CodeIgniter Posted by Alan D Moore on 2009-08-06 01:56:39

Well, years after being recommended it, I'm finally checking out CodeIgniter. With the downturn of the economy, it looks as though fewer departments will be buying vendor-provided solutions, so some in-house PHP coding is in order.

As much as I code PHP, I've always been oh-so-keenly-aware that everything I code is spaghetti when I use PHP. Compared to Python where the quest for elegance is so easily fulfilled, my PHP coding always feels like a massive hack, no matter how much object-oriented code I throw at it.

So after debugging one last fatal error due to my forgetting whether my database query function was called queryDb() or dbQuery(), I decided to start looking for a solid but not overwhelming framework. CodeIgniter seems to fit the bill.

If nothing else, learning it may give me something to blog about! leave your comment ...

First order of business Posted by Alan D Moore on 2009-08-04 02:45:06

Well the first order of business for reviving this blog is to improve the blog engine itself a bit. I've not messed with this code in years, so it's a little frightening to delve back in. But it appears I've at least managed to add some useful features that might encourage more writing, to wit: I now have a "save draft" option so I don't have to choose between publishing something half-written and creating things offline and then forgetting where I saved them. read more and leave your comment ...

Still alive Posted by Alan D Moore on 2009-08-03 17:59:41

So, yeah, my blog's been dead a while. I still do a lot of tinkering with stuff, in fact so much so that I don't have time to write about it.

As usual, I have a lot of stuff ALMOST THERE which I'd like to post, including an updated version of my browser kiosk setup, and a couple of thoughts and observations on the trials and tribulations many people have migrating from Windows to Linux.

read more and leave your comment ...

Making sense of Ubuntu Posted by Alan D Moore on 2008-11-08 05:01:12

Having spent some time trying to help people in the Ubuntu server forum, I find that a lot of people fail to grasp what Ubuntu really is and how the various versions relate (particularly the server and desktop version). That's understandable given how other distributions or operating systems are packaged, so I'm going to explain it here: read more and leave your comment (10 comments)...

How to upgrade to Intrepid Ibex from an apt-mirror server Posted by Alan D Moore on 2008-10-30 13:59:40

Well Intrepid Ibex is out, and if you're a fan of Ubuntu you are probably champing at the bit to get your hardy install(s) up to the next release. Unfortunately, you're going to be competing on bandwidth with millions of others who want to do the same thing.

A clean install of Kubuntu requires just over 1 GB of packages to upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid, and dragging that much data across the cloud is just painful, I don't care how fast your ISP is. It's especially painful if you happen to have an apt-mirror server on your own LAN with a full copy of the Intrepid repository.

With Debian, of course, upgrading is just a matter of changing to the next release in /etc/apt/sources.list and doing aptitude dist-upgrade. With Ubuntu, that doesn't work out so cleanly (though I can attest that it does work if you're willing to hack around on it a bit). You have to use the do-release-upgrade script instead.

So enough pointless rambling, how do we get do-release-upgrade to recognize our local apt-mirror server? Do read on... read more and leave your comment (8 comments)...