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Firefox 3 Beta 4
Some of us at centre{source} have been running the latest version Firefox (version 3) which is currently in it’s beta stages. It’s VERY cool and VERY fast…Beta 3 Release 4 just came out today: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0b4&os=osx
After installing, we were extremely happy to notice that Flash is once again working as expected, and it’s all running a lot faster and more stable. It definitely is a huge improvement over Firefox 3 Beta 3 (which itself was light-years of improvement over Firefox 2!)
Try it out, and let us know what you think!
Website Grabber | Offline Browser
Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage. I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website. I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.
Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with. I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ - and many paid utilities thought the same :) I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail. Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”. Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!
PHP Doctrine ORM: Release Candidate 1 - August 31st 2007
The much anticipated PHP Doctrine ORM is nearing a stable release. After a long Google Summer of Code, Konsta Vesterinen, also known as zYne- in IRC, has tentatively scheduled the first release candidate for August 31st. This is very exciting for the PHP community as it fills a gap that has existed in PHP since its existence. Stay tuned for more information on this great news.
symfony 1.0.2 maintenance release
From the symfony-project.com website, they announced the release of symfony 1.0.2.
The bug fixes include:
* r3785: fixed getCookies() call in sfDebug when using sfConsoleResponse (#1666)
* r3775: fixed _compute_public_path() when using a query string
* r3754: updated Propel to 1.2.1 (http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/query?status=closed&milestone=1.2.1&resolution=fixed&order=priority)
* r3746: fixed output escaping and _get_object_list() (#1593)
* r3699: fixed highlight_text() doesn’t work with / (#1621)
* r3692: fixed i18n support for errors in sfRequest
Web Based Time Tracking Nearing Launch - Dekko Time
Check out our latest product, Dekko Time. After 2 long years we have finally reached a beta stage in the development and we are working hard towards a full launch SOON!
All account types are being offered for free during this beta stage. Use the coupon code ‘free’ on the payment tab when signing up for single and multi-user premium account types. Using this coupon will allow you to bypass the payment step and get your premium account for FREE!
Open Source Office can handle Blackberry
CentreSource has jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon! After complaining for months that I spend too much time with email, I gave up trying to avoid the problem and simply decided to further my addiction :) We purchased three new Blackberry 8703e’s and have now started the painful process of getting them to work in our Open Source environment. That’s right, Blackberries in a world without Outlook and Exchange. The verdict? It works, but not great.
Firefox 2.0
I just read a quick review of Firefox 2.0. I am not terribly impressed — with Firefox itself, or the review for that matter:
The first thing that stands out in the new Firefox is the more modern, snappier look and feel. Everything is more shinny, more playful and more clickable.
Can anyone tell me what this means? This is followed by:
Tabbed browsing was a major browser innovation that Firefox popularized
VH1: The lost Mac Ads
The new mac commercials are great - especially given their crafty delivery of undertone messages about PC users. On the other hand, these parody commercials are hilarious as well. Tit for Tat baby… tit for tat.
PHP Session Lifetime: An Adventure
We had a bit of a sticky situation here at the Centresource stomping grounds this past couple of weeks. We have a server with a multitude of environments served via our Apache webserver. It’s a fairly simple setup: we have a virtualhost devoted to development environments for all of our software developers, and then a plethora of virtualhosts for the various web-based applications we use: some home-brewed, some OSS web applications we use for various business functions (CMS, CRM, Groupware, etc..).
The mystery started when sessions started mysteriously expiring prematurely on two of our most popular web applications: DekkoTime, and our internal CRM/groupware application. It started about two weeks ago, with no discernable changes to our configuration that could be responsible.
So to understand what was necessary to track down this problem, we have to explore a little bit about how PHP session data storage and expiration works:
Simplegraph
I use command-line utilities to do data-mining on logs compulsively — often in sick and twisted ways. There are many times in which I perform a tortuous serious of grep/perl/awk commands which wind up being fed to “sort | uniq -c | sort -nr” or something similar.
Those of you familiar with those commands already know that the result is a list of unique values added up and displayed with a total, e.g.:
