Gareth Fiford's Blog

Baby Sophie Born!!

Baby Sophie Beatrice Fiford was born at St Marys hospital at 03:55 on 17th July 2008.

Mum and baby doing well.

Excellent Service from John Lewis (Knight & Lee)

Just a short message to say how amazingly impressed i was by the service i recieved in southsea knight and lee (John Lewis department store). I went just to browse with my 22 month old boy, and saw a junior bed which i thought was a bargain for �60, the assistant gave me an excellent background on the product and accessaries, and even suggested a more cost effective solution as my child is rather large!! I decided to buy the junior bed, and it had free delivery etc reasonable time slots for delivery (3 hour window). The best bit was, while processing the order she arranged for me and my child to have free tea and cake in the cafe, which was excellent, crayons and drawings were provided for my child. I was amazed that service still existed like this and wasn't part of a bygone era that i never saw. My hats go off to the staff at knight and lee on palmerston road, i thoroughly enjoyed my visit and my wife will be back to by lots of your shoes and handbags!!

Website for Knight and Lee
www.johnlewis.com/southsea

Address:
Knight & Lee
Palmerston Road
Southsea
PO5 3QE

Telephone:
023 9282 7511

Time for a change

Today is my last day at my first java job, i have been at gamesys since last July and thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I have a new Job starting 7th of April with the Ordnance Survey, so nice civil service pension. Got the week off in between. I am really looking forward to it as i have been offered training.

Published my first Magazine Article

Just to let everyone know i have just posted a short article titled Building Scalable PHP Oracle Applications - Part One on Oracle PHP Magazine. Have a read please and tell me what you think in your comments, or just rate using the stars below!! I think this is definitely a 5 starer!

To give an over view, it is about how to implement a scalable architecture in PHP Oracle applications, it is the first in a series i will tackle technical implementation later on.

PHP ORACLE HOSTING RELAUNCH

PHP Oracle Hositng has been relauched with a new website on a new server.

We now have php oracle packages from �2.99

Checkout the Cheapest Oracle Host with PHP

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www.PHPOracleHosting.com is number 1 on google.co.uk when searching for:
PHP Oracle Hosting

Ruby - A programming gem

Don't get me wrong, i love PHP and Java, but ruby looks like a real contender when building quick web applications. I was reading an article from linked from digg about a .com built in 24 hours. The site is called wigitize.com.

I was really impressed by the rapid development process and the polishedness of the final product.

I was so interested that i started looking into Ruby. Exploring the site took me on to a live ruby command line that had a tutorial built in, in my browser. the url is http://tryruby.hobix.com/, it truely rocked, and i was coding OO ruby in minutes.

I was also looking into ruby on rails scalability, and like jboss it can be scaled using mod proxy in apache, what really excites me is this coupled with Amazon online computing cloud for scalabilty, almost infinite low cost horizontal scalability for a web app!!

All in all a recipe for massive scalability and web 2.0 yuminess

PHP Oracle Hosting for agencies and resellers is go!!

I have launched packages for agencies and resellers. PHP Oracle hosting for Agencies and Resellers is available at the following URL:
http://www.phporaclehosting.com/agency

PHP Oracle hosting for agencies represents a unique cost effective way of adding value to customer solutions. Give your customers the power of Oracle for the costing structure of MySQL.

Please check out the site, and give me feedback on agency hosting plans. they start from £12.50 for a taster plan, i also have a standard plan which should be enough for 20 or 30 commercial products.

Thanks guys

PHP Oracle Hosting - hits number 2 on google

This Google search for PHP Oracle Hosting shows we are already at number 2 after one week for the search "PHP Oracle Hosting".

Check out the web site http://www.phporaclehosting.com and give any thoughts on it, feed back on pricing plans etc any products you would like to see would be helpful. just click contact me on the right hand side

PHP Oracle Hosting is Go!!!!

My hosting company is launched today!!

Contact me through the blog if you want a bit of a discount, extra few months or something, i'm sure we can sort something out :)

check it out and give me feedback, http://www.phporaclehosting.com

Here is a screen shot:

Alfie joins the Fiford house

Alfie, our golden Labrador, still weeing and pooing everywhere.

He is lovely and gets on with henry really well.

Zydas Chipset (Safecom and others) Wireless Usb Dongles in openSuse 10.3

Rather than trying to build the drivers downloaded from safecom or other vendors site. Try installing zd1211-firmware-1.3-35.noarch.rpm
from yast.

Or just use the one click install taken from opensuse site:

zd1211-firmware-1.3-35.noarch.rpm One Click Install

After this the dongle should just start working and you can connect with network manager applet in gnome or knetworkmanager in kde.

Old Intel Cards with openSuse 10.3

Trying to update my brothers very old novatech laptop to opensuse 10.3 i came across lots of difficulty trying to get graphics. I got Black screen of death at the end of the install when sax2 is running. Basically the screen turned itself completely off. On restart go into failsafe(runlevel 3), don't re run the installer., log in as root, and don't use the intel driver suggested by:


sax2 -p

Run the following to use the more stable i810 driver:


sax2 -r -a -m 0=i810

This should get a minimum working. then when you have got in to a graphical environment, either by restarting or by issuing:


init 5

Now you can configure properly by issuing the following at the terminal(as root):


sax2 -r -m 0=i810

and you can use the graphical setup tool.

Hope this works for you, leave comments if you have any suggestions or success stories.

Registered Linux User

Just registered as a linux user for the first time in 5 years.

So here it is:

Upgrade to Leopard

I have moved all my macs to apples beautiful new operating system Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard. The only niggle i had was with vmware fusion not handling bridged connections after the upgrade, a quick uninstall and re install and it was fine all my opensuse virtual machines were safe and warm.

Hope you are all upgrading now or have upgraded to leopard, feel free to leave comments on your experiences with it.

Installing DB2 9.1 Express-C in openSuse 10.3 x86

DB 2 9.1 won't install from the ./db2setup command it complains about not getting a lock in the logs. Here is a quick and easy way to fix that and also get all the db2 binaries on the path in your user account.

UPDATE this should also work for 9.2 VIPER

Just issue the following in the command line before running ./db2setup, and log out and log back in again.


export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1
echo 'PATH=/opt/ibm/db2/V9.1/bin:$PATH
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1' >> ~/.bashrc

This sets the correct environment for your session and for future sessions as well as putting the db2 bins on your path.

VIPER USERS
Change the path accordingly

My move to Gnome

Finally after years and years with KDE i have decided to move to gnome, i found it to minimal for years, but loving os x i think gnome is an excellent desktop manager. it seems faster too.

I have stopped running my openSuse directly on my mac book now i run it in vmware fusion and 10.3 seems to run fine, even though it is not listed as supported.

Below is a nice screen shot of my desktop in gnome.

Hope you like it!!!

How to install openSuse 10.3 beta2 on a macbook

If you install 10.3 beta2 directly the mouse and network card does not work. So install 10.2 first. a guide to installing 10.2 can be found here http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_on_MacBook it is for 10.3 but it works for 10.2. after installing 10.2 you are ready to install 10.3 beta2. download the dvd(via torrent) and boot(note it takes a few tries before the keyboard works) and select update.

WARNING DO NOT ADD THE ONLINE REPOSITORIES AS THIS BREAKS EVERYTHING

Note: no mouse during install but works afterwards.

After installation the synaptics driver work can add the synaptics stuff in:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf


Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier      "Mouse[2]"
  Driver          "synaptics"
  Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
  Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
  Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
  Option          "LeftEdge"      "100"
  Option          "RightEdge"     "1120"
  Option          "TopEdge"       "50"
  Option          "BottomEdge"    "310"
  Option          "FingerLow"     "25"
  Option          "FingerHigh"    "30"
  Option          "MaxTapMove"    "220"
  Option          "TapButton1"    "1"
  Option          "TapButton2"    "3"
  Option          "TapButton3"    "2"
  Option          "MinSpeed"      "0.79"
  Option          "MaxSpeed"      "0.88"
  Option          "AccelFactor"   "0.0015"
  Option          "SHMConfig"     "on"
EndSection

And edit the Section ServerLayout as follows:


#  InputDevice  "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
  InputDevice  "Mouse[2]" "CorePointer"

and restart X, su, init 3, log in as root and then init 5.

Restart the machine to get networking working.

Also follow the atheros configuration guide in my blog to configure wireless

Clustering Jboss on a Single Linux Machine openSuse

Networking
First you need to add an extra IP address to your machine. Next use
your network configuration program (YAST) to add the extra address to your network card.

Install Jboss
Download Jboss 4.0.2 from http://www.jboss.org as a tar.gz file. Create a directory in your home named jboss. Add the following directories jboss1 and jboss2. Unzip the tar.gz file with the following command


tar -xvf jboss-4.0.2.tar.gz

and copy it to jboss1 and jboss2 directory. So you now have /home/yourname/jboss/jboss1/jboss-4.0.2 and /home/yourname/jboss/jboss1/jboss-4.0.2. Create a start script in your home directory. Substitute yourname for your userid, IP addresses to the IP address that you added to your machine and your normal ip address and JAVA_HOME to the path to your JDK in the following script and make it executable



JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0/
export JAVA_HOME
/home/yourname/jboss/jboss1/jboss-4.0.2/bin/run.sh -b 192.168.3.200 -c all &
/home/yourname/jboss/jboss2/jboss-4.0.2/bin/run.sh -b 192.168.3.201 -c all &

to stop each jboss you can run:



/home/yourname/jboss/jboss1/jboss-4.0.2/bin/shutdown.sh 192.168.3.200 -S

You are now clustering jboss, next you can configure apache to load
balance the two jboss instances.

Configure apache
Add the following to a new file in your apache conf.d directory called
proxy_ajp.conf, configure the IP addresses for the ones that you started
Jboss with, and the paths to the mod files at the top.



LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_ajp_module /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_proxy_ajp.so
LoadModule proxy_balancer_module /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_proxy_balancer.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_proxy_http.so
 

#

# When loaded, the mod_proxy_ajp module adds support for

# proxying to an AJP/1.3 backend server (such as Tomcat).

# To proxy to an AJP backend, use the "ajp://" URI scheme;

# Tomcat is configured to listen on port 8009 for AJP requests

# by default.

#

 

#

# Uncomment the following lines to serve the ROOT webapp

# under the /tomcat/ location, and the jsp-examples webapp

# under the /examples/ location.

#

#ProxyPass /tomcat/ ajp://localhost:8009/

#ProxyPass /examples/ ajp://localhost:8009/jsp-examples/

 



        BalancerMember ajp://192.168.3.200:8009 route=w00

        BalancerMember ajp://192.168.3.201:8009 route=w01




 

#RewriteEngine on

#RewriteRule "^(/test/.*\.jsp)$" balancer://lb/$1 [P]

 



ProxyPass balancer://lb/test stickysession=JSESSIONID

Testing it all worked
Add the following war file to the deploy directory test.war of each instance of jboss, and then you can test it at http://localhost/test. This will show a shared session counter distributed over 2 instances of jboss, now you can turn the jbosses on and off and see how it remembers the session. Remember keep at least one jboss running to keep the session.

Adding right click to apple macbook on openSuse 10.2

The synaptics driver does not seem to work for love nor money for the apple mac book core 2 duo, you can add right clicking on the right apple key by doing the following.


wget "http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen/software/xkbset/xkbset-0.5.tar.gz"
tar -xvf xkbset-0.5.tar.gz
cd xkbset-0.5/
make
sudo make install
echo '#!/bin/bash
xmodmap -e "keycode 116 = Pointer_Button3"
xkbset m' > ~/.kde/Autostart/keyboard
chmod +x ~/.kde/Autostart/keyboard
~/.kde/Autostart/keyboard

Now you should have right click on the right apple key!