We moved house successfully (just about) and have now been here for over a month. We’ve been busy working on modernising the house with help from friends and family. After sorting the essentials (tap in kitchen, shower etc.) we have nearly finished decorating the lounge. There’s quite a learning curve to wall paper stripping and then putting up lining paper Hopefully we’ll be sorted soon, and I shall post some pictures.

It was also my birthday at the beginning of the month, for which I received a wonderful Canon EOS350D Digital SLR camera. My lovely wife Becca organised this with everyone. Thank you very much to all who contributed. I used it well for Chris and Jess‘ wedding which was also at the beginning of May. I shall have to get out and use it some more when I have some time.

I finally got round to taking the exam to become a Zend Certified Engineer for PHP5 yesterday. I passed! I will hopefully be listed on the ZCE yellow pages that Zend maintain within 24 hours. I’m quite chuffed about that, let’s hope employers recognise it! I have some practice tests left if anyone wants to try it. Professionally, I think I shall be focussing on getting more experience under my belt now for a little while.

While we were in the Midlands, we spotted a Bonsai tree shop near to the house, namely Dai-Ichi. We’ve been casually looking at getting one for a few weeks now and thought we’d pop in and take a look. They had a very large selection to choose from at all different levels of maturity and budgets from £10 - over £1000! It was all very impressive. We decided that we would buy one and we went for an Acer of about 18 years old. It has been recently potted up and so looks very smart and tidy and shouldn’t need any attention in this area for a year or so. We also bought the necessary other items such as a care book and a suitable plant food. Hopefully we’ll be able to look after it well and I shall aim to do regular updates so that you can see the progress!

• Security - Excellent
• OOP - Excellent
• Design - Excellent
• Basic Language - Excellent
• String Manipulation and Regular Expressions - Excellent
• Arrays - Excellent
• XML & Web Services - Excellent
• PHP 4/5 Differences - Excellent
• Web Features - Pass
• Streams and Network Programming - Pass
• Database Access - Pass
• Functions - Fail

My overall score for this test was Excellent! This is much improved over my first test which was still a pass. Interesting that I have jumped from an excellent to a fail forthe functions sub area. I guess I got some questions wrong this time around.

I shall continue revising and seriously consider booking the actual exam, I just need to work out when to fit it in!

• Functions - Excellent
• OOP - Excellent
• String Manipulation and Regular Expressions - Excellent
• Web Features - Pass
• Security - Pass
• XML & Web Services - Pass
• Basic Language - Pass
• Database Access - Pass
• Arrays - Fail
• Design - Fail
• PHP 4/5 Differences - Fail
• Streams and Network Programming - Fail

My overall mark was a pass! I am quite pleased with this, it shows me areas I need to concentrate on to practice on my other nine practice tests.

Essentially I have been self taught PHP over a good 6/7 years and as it is currently quite central to my work I thought I’d like to gain certification that says I can do what I say I can do! This is particularly true as I do not currently have a personal project which demonstrates my skills - although I am working on this! Gaining certification from PHP’s commercial backers, Zend, will put me in a strong position to demonstrate my skills and place me amoung the exclusive list of UK PHP developers with this qualification.

I’ll keep you posted about future practice tests and, hopefully not in the too distant future, the real test. Wish me luck!

If you have any ideas, I’d be interested to hear about them. Please add a comment to this entry.

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

We soon arranged a viewing and instantly liked it. We have looked around a few houses now and this was a very spacious two bedroom house in comparison to those that we had seen previously. We also really liked the area being high up above Huddersfield and Halifax practically on the top of a moor! The population of Golcar is predominantly elderly people and young families. It is quite a bit further out of town than where we are and so should be quieter. We will be a 5 minute walk from the village centre with shops and a library as well as having two small pubs within easy walking distance. We will be next door to a doctors surgery and a top rated infants school. We will be able to see Huddersfield’s Castle Hill from kitchen and bedroom window!

We promptly put an offer in and after a few more our offer was accepted. We soon got the wheels in motion in January and after a few miscommunications on the part of the estate agent, we look set to go. We are really looking forward to moving and taking on the challenge. We are in theory all ready to go, we need to sign on 6th April looking to move on 28th April. Let’s hope we don’t suffer any more hitches!

Take a look at the area on Google Maps.

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!

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