moving home - part 3 ... the wonders of mod_rewrite
Yesterday I sat down on my dev box at home… depressed at the thought of the challenge of migrating all these silly sites… We have about 8 different resources (perhaps more) that had previously been on the same domain name… I want to redirect some, set up aliases for others (some of the old names just won’t cut it)…
Mod_rewrite answered the call! mod_rewrite is the coolest piece of gear I’ve played with in a while!
All is now sorted… and the universe is in balance once again ;)
Great places to go to for mod_rewrite are this cool cheat sheet from ilovejackdaniels.com and apache’s own url rewriting guide
the sounds of silence!
Yesterday, after MUCH frustration at the noise from the jet engine beside me, I finally succumbed and bought a new power supply for my computer… and I’ve been in a great mood ever since.
Dann - you have GOT to get yourself one of these… more efficient power consumption and NO NOISE! This thing sits at ear level a metre from my head and all i hear is the occasional whirring of my HDDs!
Leadership and trust
Spent this morning trawling over the informative words from boxes and arrows reading this article by James Kalbach titled The Art of Project Management. James is reviewing Scott Berkun’s book, (aptly titled) The Art of Project Management. James is pretty happy with the book, but the article is worth a read itself as a good summary and thinktank on Project Management itself.
This was a nice quote - I don’t know if its Scott’s or James’ handiwork.
“Leaders must develop enough trust that people will bring issues to them during crises instead of hiding them. Trust, then, is at the core of leadership.”
Certainly in my experience, many leaders in fact do the opposite - choosing to hide issues and fostering distrust among those colleagues they manage in order to keep them apparently ‘on edge’ and ‘focused’. It isn’t lost on those working under a leadership team such as this that the true reasons for these stupid methodologies are based on simple minded power games and narrow-sighted visions of their own roles within the broader company/project scope.
Unfortunately these types of leaders usually realise this at some point, then try some token gesture trying win the trust back among their "sheep” and fall painfully short, making a fool of themselves and the organisation.
moving home part 2 - installing apc
As part of the processing of migrating our moodle sites to their new home, I investigated setting up apc - the "alternative php cache" managed as a pecl project.
Installing apc on Ubuntu couldn’t be easier… this is basically a post I contributed to Moodle.org … thought it’d be useful here too.
Assuming you have php5 and apache2 all up and happy on your Ubuntu server ;)… this should get you over the line with apc:
1. Install pear (and the various libraries for pecl to install)
apt-get install php-pear php5-dev apache2-threaded-dev
2. Fix a silly name/version change problem with apxs by adding a symbolic link to the right file
ln -s /usr/bin/apxs2 /usr/bin/apxs
3. Install apc
pecl install apc
4. Make sure that php knows to use it… edit /etc/php/apache2/php.ini and add
extension=apc.so
5. Restart Apache and you’re away!
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Of course, try it out in your dev environment first… but it should yield significant benefits.
NB. In my dev environment this worked perfectly… but a pecl setting shut me down on 64 bit Ubuntu… complained during the installation at step 3… something like "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted…" for some reason it’s using its own ini values… (not either the php.ini values for cli or apache).
If so… edit /usr/share/php/pearcmd.php and add:
@ini_set('memory_limit', '16M');
moving home
The time has come to finally transition off our crazy Windows box at work. For the past couple of years the site had gradually been grinding to a halt… and it certainly wasn’t the hardware.
To be honest, the build process had been a shocker. My predecessors had basically "imaged" a previous Windows server onto a new box… and the performance was terrible from the start.
The first stage of my plan calls for a transition to Ubuntu Dapper Server (64bit)… although I don’t have a spare server and can’t afford more than about an hour’s downtime… the answer? Host the site for a short period on a desktop box… and pray hard!
Wish me luck!
