GizmoLA.com

One of the first things people learn about using subversion is how to do a "checkout" using svn co. The svn checkout command pulls files from the subversion repository into your "sandbox" and in so doing creates what subversion calls a "working copy". A working copy includes a .svn directory in every subdirectory of the working copy, which is chock full of directories and files that svn uses to determine what you're doing in your sandbox.

A "working copy" is designed to be just that -- a copy of the source tree built with the assumption that you will be making changes and committing them back to subversion. But what do you do if you want the files, but you don't need or want a sandbox?

Continue reading "Get files from subversion without creating a sandbox using svn export" »

*Part 1 of this series is here*

Customizing your LAMP server

Unix people are probably familiar with the father of the DNS system -- the /etc/hosts file. The hosts file has a simple format:

ipaddress hostname

In the days prior to DNS, people would update a master hosts file and copy it around to all the servers in the enterprise. Surprisingly Windows versions also support this file, as a way of overriding DNS, so we can use this to our advantage, by adding an entry for our development server. In this example, I'm going to use dev.gizmola.com, which is not a real server.

One important reason to do this is that Apache and other web servers, use a feature of HTTP 1.1 that specifies a header field named "Host:". This mechanism facilitates the service of multiple domains from a single apache server, through the configuration of apache virtual host (or vhost) entires. The server uses the Host name in the HTTP header to determine how to route requests, so without host name resolution. you have to use non-standard ports and other mechanisms that are more trouble than they're worth. a

Continue reading "Centos Virtual LAMP server -- Part II" »

A few years ago I published a 3 part LAMP tutorial series entitled LAMP, MySQL/PHP Database Driven Websites on the well known php community website PHPFreaks.com. This series dealt with a slew of practical issues including how a LAMP server works, relational database design using MySQL, many to many tables, SQL inner and outer joins, practical PHP debugging, php documentation tools, basic PHP classes, css, interactive javascript & DHTML with a chooser widget, php HEREDOC and php basics like how to process forms and utilize GET and POST methods.

The series was fairly successful, (a 4.5 of 5 after hundreds of ratings), many pages of comments and questions, and page views to the 100k's+ although PHPFreaks auditing system was turned off at some point and stopped recording views.

Unfortunately, some years ago PHPFreaks.com suffered some fairly catastrophic issues with its publishing system. There were also some bugs, and the site was exploited with some XSS, and the admins simply decommissioned the majority of the site. My series was part of what disappeared. At that point, a couple of college Computer Science courses on web development had taken the series and integrated it into their curriculum, and the professor of one of these courses had converted it into a Word document, which I was able to download and convert to pdf.

I plan to write a compatible publishing addon for gizmola.com so that I can take the original markup and republish it here, but in the meantime, here is the series in pdf format. The conversion utility they used stripped out the original markup, and page breaks are gone, but the text, source code, and illustrations are all still there.

I also offer all the source code for parts 2 & 3 of the series. I'm not sure what happened to the source for part 1, however, it is all included inline in the tutorial. The LAMP, MySQL/PHP Database Driven Websites series is now available in pdf format. Click here.

I'll be talking about the Dynamic Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) with Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) demo I created for the LAMPsig booth at the Southern California Linux expo 2006 (SCALE) conference that was held last weekend.

There were some excellent LAMP oriented discussions including Zend's Andi Gutmans himself, who talked about the PHP community project and PHP 6, then hung around for a while whilst myself and Chris Thompson peppered him with questions about MySQL's oop, its applicablility to the various framework projects underway. In short, Andi indicated that the PHP core team currently has no plans to add anything to the Oop capabilities of PHP 5, although I suppose that could change once the PHP Framework project matures. He indicated that the PHP Framework should be available in alpha or beta within the next few weeks.

Other LAMP hi-lights included Jim Winstead from MySQL AB who discussed new features in MySQL 5.x and provided some nice example code, and David Schecter from Sleepycat gave an entertaining talk that illustrated how integral berkely database is to Linux in general, and how its used by many major players to provide a high performance caching layer in front of oracle and mysql for websites like Yahoo.

Give this a day and it should be in Spartacus and the Sourceforge Additional Plugins cvs branch.

-.05 release
- Updated GeSHi to latest release (1.0.7.4)
- This release includes some fixes, and new language files for:
applescript, D, diff output, DIV game language, DOS batch language, eiffel, freebasic, gml, Delphi Inno script, Matlab M language files, MySQL specific SQL, Objective CAML, Ruby, Scheme, SDLBasic, and VHDL: Very high speed integrated circuit HDL

The Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC) is one of a number of Massive Multiplayer Online Role playing games (MMORPG) available for people who like those types of things. Mythic Entertainment, the company behind DAoC decided to offer an xml feed with various statistics about the game including the number of active players. From April 2002 to July 2005 I used a cron job to query the xml feed once every 5 minutes, parse the results and store the statistics in a database table.

I made a graph of these statistics available on a fan site I operated. The graph used the open source PHPlot graphing class in order to draw a line graph charting the number of players playing the game by hour for a 24 hour period. Visitors to the site would see the line graph shown here, plotting the number of players per hour against a second line showing the day's average. Like many PHP graphing libraries, PHPlot assumes that you have the GD library installed and available to PHP on order for the graphs to work.

This was one of my early experiments with PHP, and illustrated its power and flexibility. Now that the site where the graph appeared is no longer online, I figured I would provide the code, and a small subset of the database, for people interested in how to program with PHPlot. At the time I created this code, PHPlot didn't have much documentation and required some trial and error experimentation. Of course, since then (several years now) PHPlot has been improved, and should definately be considered if you want graphing in your application. Because I don't want to spend time debugging old obsolete code, I've provided the library I used in the download along with the graph script. It would probably work with the latest release, but I don't have time to test it. You can download my example database, version of PHPlot and script here. The database contains one months data, so you can play with the script and explore the class.

Read on for some brief instructions and an explanation of the code.

Continue reading "PHPlot, MySQL and the Dark Ages of Camelot" »