My Desktop and Linux
March 12, 2006
I must say I have had one interesting weekend. I came home Friday to find that my Windows XP 64-Bit edition trial was ending in one hour. I hopped on the computer and burned everything to a DVD as fast as humanly possible. During that time I downloaded a DVD install of Fedora Core 4 (what a nightmare)! So I was off to the races with installing a new Linux Distro which I was planning on doing for sometime but a few applications have been holding me up.
I came to find that Fedora Core was probably one of the worst distributions I have ever installed. The installation did not go smoothly. It would get hung up on detecting my USB devices so I had to run the installer with the noprobe option. I get it all installed then rebooted and a GRUB error. Needless to say I found out later that it was because of my SATA Raid hardware setup. I had to turn RAID off and turn it into a BASE drive. Yuck. Next, Fedora Core would not stop crashing. I believe I reinstalled the OS and got all the updates around 10-20 times in the last 2 days. This was even more aparent when I would install the Nvidia driver and started playing with my monitors. Anytime I changed something I would have to hard boot because it would lock up.
Finally tonight, I installed Ubuntu linux. I am finding out that it is a great distribution, not only for its stability but package management and customization. Ubuntu is based off of Debian. That is not to say it doesn’t have it’s faults. I am still trying to figure out how to configure my 5 button mouse to work correctly and it doesn’t seem to have an option anywhere so I guess my search for sortware to do this will continue.
Now I need to find a good PHP IDE for Linux that is free. I’ve tried the eclipse one’s and needless to say that hasn’t worked very well for what I am looking for. I might have to buckle down and purchase a Zend license just for my personal usage. My preferred application however is PHPEdit. I suppose I will be looking for software for development for a little while hear as many of the items I was using where either Windows only or do not function correctly in linux. Normally because of an error with shared modules.
Zend Framework First Thoughts
March 7, 2006
Now that I have had a bit of time to look through the Zend Framwork it looks like it has some serious potential. There are things I really like about it and other things that I do not like so much about it. But this is also without some of the documentation done that I would really like to see because I haven’t even started stepping through the code. However I did have some issues with trying to include it without it being in an include path unless it was at the same document root as the main index.php file I was utilizing.
Quite possibly my favorite feature is the MVC implementation. The most intriging part of it, is that it utilizes a class to call your pages which are stored in functions. I guess I never really thought of that approach. Mine has always been one of the switch statement. I think I actually prefer the class utilizing the methods much more than the switch statement.
Now on to my biggest irritation the Input Filter. Basically you assign your get and posts to the filter and it removes them from the scope so they can not be used. Looking at it from the api documentation, most of the validation routines and such could be accomplished with one line of php and only very simple routines are included. I suppose what might work well is to extend the classes to add in custom validation items.
The main problem with the framework is that it is so highly undocumented that it is hard to truly evaluate it and build applications with it at this moment. Which is pretty much known and is to be expected. I think I will probably play with this and the new features of MySQL 5 and build some site within the next few weeks and see how it goes. Expect me to post some more information and quite possibly a few tutorials on what I find that is of major usage with this new framework.
MySQL Workbench 1.0.5 Beta Released
March 7, 2006
Well finally, the guys over at MySQL released a beta of the workbench. The last few alpha versions have not even been usable. You can now boot it up and actually use it. It is one fine tool.
I was able to reverse engineer a model from a database and have all of the index’s and foreign keys show up. Also the grid is very nice on the eyes! Workbench supports views, procedures, triggers and all sorts of other MySQL 5.x features and above. If you are doing work on MySQL this is probably a tool you would like to have in the ole black hat.
Personally this is probably one of the best ER Diagramming tools I have seen. You might want to checkout the public beta on MySQL Downloads.
Preparing for MySQL 5 Certification
March 2, 2006
Well I am taking the plunge. Since I have the Zend Certification already I am going to start pursuing the MySQL 5 Developer certification. I find certification exams pretty hard seeing as you have to pull out all of your knowledge on a particular subject within a half of minute. Even more troubling is how this exam is 2 parts! I think it will go well, however I am not as well versed on the new MySQL features as of yet because we haven’t been utilizing it in production at my current company.
It is only a matter of time before we start working that into our CMS and completely rewrite it. So I am using this both as to get well versed in the new features of MySQL 5 and how they utilize them also learning the differences in how they implemented them in consideration of other databases. I think this will be a very interesting experience to really gain some more knowledge on MySQL and maybe if it proves successful and fun I will consider taking the DBA exams.
I will probably be writing a ton of software in my spare time because of this to really get a hold and memorize all of the different functionality of MySQL and tools. Maybe I will finally start to get some of my development ideas out of being an idea and into software that is working!
