Dan Rooke’s Blog

I have just finished setting up Subversion 1.4.3 and Trac 0.11-dev on our web server at work. These are systems we will use to help with the management of the web development process. They are both geared towards software development.

Subversion manages multiple versions of the same file whilst providing a central location, repository, for a team working on a project to store project files. This will allow us to track our changes much better and assess progress. It will also allow us to work on new features while still be able to fix any issues which arise with systems int he mean time.

Trac is a wiki, Subversion repository browser and general project management tool. It provides many tools to track and manage a project and to manage issues with the project. It allows for quick reference to related items within the project in theory making tracking and communication easier.

I’ve had fun with our server and setting these tools up. We use the Plesk web hosting administration panel on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Because of Plesk, I’ve had to install Python 2.5 in addition to the existing Python 2.3 installation which has caused a number of issues. I have also installed the PostgreSQL database server, Subversion 1.4.3 server, Apache mod_dav module, Apache mod_fastcgi module, Python bindings for Subversion, Python bindings for PostgreSQL and then Trac and it’s dependencies. With not having a great amount experience of compiling packages and installing software in Linux, I have had a bit of a steep learning curve. I seem to have come through it intact however and have gained quite a bit of experience in the process. This should be useful for my own Ubuntu 6.10 system for compiling the latest version of PHP.

I’m looking forward to working with these tools full time!

Well, it’s been a little while coming but the new theme for my blog is now in place. I think that it looks a little cleaner personally and provides more functionality. I hope that you like it, please feel free to comment.

I’m also doing some work on organising and updating the information on here. And I shall try to post a little more regularly!

As you may, or may not, be aware both Mozilla and Microsoft have launched new versions of the popular web browser Firefox and Internet Explorer late in October. As a web developer, this has quite an important impact on how I develop web applications.

I personally use Mozilla’s Firefox for my browsing and primary development needs. It better conforms to web standards than its rival Internet Explorer. But the majority of web users stay with Internet Explorer, for the most part because it is conveniently installed on a PC running a Microsoft Windows operating system by default. Internet Explorer however is known to have lower levels of conformance to web standards than Firefox and does have a reputation of particularly fussy. Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of the browser, does go some way to better conforming to web standards however it does still trails its competition.

As a web developer, having various levels of conformance to standards in browsers and particular requirements for each browser causes a plethora of problems and complicates the development process massively. To combat this, I feel that standards should be taken to the next level. I believe that all web browsers should use, here comes the technical bit, a common rendering engine. The rendering engine takes the code and converts it into a human friendly interface known as a web page. Having a common rendering engine will greatly reduce the complexity of supporting different browsers for us web developers. It will encourage better standards conformance which in the end will help the web site/application user. It should also, in theory, reduce development costs of web browsers.

By all means have different web browsers providing different features and functionality, but have a common rendering engine at the core of each. This idea is not meant to discourage competition, merely make the web a better place for us all.

It’s been a while since my last update, sorry about that!

The last month has seen many things: Becca starting her job at Greenacre School, us collecting a van load (yes, literally) of mine and my Dad’s belongings, collecting wedding photos and going quad biking for Becca’s birthday, buying Becca a bike and getting out on them (occasionally), passing my probation period at work and getting a contract, Becca’s brother Kieran and his girlfriend Becca (yes, it gets confusing!) are starting at Uni this month at Newcastle and Huddersfield respectively and … I think that’s enough in one sentence!!

Another highlight was visiting the Black Sheep Brewery at Masham and enjoying a very nice lunch accompanied by a very clean pint of Emmerdale. With a tour of the village after, I found an excellent sweet shop selling home made fudge off the block, I had to get some!! They even had black sheep ale fudge! I went for more conservative choices and very enjoyable it was too.
On a more geeky angle, I’ve moved our home broadband over to Zen Internet and we are now enjoying a reasonably priced service with good support to back it up. I’m also in the middle of migrating my websites over to a new UK based server, Chris‘ server Baldrick that is. My blog is already on the new server and I hope that you will have noticed a speed improvement!

Work is going well with a large project I’ve been working on almost since my start date nearly out of the door. I have recently been researching dedicated servers as we are looking at consolidating out hosting onto one machine as well as working and experimenting further with PHP5’s exception handling, the Zend Framework, SOAP as well as various other little tasks. I would quite like to start an engineering type of blog for the company to keep a track of various technical discoveries I make / solutions I find. It could be useful for somebody!

I have just noticed the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drives have been added to OcUK’s store. These are among the first hard disk drives to utilise perpendicular recording technology allowing for larger capacity platters. The range topper from Seagate’s 7200.10 series is a breathtaking 750GB, from a previous industry high of 500GB.

This is quite a jump in capacity and excuses the seemingly stagnant nature of the hard drive storage market over the last few years. Needless to say, I am now after a couple of the 320GB drives for Kryten to run in a RAID 1 configuration.

I have being playing with the Ubuntu linux distribution which I am tempted to run on Kryten in place of Windows XP Pro. The drives as well as Ubuntu should make a nice responsive and secure web/database/print/file server for our home network.

Another advancement in the storage field as reported by The Register claims to be capable of storing 12.8m GB (notice the m) in a cubic centrimetre of ferroelectric memory. Now this would really blow current storage capacities out of the window! I’m thinking it may be 2015 before we see this type of storage in products coming to market.