https://www.davehall.com.au/Recent content in Welcome on Dave Hall ConsultingHugoen-auSun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2022/11/06/upgrading-aws-lambda-powertools-python-v2/Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2022/11/06/upgrading-aws-lambda-powertools-python-v2/Learn how easy it is to upgrade AWS Lambda Powertools to version.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2022/10/19/tracking-infrastructure-with-ssm-and-terraform/Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2022/10/19/tracking-infrastructure-with-ssm-and-terraform/Use AWS SSM Parameter Store to share resource references with other teams.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/12/13/close-the-gate-why-you-need-egress-controls-in-your-security-groups/Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/12/13/close-the-gate-why-you-need-egress-controls-in-your-security-groups/Open egress in your cloud environments is bad idea.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/12/10/does-github-enterprise-cloud-make-your-organisation-less-secure/Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/12/10/does-github-enterprise-cloud-make-your-organisation-less-secure/GitHub’s oAuth scopes could leave organisations vulnerable.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/09/11/your-terraform-module-needs-an-opinion/Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/09/11/your-terraform-module-needs-an-opinion/Learn why your Terraform modules should be opinionated.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/05/31/rube-goldberg-machine-container-workflows/Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/05/31/rube-goldberg-machine-container-workflows/Learn how can you securely copy container images from GHCR to ECR.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/22/parameter-store-vs-secrets-manager/Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/22/parameter-store-vs-secrets-manager/Which AWS managed service is best for storing and managing your secrets?https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/12/lost-parcel-results-new-website/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/12/lost-parcel-results-new-website/When Australia Post lost a parcel, we found a lot of problems with one of their websites.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/11/new-website/Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2021/02/11/new-website/After 15 years we rebuilt our website. Learn more about the new site.https://www.davehall.com.au/privacy/Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/privacy/Skwashd Services Pty is committed to providing quality services to you and this policy outlines our ongoing obligations to you in respect of how we manage your Personal Information. We have adopted the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (the Privacy Act). The NPPs govern the way in which we collect, use, disclose, store, secure and dispose of your Personal Information. A copy of the Australian Privacy Principles may be obtained from the website of The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at www.https://www.davehall.com.au/contact/Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/contact/ Get In Touch Contact Us Skwashd Services Pty Ltd T/A Dave Hall Consulting Address PO Box 7306 Kaleen ACT 2617 Australia Phone Number +61 (0) 2 8294 4747 ABN 99 127 791 539 Feel free to use the form below to contact us. Your Name * Email Address * Subject * Message * Send Sendhttps://www.davehall.com.au/services/devsecops/Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/services/devsecops/Agile, scrum, kanban, iterate, cloud, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, DevOps, infrastructure as code, X as a service, machine learning, shift left, zero trust … Some days it feels like software development has turned into buzzword bingo. One of the latest additions to the card is DevSecOps. For the last decade organisations have been breaking down the wall between developers and operations. Teams that adopt DevOps culture, practices and tools deliver better solutions faster.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/07/17/if-youre-not-using-yaml-cloudformation-templates-youre-doing-it-wrong/Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/07/17/if-youre-not-using-yaml-cloudformation-templates-youre-doing-it-wrong/Learn why you should be using YAML in your CloudFormation templates.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/07/10/logging-step-functions-cloudwatch/Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/07/10/logging-step-functions-cloudwatch/A quick guide on how to stream AWS Step Function logs to AWS CloudWatch.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/04/01/zooms-make-or-break-moment/Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2020/04/01/zooms-make-or-break-moment/Covid-19 has fuelled massive growth for Zoom. Will this motivate them to fix their security problems?https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/11/16/drupalsouth-diversity-scholarship-winner-announced/Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/11/16/drupalsouth-diversity-scholarship-winner-announced/A few weeks ago we announced our diversity scholarship for DrupalSouth. Today we announce the winner.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/10/30/buying-apple-watch-7usd/Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/10/30/buying-apple-watch-7usd/Learn how we hacked a social media marketing campaign to get a brand new Apple Watch for $7.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/10/04/announcing-drupalsouth-diversity-scholarship/Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2019/10/04/announcing-drupalsouth-diversity-scholarship/Dave Hall Consulting announces a scholarship to improve diversity at DrupalSouth.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2018/08/26/aws-parameter-store/Sun, 26 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2018/08/26/aws-parameter-store/Anyone with a moderate level of AWS experience will have learned that Amazon offers more than one way of doing something. Storing secrets is no exception. It is possible to spin up Hashicorp Vault on AWS using an official Amazon quick start guide. The down side of this approach is that you have to maintain it. If you want an “AWS native” approach, you have 2 services to choose from. As the name suggests, Secrets Manager provides some secrets management tools on top of the store.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2018/07/05/migrating-aws-system-manager-parameter-store-secrets-new-namespace/Thu, 05 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2018/07/05/migrating-aws-system-manager-parameter-store-secrets-new-namespace/When starting with a new tool it is common to jump in start doing things. Over time you learn how to do things better. Amazon’s AWS System Manager (SSM) Parameter Store was like that for me. I started off polluting the global namespace with all my secrets. Over time I learned to use paths to create namespaces. This helps a lot when it comes to managing access. Recently I’ve been using Parameter Store a lot.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/09/24/drupal-puppies/Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/09/24/drupal-puppies/Over the years Drupal distributions, or distros as they’re more affectionately known, have evolved a lot. We started off passing around database dumps. Eventually we moved onto using installations profiles and features to share par-baked sites. There are some signs that distros aren’t working for people using them. Agencies often hack a distro to meet client requirements. This happens because it is often difficult to cleanly extend a distro. A content type might need extra fields or the logic in an alter hook may not be desired.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/09/16/trying-drupal/Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/09/16/trying-drupal/While preparing for my DrupalCamp Belgium keynote presentation I looked at how easy it is to get started with various CMS platforms. For my talk I used Contentful, a hosted content as a service CMS platform and contrasted that to the “Try Drupal” experience. Below is the walk through of both. Let’s start with Contentful. I start off by visiting their website. In the top right corner is a blue button encouraging me to “try for free”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/27/continuing-conversation-drupalcon-and-future/Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/27/continuing-conversation-drupalcon-and-future/My blog post from last week was very well received and sparked a conversation in the Drupal community about the future of Drupal. That conversation has continued this week at DrupalCon Baltimore. Yesterday during the opening keynote, Dries touched on some of the issues raised in my blog post. Later in the day we held an unofficial BoF. The turn out was smaller than I expected, but we had a great discussion.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/22/many-people-want-talk/Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/22/many-people-want-talk/WOW! The response to my blog post on the future of Drupal earlier this week has been phenomenal. My blog saw more traffic in 24 hours than it normally sees in a 2 to 3 week period. Around 30 comments have been left by readers. My tweet announcing the post was the top Drupal tweet for a day. Some 50 hours later it is still number 4. It seems to really connected with many people in the community.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/19/drupal-we-need-talk/Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/19/drupal-we-need-talk/Update 21 April: I’ve published a followup post with details of the BoF to be held at DrupalCon Baltimore on Tuesday 25 April. I hope to see you there so we can continue the conversation. Drupal has a problem. No, not that problem. We live in a post peak Drupal world. Drupal peaked some time during the Drupal 8 development cycle. I’ve had conversations with quite a few people who feel that we’ve lost momentum.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/06/remote-presentations/Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2017/04/06/remote-presentations/Living in the middle of nowhere and working most of my hours in the evenings I have few opportunities to attend events in person, let alone deliver presentations. As someone who likes to share knowledge and present at events this is a problem. My work around has been presenting remotely. Many of my talks are available on playlist on my youtube channel. I’ve been doing remote presentations for many years. During this time I have learned a lot about what it takes to make a remote presentation successful.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/10/31/wix-arent-only-ones-violating-gpl/Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/10/31/wix-arent-only-ones-violating-gpl/Recently Matt Mullenweg called out Wix for violating the GPL. Wix’s CEO, Avishai Abrahami’s post on the company blog missed some of the key issues when it comes to using code licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The GPL doesn’t require you to only release the changes made to a dependency. If you use a GPL library in your project, then the entire project is deemed to be a derivate work.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/09/17/road-drupalcon-dublin/Sat, 17 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/09/17/road-drupalcon-dublin/DrupalCon Dublin is just around the corner. Earlier today I started my journey to Dublin. This week I’ll be in Mumbai for some work meetings before heading to Dublin. On Tuesday 27 September at 1pm I will be presenting my session Let the Machines do the Work. This lighthearted presentation provides some practical examples of how teams can start to introduce automation into their Drupal workflows. All of the code used in the examples will be available after my session.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/01/25/environment-config-drupal-8/Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/01/25/environment-config-drupal-8/One of the biggest improvements in Drupal 8 is the new configuration management system. Config is now decoupled from code and the database. Unlike Drupal 6 and 7, developers no longer have to rely on the features module for moving configuration around. Most large Drupal sites, and some smaller ones, require per environment configuration. Prior to Drupal 8 this was usually achieved using a combination of hard coding config variables and features.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/01/19/internal-applications-when-semantic-versioning-doesnt-make-sense/Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2016/01/19/internal-applications-when-semantic-versioning-doesnt-make-sense/Semantic Versioning (or SemVer) is great for libraries and open source applications. It allows development teams to communicate to user and downstream developers the scope of changes in a release. One of the most important indicators in versioning is backwards compatibility (BC). SemVer makes any BC break clear. Web services and public APIs are another excellent use case for SemVer. As much as I love semantic versioning for public projects, I am not convinced about using it for internal projects.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2015/05/15/leaking-information-drupal-urls/Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2015/05/15/leaking-information-drupal-urls/Update: It turns out the DA was trolling. We all now know that DrupalCon North America 2016 will be in New Orleans. I’ve kept this post up as I believe the information about handling unpublished nodes is relevant. I have also learned that m4032404 is enabled by default in govCMS. When a user doesn’t have access to content in Drupal a 403 forbidden response is returned. This is the case out of the box for unpublished content.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2015/04/13/managing-variables-drupal-7/Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2015/04/13/managing-variables-drupal-7/A couple of times recently the issue of managing variables in Drupal 7 has come up in conversation with other developers. This post outlines the various ways of managing variables in Drupal sites. The three things this guide ensures: Sensitive data is kept secure Variables are correct in each environment You are able to track your variables (and when they changed) The Variables Table The most common place you’ll find configuration variables is in Drupal’s variable table (aka {variable}).https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2014/07/21/interacting-acquia-cloud-api-python/Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2014/07/21/interacting-acquia-cloud-api-python/Update: Acquia shutdown Cloud API v1 on 1 July 2020. The Acquia Cloud API makes it easy to manage sites on the platform. The API allows you to perform many administrative tasks including creating, destroying and copying databases, deploying code, managing domains and copying files. Acquia offers 2 official clients. The primary client is a drush plugin which can only be downloaded from Acquia Insight. The other is a PHP library which states in the README that it is “[n]ot ready for production usage”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2013/01/02/visualising-drupal-development-history-gource/Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2013/01/02/visualising-drupal-development-history-gource/Over the Christmas break I came across gource, a software version control visualization tool. Gource produces really nice visual representations of software projects growing. About 2 years ago David Norman produced a gource video of development of Drupal up to the 7 release. This is pretty cool, but it only shows who committed the patch, not who contributed to it. After some searching I found the Drupal contribution analyzer sandbox project.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/10/08/coder-talks-wanted-drupalcon-sydney/Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/10/08/coder-talks-wanted-drupalcon-sydney/One of the many hats I wear these days is Development and Coding Track Chair for DrupalCon Sydney 2013. As outlined in the track description we are planning on showcasing what is awesome today in Drupal 7 and the cool stuff that is coming in Drupal 8. Given that there are no core conversations in Sydney we are trying to put together a more intermediate-to-advanced level track. I want people to come to these sessions and go away with their heads full of ideas about what they can do better in their next project.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/09/12/switching-installation-profiles-existing-drupal-sites/Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/09/12/switching-installation-profiles-existing-drupal-sites/In my last blog post I outlined how to use per project installation profiles. If you read that post and want to use installation profiles to take advantage of site wide content changes and centralised dependency management, this post will show you how to do it quickly and easily. The easiest way to switch installation profiles is using the command line with drush. The following command will do it for you:https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/09/09/managing-project-installation-profiles/Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/09/09/managing-project-installation-profiles/Unbeknown to many users, installation profiles are what is used to install a Drupal site. The two profiles that ship with core are standard and minimal. Standard gives new users a basic, functional Drupal site. Minimal provides a very minimal configuration so developers and site builders can start building a new site. A key piece of a Drupal distro is an installation profile. I believe that developers and more experienced site builders should be using installation profiles as part of their client sites builds.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/07/13/gitlist-and-my-todo-list/Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/07/13/gitlist-and-my-todo-list/Months ago I was searching for a good web front end for git for doing code reviews and browsing repos. My short list ended up being Gitweb and GitLab. Gitweb is a Perl based web front end for git that is a sub project of the official git project. Out of the box Gitweb is pretty ugly and I have never found it to be very user friendly. Even with all of its problems, it does what it does pretty well.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/05/20/your-site-should-be-full-beans/Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2012/05/20/your-site-should-be-full-beans/From: Dave Hall To: boxes boxes-module@drupal.org Subject: Our Relationship Dear boxes, I’m sorry but things just aren’t working out between us. It’s not you, it’s me. I need some time to myself. I need to think things through. I’m not sure what I want. We should spend some time apart. We should try new things. I will miss you, but this is for the best. Let’s meet for coffee in a couple of weeks.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/11/11/drupal-enterprise-aka-vote-my-drupalcon-session/Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/11/11/drupal-enterprise-aka-vote-my-drupalcon-session/For the last few months I’ve been working for Technocrat on a new Drupal based site for the Insurance Australia Group’s Direct Insurance brands. The current sites are using Autonomy Teamsite. The basics of the build are relatively straight forward, around 1000 nodes, a bunch of views and a bit of glue to hold it all together. Where things get complicated is the workflow. The Financial services sector in Australia is subject to strict control of representations being made about products.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/05/17/drush-make-and-module-dependencies/Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/05/17/drush-make-and-module-dependencies/Drush make is a wonderful tool for constructing Drupal platforms. A lot of Drupal developers are used to adding a list of modules, a few libraries and theme or 2 then running drush make to build their platform. It all seems pretty easy. What if I told you module developers could make things even easier for site builders? Some contrib modules depend on third party libraries, and due to various reasons they can’t always be stored in git repositories on drupal.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/04/02/fixing-zimbras-broken-debs/Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/04/02/fixing-zimbras-broken-debs/As much as I love Zimbra, I find their Debian packaging frustrating. Why do they insist on shipping half broken debs? I can excuse vmware for being too lazy to provide proper descriptions for their packages, although the generic “Best email money can buy” text seems a little lame. Failing to populate the “Provides” field is brain dead. This makes it possible to install mailx on a server running Zimbra without installing another MTA.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/26/looking-back-drupal-downunder/Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/26/looking-back-drupal-downunder/I spent the weekend at Drupal Downunder in Brisbane. The venue was excellent. I’m a fan of not using “traditional” venues for conferences, to help make them even more memorable for attendees. I managed to catch up with a bunch of people. The relaxed feel about the event was great. Most conferences I’ve attended recently have either been large or I’ve helped organise them, this time I could relax and enjoy.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/04/keyword-bookmarking/Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/04/keyword-bookmarking/When doing development work, from time to time it is handy to be able to look up documentation. Bookmarking manuals is handy, but often you still need to search for the function you’re after. Firefox, and possibly other browsers (not Chrome or Chromium), allows you to setup a keyword bookmark linked to a search. I’ve setup a few search bookmarks for development resources. This is how I’ve done it: Select Bookmarks > Organise Bookmarks… from the menu.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/02/100-drupal-site-series-part-7-wrapping-it/Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2011/01/02/100-drupal-site-series-part-7-wrapping-it/Thanks to everyone who read the posts in my $100 Drupal site series. Today I will be responding to some of the points people have raised in comments and via email as well as adding a few closing comments. Undervaluing Labour Some have suggested that the only way to make a venture like this work is to work for a few dollars an hour. I completely disagree with that! If you are building every project from scratch and only charging your clients 100USD, you will be working for peanuts, but I’m not advocating that model.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/29/100-drupal-site-series-part-6-business-considerations/Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/29/100-drupal-site-series-part-6-business-considerations/During this series on creating a profitable business around the concept of building Drupal sites for $100 I have attempted to demonstrate that there is a viable business model here. I don’t believe it is a business that will suit everyone and nor do I believe every developer will want to work on such a project, but for some this will be an excellent opportunity. Today I will cover some of the things that I think you should consider before investing too much in this business model.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/28/100-drupal-site-series-part-5-support/Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/28/100-drupal-site-series-part-5-support/Through out this series, the cost of labour has been identified as one of the biggest risks for this project. As most people who have run a tech business know, support can turn into a massive black hole of wasted time. Today we will look at how to manage support in a way that helps you avoid any direct customer contact for support. Documentation and Online Resources People like documentation, or even better videos, to walk them through a process.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/28/100-drupal-site-series-part-4-platforms/Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/28/100-drupal-site-series-part-4-platforms/So far in this series we have covered a potential target market and business plan, resources and infrastructure and the tools required to deliver Drupal sites with a sale price of $100 per site. In this post I’ll be covering some of the considerations when building Drupal platforms or distributions. The sites which customers deploy will need to be based on a custom Drupal distribution or “distro”. The distro should be modular and primarily driven by Features.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/26/100-drupal-site-series-part-3-tools/Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/26/100-drupal-site-series-part-3-tools/In the previous instalment of my $100 Drupal site series I covered resources and infrastructure. In this post I will be covering the development tools I think you need in order to build and sell Drupal sites at the $100 price point. Given that Drupal 7 is close to release, it is assumed that the sites will be built using D7. I don’t believe that it is smart to invest heavily in Drupal 6 for new long term projects, given D8 could be out in 18 months and D6 would then be unsupported.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/24/100-drupal-site-series-part-2-resources-and-infrastructure/Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/24/100-drupal-site-series-part-2-resources-and-infrastructure/In my previous post in this series on the $100 Drupal site I outlined a possible target market and set out why I thought very low cost sites could be a viable business model. Today I will cover the resources and infrastructure you’d need to consider to build such a service. I am not proposing that the business is built on the premise of working for $5 per hour to build new sites for each client.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/24/100-drupal-site-series-part-1-it-possible/Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/12/24/100-drupal-site-series-part-1-it-possible/In late October Gdzine posed the question “$100 CMS web site feasible? What do you think?” on LinkedIn and the question was also posted on groups.drupal.org. These posts lead to lengthy discussion threads. Some people accused Gdzine of trolling and others claimed that it wasn’t possible, but a few of us argued it was possible to build a Drupal site for $100. Over the next week or so I’ll be blogging how I would go about delivering $100 Drupal sites.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/08/08/kicking-javascript-footer-drupal-8/Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/08/08/kicking-javascript-footer-drupal-8/As a platform, Drupal has excellent javascript support. Drupal 7 will ship with jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8, which will make it even easier to build rich user interactions with Drupal. Drupal supports aggregating javascript files to reduce the number of network connections a browser must open to load a page. It is common practice for Drupal themes to put the <script> tag in the <head> section of the page.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/07/22/travelling-speaking-scaling-and-aegiring/Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/07/22/travelling-speaking-scaling-and-aegiring/The next couple of months are going to be a crazy ride. I will be visiting at least 7 countries, speaking on 8 or more days in a 5 week period. The talks will be focused on Drupal and Aegir. My schedule is below. Horizontally Scaling Drupal - Melbourne On 7 August I’ll be running a 1 day workshop around the theme of horizontally scaling Drupal. The content is built on the knowledge I developed building, deploying and managing around 2100 sites for a client.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/07/19/western-digital-fix-licensing/Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/07/19/western-digital-fix-licensing/Over the last few months months I’ve been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement. It has taken some time to get WDC to understand the situation. There has been confusing messages about what the situation is with the EULA, the GPL and what license covers what pieces of code.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/06/26/multi-core-apache-solr-ubuntu-1004-drupal-auto-provisioning/Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/06/26/multi-core-apache-solr-ubuntu-1004-drupal-auto-provisioning/Apache Solr is an excellent full text index search engine based on Lucene. Solr is increasingly being used in the Drupal community for search. I use it for search for a lot of my projects. Recently Steve Edwards at Drupal Connect blogged about setting up a mutli core Solr server on Ubuntu 9.10 (aka Karmic). Ubuntu 10.04LTS was released a couple of months ago and it makes the process a bit easier, as Apache Solr 1.https://www.davehall.com.au/copyright/Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/copyright/Unless otherwise noted all content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. The design of this site is copyright Dave Hall Consulting, All Rights Reserved. The design of this site can not be used without prior written permission. Trademarks and logos used on this site are property of their respective owners.https://www.davehall.com.au/services/automation/Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/services/automation/Back in 1967 IBM released a corporate video with the key message “machines should work, people should think”. Five decades on, this is even more important. People need time to think about their work. Adopting automated processes isn’t a once off project, it is a change in approach. The upfront cost of automating processes is recovered in ongoing cost avoidance and staff are freed up to focus on meeting business objectives.https://www.davehall.com.au/services/cloud/Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/services/cloud/The cloud is transforming the enterprise as organisations move workloads out of traditional data centres. Cloud migrations involve changing more than just the hosting platform. While lifting and shifting applications often brings initial benefits, many businesses fail to unlock the full potential of the cloud. Refactoring and rearchitecting applications to make them cloud native is a journey. This will allow you to take full advantage of the flexibility and reliability offered by cloud hosting.https://www.davehall.com.au/services/training/Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/services/training/Dave Hall Consulting has extensive experience delivering training and conference presentations. For over a decade Dave has presented at conferences around the world, including keynoting events. We harness this experience and our deep technical knowledge to deliver training that is engaging and relevant. Dave Hall Consulting can provide public and tailored private training for diverse audiences. We have experience engaging with participants who have English as a second language and have taught everyone from high school students to seniors.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/16/ebook-review-theming-drupal-first-timer%E2%80%99s-guide/Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/16/ebook-review-theming-drupal-first-timer%E2%80%99s-guide/My experience themeing Drupal, like most of my coding skills, have been developed by digging up useful resources online and some trail and error. I have an interest in graphic design, but never really studied it. I can turn out sites which look good, but my “designs” don’t have the polish of a professionally designed site. I own quite a few (dead tree) books on development and project management. Generally I like to read when I am sick of sitting in front of a screen.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/09/motorola-dext-my-firts-impressions/Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/09/motorola-dext-my-firts-impressions/Today I purchased a Motorola DEXT (aka Cliq) from Optus. Overall I like it. It feels more polished than the Nokia N97 which I bought last year. The range of apps is good. Even though the phone only ships with Android 1.6, 2.1 for the DEXT is due in Q3 2010. The apps seem to run nice and fast. The responsive touch screen is bright and clear. I am yet to try to make a call on it from home, but the 3G data seems as fast as my Telstra 3G service, so the signal should be OK.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/01/acma-investigates-nokia-sms-spam/Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/01/acma-investigates-nokia-sms-spam/The ongoing saga of Nokia’s TXT spam continues. The bad news is that I received another TXT from Nokia today. This comes after being told by Nokia that I would no longer receive any TXTs from them. The message reads: Tip: Use less battery power and help conserve energy with a few helpful tips from Nokia. Vist http://environment.nokia.mobi to learn more. I have an energy saving tip for Nokia, stop sending TXT messages I don’t want, then I won’t waste energy on trying to make them stop.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/01/x-mail-headers-identica/Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/04/01/x-mail-headers-identica/A while ago I submitted a patch for status.net, the code that powers identi.ca and other microblogging platforms. The patch added X headers to email notification messages, to make it easier to filter messages. The headers look something like this: X-StatusNet-MessageType: subscribe X-StatusNet-TargetUser: skwashd X-StatusNet-SourceUser: username X-StatusNet-Domain: identi.ca The patch was included in the 0.9.1 release of statusnet, and is now running on identi.ca. I think this is the highest traffic site running any of my code.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/22/tricks-running-haproxy-pfsense-embedded/Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/22/tricks-running-haproxy-pfsense-embedded/HAProxy is available as an addon module for pfSense 1.2.3. This makes it really easy to have pfSense control the gateway and load balancing. There are a couple of tricks to getting it all up and running. Although everything looked good in the webgui HAProxy just wouldn’t start. After logging in it seemed that there were 2 problems, firstly as mentioned in the forums the IP addresses must be an interface or CARP addresses not Virtual IPs for HAProxy to work and secondly the file descriptor limits have to be increased.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/16/making-it-easier-spawn-php-cgi-debian-and-ubuntu/Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/16/making-it-easier-spawn-php-cgi-debian-and-ubuntu/Apache is a great web server, but sometimes I need something a bit more lightweight. I already have a bunch of sites using lighttpd, but I’m planning on switching them to nginx. Both nginx and lighttpd use FastCGI for running PHP. Getting FastCGI up and running on Ubuntu (or Debian) involves a bit of manual work which can slow down deployment. The normal process to get nginx and php-cgi up and running is to install the spawn-fcgi package, create a shell script such as /usr/local/bin/php-fastcgi to launch it, then a custom init script, after making both of these executable you need to run update-rc.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/13/solr-replication-load-balancing-haproxy-and-drupal/Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/03/13/solr-replication-load-balancing-haproxy-and-drupal/I use Apache Solr for search on several projects, including a few with Drupal. Solr has built in support for replication and load balancing, unfortunately the load balancing is done on the client side and works best when using a persistent connection, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for PHP based webapps. In the case of Drupal, there has been a long discussion on a patch in the issue queue to enable Solr’s native load balancing, but things seem to have stalled.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/22/check-drupal-module-status-using-bash/Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/22/check-drupal-module-status-using-bash/When you run a lot of Drupal sites it can be annoying to keep track of all of the modules contained in a platform and ensure all of them are up to date. One option is to setup a dummy site setup with all the modules installed and email notifications enabled, this is OK, but then you need to make sure you enable the additional modules every time you add something to your platform.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/20/group-redent-plugin-statusnet-identica/Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/20/group-redent-plugin-statusnet-identica/For a bit over a year now I’ve been using the free software based microblogging service identi.ca. Unlike twitter, the identi.ca code base is released under the AGPLv3, through the status.net project. Anyone is free to setup their own instance of status.net and can even federate with other instances, using the Open Micro Blogging standard. Another feature which identi.ca/status.net has over twitter is support for groups, so someone can send a message to a group of people, a bit like how a mailing list works.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/20/western-digital-my-book-world-edition-licensing-and-gpl/Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/20/western-digital-my-book-world-edition-licensing-and-gpl/Earlier today I purchased a Western Digital My Book World Edition (MBWE) 1Tb NAS as I needed a simple NAS. The MBWE seemed like a good option, it runs GNU/Linux, it is hackable and there is a bit of a community around it. I got the thing home and started setting it up through the web GUI so I could enable SSH and NFS on it, until I hit the EULA.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/17/making-my-nokia-smses-stop/Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/17/making-my-nokia-smses-stop/This is a public service announcement. Tracy Postill, Corporate Communications Manager at Nokia Australia sent me this response when I enquired as to why it had taken more then 6 months for me to be unsubscribed from the My Nokia service. There are a number of very simple processes to unsubscribe: - sending “stop” to +61416906978 - through My Nokia application in phone - online at www.nokia.com.au/mynokia - request “unsubscribe” through Australia.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/11/nokia-and-txt-spam/Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/11/nokia-and-txt-spam/Last year I bought my 4th Nokia phone in a row, a N97 on contract from Optus. What a mistake that was. The phone would drop every second call and the user experience was less than I expected from Nokia. Telstra allow customers in the bush to test drive a handset for a few days or so to make sure it works where you need it, Optus on the other hand will sell you the handset but offer a “Coverage Satisfaction Guarantee”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/11/packaging-doctrine-debian-and-ubuntu/Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/11/packaging-doctrine-debian-and-ubuntu/I have been indoctrinated into to the everything on production machines should be packaged school of thought. Rather than bang on about that, I intend to keep this post relatively short and announce that I have created Debian (and Ubuntu) packages for Doctrine, the ORM for PHP. The packaging is rather basic, it gets installed just like any other Debianised PEAR package, that being the files go in /usr/share/php, the package.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/06/howto-setup-private-package-repository-reprepro-nginx/Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/06/howto-setup-private-package-repository-reprepro-nginx/As the number of servers I am responsible for grows, I have been trying to eliminate all non packaged software in production. Although ubuntu and Debian have massive software repositories, there are some things which just aren’t available yet or are internal meta packages. Once the packages are built they need to be deployed to servers. The simplest way to do this is to run a private apt repository. There are a few options for building an apt repository, but the most popular and simplest seems to be reprepro.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/04/packaging-drush-and-dependencies-debian/Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/02/04/packaging-drush-and-dependencies-debian/Lately I have been trying to avoid non packaged software being installed on production servers. The main reason for this is to make it easier to apply updates. It also makes it easier to deploy new servers with meta packages when everything is pre packaged. One tool which I am using a lot on production servers is Drupal’s command line tool - drush. Drush is awesome it makes managing Drupal sites so much easier, especially when it comes to applying updates.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/01/29/upcoming-book-reviews/Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2010/01/29/upcoming-book-reviews/Packt Publishing seem to have liked my review of Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery, so much so they have asked me to review another title. On my return from linux.conf.au and Drupal South in New Zealand, a copy of the second edition of AJAX and PHP was waiting for me at the post office. I’ll be reading and reviewing the book during February. I will cover LCA and Drupal South in other blog posts once I have some time to sit down and reflect on the events.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/09/ads-dont-belong-your-business-site/Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/09/ads-dont-belong-your-business-site/Back in the late 90s there was a range of free website hosting options - GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod are the big 3 I remember straight off the top of my head. The business model was pretty simple, you got a free site, albeit with a bad URL, and the host got to inject ads into the page. The first “site” ever I ever built was hosted by tripod and is still up, I have forgotten the login details so it hasn’t been updated for years.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/08/drbd-ubuntu-karmic/Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/08/drbd-ubuntu-karmic/Ubuntu 9.10 (aka karmic koala) has a frustrating packaging bug. Even though the stock server kernel includes the DRBD module, the drbd8-utils package depends on drbd8-source. drbd8-source uses DKMS to build the drbd module to match the installed kernel/s. As I stated in the bug report (lp:474660), “really don’t like having build-essential installed on production net facing servers, and where possible any productions servers”. As side from personal opinion on whether the module should be bundled or not, the fact is that is bundled and so there is no need for the dependency on drbd8-source.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/08/updating-all-your-drupal-sites-once-aka-lazy-persons-aegir/Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/08/updating-all-your-drupal-sites-once-aka-lazy-persons-aegir/Aegir is an excellent way to manage multi site drupal instances, but sometimes it can be a bit too heavy. For example if you have a handful of sites, it can be overkill to deploy aegir. If there is an urgent security fix and you have a lot of sites (I am talking 100s if not 1000s) to patch, waiting for aegir to migrate and verify all of your sites can be a little too slow.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/03/php-print-thello-world/Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/12/03/php-print-thello-world/My blog is now syndicated on Planet Drupal. I am very excited about this - thanks Simon. For the last 8 years or so I have been running my own IT consulting business, focusing on free/open source software and web application development. My clients have range from micro businesses up to well known geek brands like SGI. Until recently I lead the phpGroupWare project. My Drupal profile doesn’t really give much of a hint about my involvement with Drupal.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/11/30/drupal-6-javascript-and-jquery/Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/11/30/drupal-6-javascript-and-jquery/I have just finished reading Matt Butcher’s latest book, Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery, published by Packt Publishing - ISBN 978-1-847196-16-3. It is a good read. It is one of those books that arrived at the right time and left me inspired. I have always leaned towards Yahoo’s YUI toolkit when I need an Ajax framework, while the rest of the time I just bash out a bit of JS to get the job done.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/11/23/are-sploggers-getting-smarter/Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/11/23/are-sploggers-getting-smarter/Some time ago I switched from using Akismet to Mollom. When I made the switch I was preparing to (finally) migrate to Drupal 6, but that project has stalled. I also though it would be a better idea to use something developed by Acquia, rather than the competition. After switching to Mollom I noticed the number of comments I was getting went through the floor, even though I kept the module up to date.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/27/building-debian-and-ubuntu-meta-packages/Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/27/building-debian-and-ubuntu-meta-packages/Over the last few weeks I have been building a bunch of Debian packages (aka debs) for a new Ubuntu server roll out. Most of the packages are either updates to existing packages or meta packages. Building meta packages is pretty easy, once you know how. I will outline how to build a simple package which pulls in a couple of useful packages. First off we need to create the directory structures and files.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/25/newstead-online-freely/Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/25/newstead-online-freely/Since moving to Newstead, Victoria just over a year ago I have been involved in several tech projects in the town. The first of these was helping to organise the inaugural StixCamp. StixCampNewstead was a great success - many described it as awesome (insert wikipedia citation/s needed here link). The event got some good media coverage too. Although the overwhelming majority of the 60 or so attendees were from Melbourne, several locals and people from across the goldfields turned up.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/12/drupal-book-review/Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/12/drupal-book-review/I am not reviewing a book today, but I soon will be. Packt Publishing have asked me to review Matt Butcher’s new book Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery. The book looks pretty interesting. Although it isn’t on the same scale, being asked to review a serious Drupal developer book, is a bit like Obama winning the noble peace prize - ok maybe I am exaggerating a little there. I really like YUI, but Drupal has made me interested in jQuery.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/02/goodbye-phpgroupware/Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/10/02/goodbye-phpgroupware/I am writing this post with a strong sense of sadness. At the same time I feel that I have no other option. I am walking away from phpGroupWare. Before I walk out the door, lets go for a trip down memory lane. Insert tacky music wavy lines down the screen and bad hair styles from here on in. I think the first time I heard Linux mentioned was in 1996/97.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/09/16/brotherhood-books-launches-giving-books-second-chance/Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/09/16/brotherhood-books-launches-giving-books-second-chance/In late 2008 I worked on building an online second hand bookstore for the Brotherhood of St Laurence. Today Brotherhood Books was launched by comedian and writer Corinne Grant, at the Sacred Heart Primary School in Fitzroy. I’m hanging out for Corinne to publish her short story about the snot eating witch. Brotherhood Books is a really exciting project, it allows people who can’t access bricks and mortar second hand book stores to access quality second hand books at good prices.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/08/29/missing-software-freedom-conference-kosova/Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/08/29/missing-software-freedom-conference-kosova/Today I should be in Prishtina Kosovo running Drupal workshops at the first Software Freedom Conference Kosova. Unfortunately due to work and family commitments I had to decline the invitation. I hope to make it there next year. I will also be missing out on DrupalCon Paris next week too. Sometimes it sucks to be in Australia, especially when Europe is so far away and so many cool things happen there.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/08/28/back-blogging-again/Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2009/08/28/back-blogging-again/Bless me internet for I haven’t blogged, it has been 274 days since my last post. I have wanted to blog, but I kept on finding excuses to avoid it - need to upgrade the software, need to finish x, y and z, need to focus on projects a, b and c etc. One of the main reasons is that I have been too lazy to put the effort in. I find it takes time to think of what to blog and then to bash it out, refine it and post it.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/11/27/updated-imce-plugin-drupal-yui-editor/Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/11/27/updated-imce-plugin-drupal-yui-editor/My IMCE plugin for YUI Editor has been included in drupal CVS git and the 6.x-2.33 release. Now I can claim to have code included in an official drupal release, ok it is a small plugin for a contrib module, we all have to start somewhere. The version included in Drupal only supports YUI 2.5.x as the API has changed in 2.6. I have a new version which supports 2.6.x, but it has a layout bug, so I won’t be submitting it until this bug is fixed.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/11/09/open-letter-senator-stephen-conroy-state-internet-access-australia/Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/11/09/open-letter-senator-stephen-conroy-state-internet-access-australia/Hello Senator, I have recently relocated my IT business from outer metropolitan Melbourne to country Victoria. The state of the internet in this country is a joke. A professional associate of mine in Paris has access to 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up unlimited fibre. This costs him 45EUR p/m which includes line rental for a POTS equivalent phone service and basic cable TV. Setup is throw in if you take it for 1 or 2 years - he couldn’t remember the term of the commitment.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/10/22/yui-editor-imce-drupal-6/Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/10/22/yui-editor-imce-drupal-6/Update: This has now been included in the 6.x-2.33 release of Drupal’s YUI Editor module and I have added support for YUI 2.6. Earlier today I finished off another Drupal based site. The client was pretty happy with it. Once they launch I will probably post a link. The client came back to me and asked how they could insert images using the rich text editor. Based on some positive reviews I used the YUI Editor module this time around, instead of FCKEditor or tinyMCE for the rich text editor.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/10/21/weve-gone-green/Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/10/21/weve-gone-green/Well Green Gully to be exact. Last month we relocated from Tecoma. Where is Green Gully you ask? It is near Newstead - a little town down the road from Castlemaine, which is near Bendigo. If you want to come and visit from Melbourne it is about 1.5 hours drive from the Airport or 2 hours from the CBD. I now work in a mudbrick house, with bottled gas, tank water and mains fed Green Power.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/08/05/howto-get-static-ip-vodafones-3g-network-australia/Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/08/05/howto-get-static-ip-vodafones-3g-network-australia/Vodafone in Australia offers a pretty good mobile data plan - 5Gb for $39.95 per month. They have recently upped the price to $49.95 p/m. Unlike 3, vodafone doesn’t offer a public IP addresses to their “mobile broadband” customers. Vodafone pitch this as a business product. I don’t agree with it, but I can see how you could justify only offering a NAT’d IP address when using your handset to access the internet or maybe even as a tethered modem.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/25/were-growing-and-hiring/Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/25/were-growing-and-hiring/Dave Hall Consulting has been growing strongly. We currently have a couple of contractors working on various projects. We are about to commence a significant new project and so need more hands on deck. We are not looking for website developers. If you are a web application developer with at least 2 years commercial PHP experience looking for contract work, email your resume to [redacted]. Make sure you include links to code you have worked on.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/06/evince-blows-my-mind/Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/06/evince-blows-my-mind/A couple of days ago I was emailed a scanned invoice as a PDF. I was planning to just print it and file it, as the tax office here still requires dead tree records for 7 years last time I checked. Before printing it on 100% post consumer waste recycled paper, I opened it in evince. Nothing spectacular in any of that. Then it happened, I accidentally clicked and dragged on the page.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/04/internode-adds-sourceforge-net-mirror/Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/04/internode-adds-sourceforge-net-mirror/Yesterday Internode announced that they will be hosting the Australian SourceForge.net mirror. Internode has been a long term supporter of FOSS. They are one of the few ISPs who officially support Linux. They offer their massive mirror, which has terabytes of FOSS, to the world. The new SourceForge mirror will be available to the world. Previously Optus hosted the Australian mirror. Optus hosts other mirrors for FOSS projects including ubuntu. Unfortunately their mirrors are not as reliable as many users would like.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/01/essential-tools-php-developer/Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/06/01/essential-tools-php-developer/Tobias Schlitt has just posted some slides from his talk entitled “6 essential PHP development tools in 60 minutes”. I flicked the 90 or so slides in PDF format, they pretty much mirror my development environment. Tobias left out 2 must haves from my personal list. Vim, the only editor I can use for any prolonged period of hacking (go easy emacs fanbois). Although not really a PHP tool, Firebug, is an essential tool for any serious modern web application developer,https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/25/using-gigabyte-bios-updates-linux-boxes/Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/25/using-gigabyte-bios-updates-linux-boxes/Update 2013: Some comments suggest that Gigabyte are now using 7zip, not rar as their archive format. Dealing with Gigabyte support can be a frustrating experience. They only offer support via their website. Once they reply to your enquiry which can take several days, you get a response telling you to visit their website to read the response, and you can reply. This process means it can take several weeks to get a clear and final answer.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/23/classic-javascript-games/Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/23/classic-javascript-games/A post today on Ajaxian about a javascript based version of Super Mario Kart, reminded me of some of the other great classic games ported to javascript. Below is a quick list based on my bookmarks and other stuff kicking around on my laptop. Lemmings (my favourite) Tetris Frogger (forgive their use of Comic Sans) Donkey Kong PacMan (the graphics aren’t true to the original, but the game play is) Super Mario I wish you luck getting away with slacking off in the office while playing these at work.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/21/virtual-host-project/Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/05/21/virtual-host-project/Not long before my old laptop got to the end of it usable lifespan I started playing with the Zend Framework in my spare time. One of the cool things about ZF is that it wants to use friendly URLs, and a dispatcher to handle all the requests. The downside of this approach, and how ZF is organised, it works best if you use a Virtual Host per project. At first this seemed like a real pain to have to create a virtual host per project.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/28/day-2-php-unconference-hamburg/Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/28/day-2-php-unconference-hamburg/I arrived back in Bergen late last night after spending another day the PHP Unconference in Hamburg. I even managed to get one speaker to do his talk in English, which made things a lot easier for me. My brain started to adjust to German a bit more, which made things easier than on day 1. Overall I think I understood about 25% of what was being discussed, which sounds like a waste of time, but that 25% was pretty good quality.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/27/php-unconference-hamburg-day-1/Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/27/php-unconference-hamburg-day-1/I spent yesterday at the PHP Unconference in Hamburg. None of the sessions were in English, so that meant I really struggled with some of the sessions, while some of the others I could pick up some of it. Between sessions I meant to meet a few people I had chatted with in IRC, but never met in meatspace. I always like to be able to put a face to a nick or blog, then have a beer or 2.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/13/snakker-du-engelsk/Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/13/snakker-du-engelsk/The title will become my most used phrase over the next couple of weeks. As I bash this out, I am on the train to catch a flight to Bergen, Norway. Over the next 2 and a bit weeks I will be meeting with Sigurd and the guys from Resight to discuss the project and the next stage of development. I will be making a side trip to Hamburg, Germany to attend the PHP Unconference on the 26/27th April.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/10/google-adds-custom-404-handler/Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/04/10/google-adds-custom-404-handler/Tonight I was trying to get to Google translate, but was trying http://google.com/translation - which doesn’t work. Unlike last time it didn’t work, Google.com now tried to suggest the right URL for me, which was nice. It looks like Google has recently added a better 404 handler. It only seems to work for google.com not google.com.au (I didn’t try other local versions). Here are some examples. Translation - com | local Shopping - com | local Crap Code - com | local (is google really claiming that they have no crap code?https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/27/windows-8-be-written-lolcode/Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/27/windows-8-be-written-lolcode/On Saturday at BarCamp Melbourne, Nick Hodge, from the evangelist team at Microsoft, gave a lightning talk about something that makes the geeks at MS very excited - LOLCODE. Soon you won’t need Visual Studio any more, you can just code in MSN Windows Live Messenger. Twitter is fast becoming the distributed version control system of choice. Afterwards I was talking to Nick about it and he suggested that Windows 8 might be written in LOLCODE.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/18/barcamp-melbourne-2008/Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/18/barcamp-melbourne-2008/This weekend I am off to BarCamp Melbourne. I didn’t make it last year, but I decided to make the effort this year. I missed out on almost all of linux.conf.au, which was disappointing, but I did take Noah to the open day, which was lots of fun. I know BarCamp won’t make up for it, but it should still be a good day. I am hoping to give a talk about phpGroupWare.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/10/flakey-bios-gigabyte-ga-m68sm-s2l-makes-mac-address-change-reboot/Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/10/flakey-bios-gigabyte-ga-m68sm-s2l-makes-mac-address-change-reboot/Over the weekend I have been setting my new Mythbuntu pair, a split back end and front end. Everything went pretty smoothly. One issue I did hit was the onboard NIC on the Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2L motherboard despite what the specs say it is a “nVidia Corporation Unknown device 054c (rev a2)” which uses the forcedeth driver. Everytime I rebooted the box the NIC would increment its interface number - eth0, eth1 … eth6 and so on.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/08/php-crack/Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/08/php-crack/I had a chuckle while reading Ed Finkler’s PHP6 wish list. After reading the (long since deleted) comment by Damien Seguy I almost fell off my chair. Try running the following code under PHP <?php ${'!@#$%^&*()[]:;"<>,./?'} = "i bet this won't work!<br>\n"; ${"omg???!!! wtf???!!! :D"} = "omg it does<br>\n"; echo ${'!@#$%^&*()[]:;"<>,./?'} . ${"omg???!!! wtf???!!! :D"}; It worked here on PHP 5.2.3 with ubuntu security fixes. I got i bet this won't work!https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/02/hello-planet-ubuntu-australia/Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2008/02/02/hello-planet-ubuntu-australia/Last week my blog was added to Planet Ubuntu Australia, the syndication site for Australian Ubuntu LoCo participants' blogs. I have been rather busy with work and family commitments lately. I am hoping to give my poor neglected blog a little more TLC.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/07/linksys-will-fix-srw224g4-firmware-eventually/Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/07/linksys-will-fix-srw224g4-firmware-eventually/Yesterday I spent about 20 minutes discussing the lack of Firefox/gecko engine browser support in the webgui on the SRW224G4 with someone from Linksys. It was an interesting discussion. When the SRW224G4 was originally released it supported Firefox but this support was dropped in a later revision which added support for new features and an updated user interface. The plan now is to put the Firefox support back in the next major release of the firmware.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/05/linksys-knows-srw224g4-broken-and-wont-fix-it/Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/05/linksys-knows-srw224g4-broken-and-wont-fix-it/Yesterday I emailed Linksys a link to my post about Linksys SRW224G4 switch being unusable with Firefox and other FOSS browsers. The only response I received was an auto responder telling me to expect a response within 24 hours. After over 28 hours and another email, I still had no response. I wasn’t expecting to get a “it has now been fixed, please test with this beta firmware - [link]”, but I did expect something along the lines of “we have received your message and have forwarded it to the relevant section, you should receive a response in the next 5 business days”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/04/linksys-srw224g4-webgui-broken/Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/04/linksys-srw224g4-webgui-broken/Last week I bought a Linksys SRW224G4 switch for my rack. It seemed like a nice piece of kit, and I got it for a good price. The first part of the setup went well enough, using the telnet interface. As I wanted to get my head around all the options the switch offered, I thought I would try WebView. The image below shows what I got with Firefox, on Konqueror is worse.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/03/phpgroupware-now-using-subversion-savannah/Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/12/03/phpgroupware-now-using-subversion-savannah/phpGroupWare is now using subversion for its version control system. We are the first project to use svn on savannah. So far the transition has been pretty smooth. The motivation was trying to merge a 80k line unified diff into the phpGW tree from the ReSight tree - something CVS couldn’t really handle. Before switching to SVN, there had been some discussion in the past about which version control system we should use.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/11/20/selling-sun-fire-t2000/Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/11/20/selling-sun-fire-t2000/I finally listed my Sun Fire T2000 which I won from Sun on eBay. If you are in the market for an almost new Sun Fire T2000, checkout the listing on eBay. If it doesn’t sell, I will be looking at other options for off loading it. It is overkill for my home office, and too noisy. To keep sweet with the eBay terms of service, I can only accept offers via eBay until the auction has ended.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/11/18/my-new-toy-nokia-n95/Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/11/18/my-new-toy-nokia-n95/About 7 weeks ago I bought a Nokia N95 and I love it. I considered the Neo 1973 from openMoko, a completely open phone platform was appealing, but at the end of the day it isn’t certified for Australia, it doesn’t have WIFI or a camera nor does it do HSDPA/3G, all things on my must have list. The iPhone was never in the race. I picked up phone for just over 800AUD via ebay, they have since dropped a little in price.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/26/happenings/Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/26/happenings/I am still alive. I had planned to blog regularly while I was in Norway, but that didn’t happen for various reasons - mostly lack of time. I have a backlog of stuff to post now. Norway was great, ReSight are a great company to work for. It now looks like we will get a stable release of phpGroupWare’s HEAD branch out this year. yay! I plan to blog more about what is happening with phpGW and ReSight - watch this space.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/03/phpgroupware-solutions-linux-2008/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/03/phpgroupware-solutions-linux-2008/Over the last few years phpGroupWare has been involved with the Solutions Linux Conference and Expo in Paris. We have had speakers at workshops promoting the project. In 2008 we may even be exhibiting - that is still being finalised. Solutions Linux is one of the biggest events on the French FOSS business calendar. Given phpGW’s large French user base, it is appropriate that we are represented at the event.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/02/skwashd-services-pty-ltd-trading-dave-hall-consulting/Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/10/02/skwashd-services-pty-ltd-trading-dave-hall-consulting/After a visit to the accountant today, I decided to switch from a sole trader to a company structure. There are many benefits to my business structuring things this way. For my clients it will be business as usual, just a change to the letterhead and bank account details. For me, it involve more bookkeeping, which may not necessarily be a bad thing Getting the company up and running took 10 minutes on website, and a small payment to the business which set it up for me - too easy.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/28/ubuntu-gutsy/Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/28/ubuntu-gutsy/For the last few weeks I have been running the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 release (aka Gutsy Gibbon) on my laptop, which is also my primary PC. I know the ubuntu team don’t recommend this, but I find it the best way for me to test stuff. Here is a quick run down of the things I have noticed. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive review, just a stuff I have noticed highlights.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/21/phpgroupware-gets-commercial-partner/Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/21/phpgroupware-gets-commercial-partner/All the pieces are now in place, so I can make the announcement. phpGroupWare now has a commercial partner - ReSight AS of Norway. Over the next 12 months ReSight will be working with several partners, including Bergen Bolig- og Byfornyelse KF, MIT FabLab Norway and others to enhance phpGroupWare. Most of their work will be centred on the property module, written by Sigurd Nes. Sigurd has done a great job in pulling this off.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/02/phpgroupware-articles/Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/09/02/phpgroupware-articles/Don (D.C.) Parris has started a series of articles about phpGroupWare over at Blue GNU. The articles are well written and provide a lot of good information for new users. I hope Don keeps on writing good stuff for us to link to. The articles have also been syndicated by others which should help raise the profile of the product. I will have another big phpGroupWare related announcement some time this month.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/22/facebook-5bil-waste-time-or-major-cash-cow-peddlers-fud/Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/22/facebook-5bil-waste-time-or-major-cash-cow-peddlers-fud/On Monday, Fairfax and others were running a story about how employees using Facebook could cost companies a fortune in lost productivity. Facebook labelled a $5b waste of time was a catchy headline. The article quotes some back of the envelope calculations done by SurfControl. They claim each Australian business has 1 employee using Facebook 1 hour per day (costing the company $6200 a year), and as there are around 800,000 businesses in Australia, so it costs the economy over 5bil AUD.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/14/new-phpgroupware-release-out/Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/14/new-phpgroupware-release-out/I have spent a little bit of time on phpGroupWare the last couple of evenings. The main motivator was becoming aware of CVE-2007-4048. The release also improved our PHP 5 support and there was the mandatory “various bug fixes” thrown in for good measure. I hope to have some time to work on some stuff in HEAD soon. Johan’s syncML stuff has me excited about hacking on phpGW. Update 2020: Removed broken links.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/06/want-work-head-developer-platform-evangelist-microsoft-australia/Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/06/want-work-head-developer-platform-evangelist-microsoft-australia/This was a question posed to me on Friday afternoon by a recruiter from xpand group. I was warned that it was probably the strangest phone call I would get all year, and it was. We chatted for a bit about me and the role. I was interested in finding out more about the role, so I rang back on Saturday, to discuss the role further. The woman was busy, so we didn’t chat for long, but said she would call back later in the evening, she never did.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/02/tux-cake/Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/02/tux-cake/While waiting to be served at a newsagents today I noticed The Australian Women’s Weekly Party Animals: Birthday Cakes for Kids sitting there on the counter. Just about every child growing up in Australia in the last 40 years has had at least 1 cake from one of the many editions of the original The Australian Women’s Weekly Kid’s Birthday Cakes (formerly Children’s Birthday Cakes?). Enough reminiscing, the reason why Party Animals caught my attention was the front cover.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/02/vodafone-service-enquiry-response/Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/08/02/vodafone-service-enquiry-response/Yesterday afternoon I received a txt message from my CALLscreen. service. The message was as follows: ERIN FROM VODAFONE RE JUST WANTED TO ENSURE YOUR HAPPY WITH YOU SERVICES That was it. No “call me back on 555 1234” or “will call you back later on today”. Notice the use of your and you instead of you’re and your? Here is a list of issues I currently have with the service:https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/07/25/pfsense-and-routed-subnets/Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/07/25/pfsense-and-routed-subnets/I have a few clients running IPCop firewall appliance boxes, but for more complex setups (such as multiple WAN connections) I use pfSense. pfSense is a FreeBSD based firewall appliance. pfSense comes in 2 flavours, one of which is designed to run on low spec embedded hardware, such as that used to be sold by Yawarra Information Appliances. I know that I could just use a bash scripts or Shorewall but not all my clients are command line ninjas, and I have better things to do with my time.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/07/23/update/Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/07/23/update/Yes I have been a bit slack about blogging lately, I have had a lot on. Here is a quick summary of the notable bits. Car My car is at the panel beaters. The guy who hit me drove off after I accused him of being drunk. The police have told me that he has been charged with several offences, including careless driving. Julie and Noah were in the car at the time, but they were both ok.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/25/warm-glow-sun/Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/25/warm-glow-sun/Last week I received an email from Sun asking if I had seen a previous email. The previous email was attached. It almost ended up in the same place the previous email did - my spam bucket. The subject was “CONGRADULATIONS: Open Performance Contest WINNER - Dave Hall Consulting - TBWEBI_<random numbers>”, which looked pretty spammy to me, just like the various bogus sweepstakes and the other 419 messages I get all too regularly.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/22/murray-mcallister/Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/22/murray-mcallister/This week has been a little chaotic for me, so I have been a little slack in posting this. Last weekend Murray McAllister emailed me his resume and asked if I had any work available. Since I started working at SGI, I have been winding things back, as I have very little time available for private work. Unfortunately I don’t have any work to offer Murray. Murray seemed like a nice guy in his email, so I rang him and discussed what he wanted to do.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/09/should-i-do-presentation-linux-conf-au-2008/Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/09/should-i-do-presentation-linux-conf-au-2008/This is a question I have been asking myself a bit over the last week or so, ever since I learned the linux.conf.au call for presentations was open. I am leaning more towards not. My reasons are pretty simple. Here they are in no particular order: I can’t think of something cool to talk about My webcam is really budget, so my video would probably detract rather than enhance my chances I get the feeling that Rusty’s blog post about rejecting LCA speakers might apply to me The first issue is pretty easily dealt with, I just need to think harder.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/09/unlocking-novatel-merlin-u530-under-linux/Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/09/unlocking-novatel-merlin-u530-under-linux/Or another reason why I am glad that I don’t use 3 anymore. I should have posted this some time ago, but forgot and so it has been sitting in my Drivel drafts folder for a bit. You might want to try these instructions under Windows too, if you get a dud unlock. Just use another terminal emulator instead of minicom. Skip the history and read how to unlock ithttps://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/07/wget-and-members-areas/Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/07/wget-and-members-areas/Earlier this evening I was discussing mirroring restricted areas of sites with wget on #ubuntu-au. The solution is pretty simple. Install the web developer extension for firefox Login to the target site On the webdev toolbar select Cookies > View Cookie Information For each of the cookie entries add the following to a file called wget-cookies.txt which should be saved in your home directory <.target.domain.name>[tab]FALSE[tab]/[tab]FALSE[tab]1496836642[tab]<key>[tab]<value> This is what it all mean?https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/03/yamakasi-and-maccas/Sun, 03 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/06/03/yamakasi-and-maccas/Some time ago I watched a documentary on Yamakasi, which was shown here on SBS TV. SBS’s press release gives a pretty good summary of the doco. For those of you interested in seeing it, a quick search on Google, should turn up a link to it on Google VideoYouTube - I would post a link to it, but I am unsure if it was posted/approved by the copyright holder.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/31/coding-has-begun-and-now-i-get-mentoring/Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/31/coding-has-begun-and-now-i-get-mentoring/Johan has already started coding for his Google Summer of Code project for the GNU Project and phpGroupware. This morning I received confirmation from the FSF that Johan’s copyright assignment is sorted. I have done a quick review of some of Johan’s work, but I hope to spend some serious time on getting things moving this weekend. The new job has really put a big whole in my time available for anything other than work, commuting or my family.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/30/disruption-caused-blackouts/Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/30/disruption-caused-blackouts/In the last 6 months I have endured 2 blackouts at home (which is also my office). Yesterday’s was about 13 hours long, easily beating the previous record of almost 8 hours. The power supplier has given me the information on how to make a claim for the food in our freezer which has to be thrown out. Now that I am working away from home for large parts of my day, I really need a working internet connection in the evenings so I can run the rest of my business.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/29/ubuntu-dell-pcs-and-xp-license-refunds/Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/29/ubuntu-dell-pcs-and-xp-license-refunds/Now that Dell is shipping Ubuntu loaded machines in the US, there has been some discussion on the Australian Ubuntu LoCo list about when Dell will be shipping them in Australia. The consensus seems to be, not any time soon. I tend to agree, there are many other larger markets Dell is likely to target if Linux/Ubuntu on Dells takes off. Tom Schinckel mentioned that he is waiting for Dell to offer Window license refunds.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/28/hello-world-c/Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/28/hello-world-c/cat hello_world.c #include <stdio.h> main() { printf ("Hello World!\n"); } $ gcc hello_world.c -o hello_world $ chmod +x hello_world $ ./hello_world Hello World! $ I have started playing with C recently. I am still finding it annoying, yet enjoyable at the same time. The PHP developers have spoilt me (and other PHP coders). PHP gives you most of the power of C, without having to deal with annoying string handling, easy arrays, memory management and having to build to test.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/26/os-x-and-macs-windows-killer/Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/26/os-x-and-macs-windows-killer/For the last week I have almost exclusively been using a PowerPC Mac - claimed by Apple to be a great platform just a few years a ago. Personally, I think that Mac OS X is an interesting platform. The mac hasn’t grabbed me. On the up side, OS X (and Darwin) is based on BSD, so it has some good security foundations, it also uses many tools common to Linux, such as bash and CUPS.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/23/most-homes-dont-really-have-broadband-australia/Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/23/most-homes-dont-really-have-broadband-australia/I am bashing out this post on a unreliable 384/64kpbs UTMS (3G data) connection, which feels painfully slow at times compared to my 8000/384kpbs (which is more like 6500/300) ADSL connection at home. Even when I had 1536/256kpbs at home I felt like I was better off than a lot of other people. Most non geeks I know have 512/128kbps. According Democrats in the US congress 2Mbit/s should be the minimum speed for “broadband”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/21/using-technology-train/Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/21/using-technology-train/It has been many years since I caught peak hour trains. Last time I did it was about 5 years ago when I was working at the City of Darebin. Back then I used to lug a heavy Compaq Armada (I forget the model number) home most nights, but I rarely used it on the train. MP3 players weren’t worn as fashion accessories back then. These days I have a Dell Latitude D810, which has a 15.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/16/first-day-my-new-9-ta-fiva/Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/16/first-day-my-new-9-ta-fiva/I am bashing out this post while sitting on the train as I head off to SGI. I have landed a 2 month contract position hacking on the web gui for their NASes. I am yet to meet everyone else in the team, except my boss and Russell Coker (sorry couldn’t resist naming dropping). I am pretty excited about the job. I will get to play with some pretty cool tech and work with some really smart people.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/13/mugshot-whats-point/Sun, 13 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/13/mugshot-whats-point/I noticed a few geeks had mentioned mugshot in their blogs (sorry too lazy to dig up references), so I signed up. I am not that impressed so far. I have created a profile page, which sort of resembles a cut down version of my liferea RSS feeds. I joined some groups, and created a phpGroupWare group, which just allows others to join the group and receive the group’s feeds via their “stacker”.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/11/google-analytics/Fri, 11 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/11/google-analytics/As some of you may have noticed I use Google Analytics on my site for statistics. I also use webalizer for basic visitor stats. I have found Google Analytics provides more information in a better format than webalizer. The downsides of Google Analytics is that it is non free SaaS, it uses flash and that it lacks the ability to drill down to get more information. As of today, the flash problem is still there (I am yet to test it with gnash), but the amount of information and how that data is displayed has improved dramatically.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/06/blog-spam/Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/06/blog-spam/I think I am pretty lucky that I only have 1 comment spammer on my blog. Every day he posts an ever expanding list of links for whatever he is being paid to post, this week it is ring tones. “nareman” give up! The combination of moderation and Akismet means that the posts get round filed. Akismet is a great tool, I recommend it to anyone who enables comments on their blog.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/05/im-virgin-again/Sat, 05 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/05/05/im-virgin-again/For a bit over a year I have had a Novatel Merlin U530 data card from 3 mobile. When my contract expired I started to look at churning. At first 3 insisted the card was network locked and couldn’t be unlocked, “as stated in your contract”. I read them what I had signed and mentioned the TIO, before the supervisor I had heard whispering in the background took the call and sorted out the unlocking.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/28/very-rough-guide/Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/28/very-rough-guide/When I go to the library I regularly check out what computer books are sitting on the shelf. Some books seem to be there every time I go in, such as iTunes 6 and iPod for windows and Macintosh. I usually end up grabbing one or 2 books on something I am at least vaguely interested in. I usually end up flicking through them over a month, and forget most of it a week later.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/23/bye-bye-php-4/Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/23/bye-bye-php-4/I have several servers running PHP 5 already, but as my laptop is my primary phpGroupWare development and test environment, it was running PHP 4. I knew this day would come, I just didn’t think it would be so soon. PHP4 has been dropped from ubuntu. Ubuntu has never shipped php4 in main, but until feisty it has been in available in the universe. This is no more. The advantage of using PHP 5 on ubuntu is that it is in main, so has full security support.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/23/planet-summer-code/Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/23/planet-summer-code/Hi to everyone reading this post via Planet SoC - the unofficial Google Summer of Code aggregator. I am Dave Hall, API Coordinator, phpGroupWare and mentor from the GNU Project. I will be mentoring Johan Gunnarsson who will be working on a syncML interface for phpGroupWare. I have already blogged about the wild ride that I had to become a SoC mentor. I have decided to only add my SoC related posts to this planet so not to clutter things too much with my general ranting.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/20/phpgroupware-release/Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/20/phpgroupware-release/I have been thinking about how to deal with releases of phpGroupWare. For me it is a technical, procedural and political question. Over the last few months I have been playing with Drupal a fair bit. I love Drupal. It is simple to install, skin and hack. The community is great. The website is massive and has almost anything you want about Drupal. They dog food their stuff. I have quite a few clients using Drupal for their sites, they love it.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/12/summer-code-roller-coaster/Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/04/12/summer-code-roller-coaster/I am awaiting final confirmation from google and the GNU project, but I am 99% sure now that phpGroupWare will be getting a Summer of Code (SoC) slot, and I will be mentoring a student to implement sync. What a process it has been, and I am yet to start mentoring. I thought others might be interested in the the ups and downs involved in getting phpGroupWare a SoC place.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/03/27/linux-better-environment/Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/03/27/linux-better-environment/TechWorld has a story about how the UK government is recommending the adoption of Linux and FOSS as it better for the environment. The story quotes a Californian Department of Commerce report. The recommendation of using Linux and FOSS in government is hardly surprising, many governments around the world have been reaching the same conclusions. The interesting part is the environmental angle. I have always liked the lower resource requirements for Linux based solutions.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/03/22/new-mac-pc-ads/Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2007/03/22/new-mac-pc-ads/Novell released a couple of new ads for Linux which are a spoof of Apple’s Get a Mac ad campaign. They are quite well done. Novell still have the ogg and mpeg versions for download. The ogg and mpeg versions of this video are also still available for download from Novell. Note: This is not an endorsement of Novell’s products or its deal with Microsoft, just their sense of humor.https://www.davehall.com.au/services/open-source/Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/services/open-source/Open source is everywhere. Almost every website uses open source components in the stack. Global networks are powered and managed by it. If something contains a chip, then it probably uses some open source. Every new car, mobile phone and TV, along with most other consumer electronics depends on this open ecosystem. This didn’t happen overnight, it has been a multi decade journey. Dave Hall Consulting has been there from the early days.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2006/11/22/finally-website-and-blog/Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2006/11/22/finally-website-and-blog/Like the builder with the worst looking house in the street, I was the guy who did web based work with no website. Now that has all changed - I finally have a website and a blog. The website is a show case of the free/open source products and services offered by Dave Hall Consulting. The blog will be a place for people to see what I am working on, playing with, discuss current issues and also provide a space for me to brain dump.https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2006/11/22/sun-sunfire-t2000-rev2-and-ubuntu-dapper-6-06/Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://www.davehall.com.au/blog/2006/11/22/sun-sunfire-t2000-rev2-and-ubuntu-dapper-6-06/A couple of months ago I received a shiny new Sun SunFire T2000. It is a monster 1 CPU with 8 cores, each capable of running 4 threads each (that is 32 concurrent threads) 8G of RAM and 2 x 73.4G Seagate SAS HDDs. The 2U case hides the power hidden away inside. Once powered up it sounds like a jet engine, but that is OK it is designed for the data center not a HTPC.