Development, Analysis And Research

I just read “How to use locks in PHP cron jobs to avoid cron overlaps” and I thought I would elaborate on this and provide some more examples. In order for a lock to work correctly it must handle, Atomicity / Race Conditions, and Signaling. I use the following bash script to create locks for [...]

Last year I wrote an application to highlight media outlets and their reach (coverage of media outlets), selecting regions within the UK and highlighting aspects of a map. This had many issues where by hitting performance problems of rendering within browsers and also limitations of converting KML to tiles via google. A list of these [...]

I recently came across a peculiar issue that meant dates and times were causing issues with a product we had developed within Australia. The issue being that within “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)” the date within PHP was being read as EST instead of AEST/AEDT, however running “date” from the terminal or [...]

I have been migrating a large number of websites and consolidating servers to reduce costs. As a result it is important to ensure that services are migrated smoothly, planned effectively, after which I had a think about aspects to consider prior to migrating services. Planning Make a preliminary checklist of services actively in use by [...]

Well, I purchased a Mac Book Pro roughly a month ago and considering I have never used a Mac, i’m quite surprised as to how quickly I have adapted. Within a week I had a good grasp of the platform and now I have everything sync’d to or through my laptop, whether that be incoming [...]

Here are a few snapshots of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. Interestingly enough ASP.NET does not display correctly in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. I can’t say i’m keen on the new design or see any feature that particularly appeals to me, however it may grow on me. Also memory usage whilst using a single [...]

Lately i’ve been playing with a number of beta’s from Microsoft. Firstly was Microsoft MAX, after watching a fairly recent cast on channel9 and installing WinFX Runtime Components September CTP, I received the following error in Outlook 2003 “Could not initialize CLR MANAGED MAPI SERVICE CATASTROPIC FAILURE, Unknown error”. After finding out that The WinFX [...]

I started writing this a while back, and I figured I might as well publish it, despite being some what incomplete… I always find that usability is a difficult topic to cover and as such, there are very limited resources that solely address this issue separate to the notion of accessibility. As the two topics [...]

I was quite surprised to see my computers memory usage creep up to 811,316K with FireFox (1.07) open with two tabs, minimal graphics and no pages containing applets. I realise Firefox has many problems with memory usage and multiple tabs, (I’m not sure if thats still the case) and also with a large number of [...]