t be a capable “software engineer” and vice versa. Are these two disciplines blurring? What industry should a computer scientist go into, rather than a software engineer?

Comments on a postcard please!