Dan Rooke’s Blog

Well after nearly 10 months, I finally have a company provided computer system!

I’ve spent the Tuesday nad part of Wednesday setting it all up and transferring the necessary data off my laptop. The system is running a development environment of Apache 2.2.4 (web server), PHP 5.2.1 (server side scripting language) and MySQL 5.0.37 (database engine). Other development tools I use are jEdit (cross platform programmer’s text editor), TortoiseSVN (a Subversion client for Windows), MySQL tools package (general database adminstration and querying duties), pgAdmin III (PostgreSQL administration), Putty (SSH client), WinSCP (for secure file transfers over SSH), ArgoUML (UML diagramming tool) along with the essential PHP and MySQL manuals for quick reference. I’m sure that there are a few others also which I can’t think of at the moment.

So I’m quite pleased with that, it’s all up and running and is highly responsive compared to my laptop. I will now have the freedom to format and rebuild my laptop which should help speed things up a little! I also have my eye on purchasing a copy of the new Command & Conquer game which would run nicely on my laptop

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!

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’ve now been working for newmediaboutique for a full week and I well and truly feel like a working man!

I was a little sceptical at first having been working with an existing project, but now the team are looking at new projects which I am able to guide the development of and so feel more comfortable. Working with other developers’ code, dependant on the standard, is very time consuming and can be quite energy sapping! The first few days of working 9am - 6pm really took it out of me - hence the blog post a week after starting!

On another note, we made good use of the weekend by not only doing the usual grocery shopping etc. but also visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, Wakefield. We also visited the local cinema on Saturday night to watch X-Men: The Last Stand. The film was good however the company not so good. The row in front of us had a group 5 individuals who were sharing a bottle of Courvoisier throughout the film, one individual left to get a pizza from Pizza Hut half way through and at the end of the film one proceeded to light up a spliff! We were a little annoyed to say the least so spoke to a manager about it and we were offered a pair of guest tickets in compensation. Apparently cinemas aren’t allowed any CCTV cameras trained on the audience due to copyright issues.

On Sunday, I was in our garden shed and found a wasp nest. It was only very small and there only appeared to be the one wasp tending to it. A quick bit of research showed that this will have been a queen setting up the nest by laying some workers. It could then grow to about a 1000 - 5000 strong nest. Thankfully we caught it early and destroyed it.

Anyway, I had better be off to work on what looks to be a gorgeous sunny day in West Yorkshire.

On 30th May ‘06 I shall be starting work at newmediaboutique over in Leeds. My job title is PHP/MySQL developer and as the title suggests, I shall be developing applications and sites using PHP and MySQL. The longer term view is to expand on this and look into Ruby on Rails as well as technologies such as AJAX. So basically a web development role, which is what I want to be doing!

The company is small and have a lot of potential. Hopefully the skills I bring will help go some way to fulfilling that potential! I’m looking forward to getting involved with new technologies and having the opportunity to expand my skills and experience. Thanks go to Tim and James for having me