KC Reaney

• 2011-11-18

  So long Ubuntu, for now

  Ubuntu 11.04 added Unity as the default desktop environment which is a change from previous versions of Ubuntu where GNOME 2 was the default. I’ve been using GNOME 2 as my desktop environment and recently updated my notebook from 11.04 to 11.10 not realizing that the GNOME 2 packages had been replaced with GNOME 3. I tried using GNOME 3 but the configuration seemed to be Unity oriented and not everything worked as expected. I ended up backing up my data and moved over to Fedora 16 running GNOME 3. The configuration seems to be more intuitive me and with Fedora I still have access to a powerful package manager and a large community of users. So, I say goodbye to Ubuntu, for now. We’ll probably meet again in the future.

• 2011-11-12

  Yaf Framework - a compiled PHP extension

  Here’s a new MVC PHP framework written in C as a PHP extension. Yaf, short for ‘Yet another Framework,’ looks to provide all the features many users love about the Zend framework with the speed of compiled C code. Benchmarks show that it’s quite a bit quicker than many other popular PHP frameworks while still providing a full MVC architecture. You can download and install the Yaf from the PECL repository to check it out for yourself. 

• 2011-10-28

  Compiling VMWare client on Ubuntu 11.10

  After an upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 the VMWare Player will need to recompile the kernel modules. This seems to fail for the 3.0 Linux kernel but there’s a workaround: http://ved-antani.com/?p=30 It took about 10 minutes to get the code patched, compiled, and back running again.

• 2010-12-17

  setuptools easy_install for different versions of Python

  Need to use setuptools easy_install on a different version of python than the default?

  $ python2.4 -m easy_install somefile.egg

  Normally you can just use the easy_install from the shell, but when you need to install an egg for a different version of Python, the above command dose the trick.

• 2010-11-24

  Accelerating PHP with Java

  I started looking in to ways to increase the performance of my PHP web applications and read an interesting discussion on the upcoming release of Drupal 7 and how this particular development group is looking int using using Java to accelerate the performance of PHP applications by pushing off slow PHP functions to Java. Why Java over a developing PHP extension? From the author’s comment:

  (1) Integrating with the Zend engine in C is awkward, at best. It doesn’t even look like C. Bridging PHP’s loose types to C’s strict types is also frustrating. (Java has strict types, too, but conversion is more straightforward.) (2) Java has a superior array of storage, caching, and cluster libraries, especially for web systems. (3) Anything coded as a C extension for PHP binds itself closely with PHP. PHP/Java integration strategies are generally more abstract, providing reusable functionality that’s easy to interface with other Java systems and scripting languages. C has nothing like JSR-223. 

  That’s great but how do I implement this? There are currently a few different options available to bridge PHP and Java:

  1. PHP/Java Bridge - Provides a bridge between the PHP application and Java using an XML based protocol to a server running the Java bridge application. Requires a PHP library to be included in order to access Java classes & methods.
  2. Quercus - Implementation of PHP 5 running in Java. This solution can run on top of many popular Java Webservers (Tomcat, GlassFish, etc..) and offer access to Java methods via the JSR-223 direct script access. No includes required, you can just call functions as if they were provided natively by PHP.
  3. Project Zero -A development suite that provides tools to develop applications in Java and PHP. It’s aimed at developing new applications using the sMash environment rather than running existing PHP applications.

  Out of the three I’m leaning towards using Quercus since it has the least overhead with direct access to methods and dose not require any includes. It also works with existing PHP applications and would provide the most straightforward way to replace PHP function with Java methods.

• 2010-07-17

  Add CSS3 Support to IE 6,7, & 8

  CSS3 Pie adds a behavior that can add CSS3 Support to Internet Explorer