Thoughts Electrique

I once had to install a custom PHP extension on a 1&1 managed server. In this case the company had already purchased a managed server which was running the corporate website. They wanted to install an extranet-like webapplication which needed the ImageMagick PHP extension. In the following post I will outlike how I compiled and installed this extension on the managed server without having administrative access.

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I’ll bet at the Yahoo! Open Hack NYC on October the 9th. If anyone has some cool suggestions or want to meet up there just shoot me an email. Seems like a fun thing to do. I’ll report back on this blog what comes out of it.

I’m also working on some projects so stay tuned.

I recently set up a new XWiki 2.0 instance (with MySQL) for documentation purposes. Although some of the steps are already described in the XWiki manual I’ll document it here mainly because I keep forgetting things. Also step-by-step tutorials come in handy when you’re in a hurry.

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I recently discovered that Skype (at least on Windows) grabs port 80 if it is available. This might prevent your local webserver from starting up. I really don’t understand why my VoIP client has to do this. If your applications main purpose is not associated with a standard port then it should stay away from it. That’s at least my take on this.

Last Week I attended the JBoss World in Chicago and I had a good time. My favorite Session was Large Clusters in JBoss presented by Bela Ban. It was a very hands-on explanation of the new mod_cluster and presented nicely some of the problems with clustered environments (such as binary incompatible rolling updates, management of configuration files, discovery, etc.) and how to work with them (I always like sessions which keep it down a bit and don’t promote the technology as the next holy grail). I also enjoyed Putting Java to REST by Bill Burke which gave a good introduction to RESTeasy. The library (including the JAX-RS standard) looks very straightforward and easy to comprehend (This is always something which I didn’t like about all the SOA stacks). I must say that I’m a bit skeptical about the announced REST-star initiative. I think it may be a little early to start a standardization effort which will certainly make the technology seem more complex.

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