For several months now I’ve thought MySQL 5’s push to a production ready status was more of a political move than technically justified. First I read this and again today when it came time to compile any MySQL support into PHP 5.1.4 on my newly installed Linux box I ran into problems.

We’re in the process of making the move to MySQL 5.0 at work too; however since we’re moving from 3.23.x there’s nothing too clever going on with the SQL. I always check up on the changes made in recent point releases. MySQL 5 scares me because of some the bugs still unpatched (SELECT DISTINCT queries sometimes returned only the last row), we’re now on more point releases for 5.0 than 4.1 (21 vs 19).

So I got XDebug working a couple of weekends ago. After much fun trying to install KCacheGrind on Fedora and setting up X forwarding to my Windows box I finally saw the fruits of my labour.

I was impressed with the Call Graph which shows the flow of execution. This is a framework I spent some time developing in April for a music store. I hope to make more use of this profiling at work some time.

Ironically just as I had got this working my Fedora install starts to play up (after running fine with no X for 18 months beforehand). The filesystem would become read-only after several hours idling. Turns out a part of the filesystem was corrupt; I was constantly having to reboot and run fsck to correct these errors. However yesterday fsck took ages to sort things out and more and more files were being lost so I figured it was time to re-install.

Fedora has been my distribution of choice for a couple of years but this is the second time I’ve had to wipe the drive due to disk errors. I think this is largely due to heat issues, my linux box is a shuttle PC and it gets pretty hot compressing off-site backups from this co-located server come 5am! After re-partitioning, formatting and running check disk in Windows, the drive seemed completely healthy (most odd considering on boot it was reporting “S.M.A.R.T bad” errors). When re-formatting in Slackware and checking for bad sectors – none found! Strange albeit good news I guess.

So why Slackware? Well after the messing around required to get KDE up and running on Fedora I wanted to move to a pro-KDE distribution. I’m not a fan of managed distro’s like Gentoo (emerge yuk!). Call me a control freak but too much happens behind the scenes, I like to install the major applications from source so unexpected changes don’t occur when you update system packages. I also prefer the default layout of Apache/PHP/MySQL, upgrades are easier, no waiting on your fav distro to prepare customised packages.

Slackware has thrown me a few curve balls early on though (just getting vim working correctly!). I forgot to install atk, which appears to be a GNOME library (so much for a GNOME free system), and ‘vi’ was symlinked to elvis (which from my brief experience seems horrible). Turns out Slackware is BSD init based not System V, meaning it doesn’t use the rc.1, rc.2 directories like Redhat etc. This was enough to trip me up when trying to install the mysql.server init.d script, easily solved though:

cp support-files/mysql.server /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld

We’re moving offices soon at work, in the process we’re having a serious clear out due to the reduced space we’ll have at the new premises. As a result I’ve picked up a couple of unwanted Java books. I never appreciated how similar OO PHP5 code is to Java, infact it looks like a complete rip off! I had also not appreciated how many OO concepts I’d become familiar with…

This of course got me thinking, I might stretch my programming legs and have a look at Java over the summer. I can’t see it being much of a leap from the PHP5 code I’ve been writing in my own time. There’s a few new things in there like inner classes, nested interfaces and threads but with the majority of the concepts I feel I’m already comfortable. Continued squabbles on the PHP internals list only encourage me to do this, who knows, there’s a whole lot more Java jobs out there (which are better paid too!).

This is a turn around from the time I spent over Christmas looking at C#

Having spent this weekend tidying up the appearance of my blog it’s bought back not-so-fond memories from my web designer days of “the eternal struggle with browser compliance“. I seriously thought come 2006 CSS support would have been nailed.

I can forgive MS with IE6 being a dinosaur. However even with the CSS hacks I had to implement to get the search form (top right) to align correctly – I find IE7 & Firefox 1.5 still dispute the vertical alignment. Sigh. One of them is wrong, I don’t know which though!
Update: I managed to fix this after approaching the layout differently!

The same goes for padding on the header image, this time Opera 9, Firefox and IE7 show additional space which IE6 doesn’t. Now I’d never normally side with IE6 but I can’t work out where this extra padding/margin is coming from…
Update: After e-mailing John at positioniseverything.com turns out it’s a baseline gap

With the recent news of Blue Security closing down after being dDoS’ed into the 1980’s, I can only sigh welcome relief my employer’s plans to move into dDoS mitigation never took off. Few people are qualified to move into this market but even less people recognise this fact!

People who want to take on “the internet bad guys” either 1) have to really know their stuff or 2) be sufficiently p’ed off with spam / spyware and have enough money to throw at the problem – calling Mr. Gates (and even he’s not managed to sort out the spam issue as promised).

I believe my company definately fell within 3 – the “don’t know enough” camp. I can safely say this because I set up a fair bit of the system!

It was a half baked concept (not mine) to re-coup some of costs of our £30k DoS protection system for our primary business, not the best reason to launch such a service.

Ironically Blue Security were flanked by spammer’s nuking their DNS hosts, this is exactly the weak point I highlighted in our own system but was assured ours could handle such an attack. I think this would have been an optimistic assumption given the size of the attack still bombarding Blue Security as I write this… it’s even reported Proxelic (their dDoS mitigation service) had trouble coping.

It’s a depressing outcome to see the bad guys win!