Coding

I’m pleased to say that my network timeout patch has been accepted into the go-beanstalk package this week. I’ve been a long time user of the excellent beanstalkd queue system. Since 2010 infact! What I really like about beanstalkd is its simplicity. It compiles to a small single binary and provides a super fast in-memory queue service that also persists jobs to disk allowing a server to be restarted without losing the jobs on the queue.

I realised over the holiday period that I had not changed my blogging theme since 2009, and with the new year fast approaching it was high time to give it a spruce up.

I wanted to make sure the new blog was “mobile friendly” and have categories and recent post blocks, as well as pagination of all posts on the site.

As my HTML/CSS/JS skills are not particularly up to date, I turned to the excellent Hugo site generator, and used the Mainroad theme.

Recently I wrote my first PHP patch to fix an issue with the SOAP module when using HTTP proxies in an unsupported version of PHP (5.6).

Hot on the heals of the CentOS 5.10, PHP 5.4.21 and PHP 5.5.5 releases, my RPMs have now been updated as follows:

Sublime Text is a very good, but lightweight text editor for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Unfortunately the developers do not provide packages for Fedora (or any Linux distribution) and because it is non-free it is not in the Fedora official repositories.

This is how to install it and create a launcher for Fedora 19 using Gnome3.

The latest version of CentOS, 5.9, has updated their Postfix (an SMTP mail server) package to require mysql because it now supports reading user and domain lists from a MySQL database.

Unfortunately this has caused issues with anyone using the Oracle or MariaDB MySQL distributions.

Apache web server traditionally writes to local log files in /var/log/httpd.

At work we have been looking into PCI compliance, and it requires that log files are stored centrally so that if a server gets compromised and the local log files are modified, there is still an authoritative copy on the central log server.

Today we started using Git. We are using Github to host our repositories for a private project. Previously we have been an SVN shop and have built various deployment systems around it. I have encountered the following issues, and will separate them into two sections; those relating to Git as a tool, and those relating to Github as a service. Github Issues User management and access control As a Systems Administrator and Developer I spend my time both writing applications and maintaining services for other developers.

On Friday Feb 25 2010 I visited the PHP UK 2010 Conference in London with two of my colleagues from work. This was my first PHP conference, and I enjoyed the presentations. Probably the most useful to me was the talk given by Sticky Eyes on optimising MySQL and Message Queues for a high traffic SEO agency. This talk mentioned Beanstalkd, which is an open source message queue. I remember looking at this application last year, however it did not have persistence at that time.

This week I have been experimenting with the cloud computing provider, VPS.NET. The application I am trying to scale is a custom built PHP/MySQL web logging application, so unlike many web apps it has more database writes than reads. This is one of the challenges of scaling it, as a central database will be a single point of failure and a bottleneck. About VPS.NET The cheapest Virtual Machines at VPS.NET are £15 a month for 400MHZ CPU, 256MB RAM, 10GB disk space and 250GB/month of bandwidth.