Planet HashPHP

OK, so this is just a heads up for anyone who knows me, due in part to my poor health these days i've withdrew from a few projects i was participating on.

Unfortunately this seems the only way I can maintain working on other things.

Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting for me to develop something, and I have not provided. I also apologise for my lack of activity, unfortunately at the moment it cant be helped.

Just so people are aware, I have also chosen to drop ircu (undernet-ircu) development, with the current release of ircux-2.10.11.08. Instead i'll be concentrating development efforts towards gnuworld, and creating a port of it that supports more than just postgresql, (Mysql Support is allready complete), and supports connecting to TS6 networks (namely inspircd). Along with modularising some of the features gnuworld provides, so further expansion will be possible.

As some of you are aware, I am the primary developer of the Netgamers Gallery, development on Version 2 of the site (The one Currently online) is limited to bug fixes only, and the receipt of feature requests is welcome for the next version (v3) , I hope to get this completed and released as soon as possible, but cannot give a release date due to my afformentioned health problems.

Planning on Marvin (A Modular IRC Bot in C++) is going well, the svn repo for it has been created, and initialised, and will have more information about its featureset soon.

Unfortunately these are the only projects I shall be maintaining for at least the near future. I may re-evaluate this over time however. If there is a project or problem you think i should be working on, and its not listed here, please drop me an email via archerATpriorityonlineDOTnet or keithATchaos-realmDOTnet.

Until Next Time!

Keith

Either you’re all boring and doing nothing or Facebook is broken!

“Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.”

- Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist

OK , it seems some times when installing packages, the installation scripts get a bit confused, and can't seem to handle initscript errors.

This results in said package being half installed, but marked as failed, On occasion running apt-get -f install or dpkg --configure -a, once you have solved the problem will get things into working order again.

These commands don't allways work however, and your left with a package stuck like this:

user@server:~$ sudo dpkg -l lighttpd
iF lighttpd 1.4.25-2 A fast webserver with minimal memory footpri

(iF meaning installation Failed)

In order to resolve this, if it still refuses to install properly (even after fixing the problem that caused the error in the first place), it is neccessary to force remove the package (unfortunately dpkg --purge or --remove on its own will not work).
Typing the following (replacing lighttpd with your package name), should get the system back into working order again.


Then if you try running apt-get -f install, it should bring your system back into the correct state again.

There are other ways around this problem (I think manually installing the .dpkg archive via dpkg -i may work, but i havent tried it), but i think this is the easiest.

Anyways Tara for now!.

Keith

Licensing is a pain in my arse. There are whole companies full of people who can tell you that you're doing it wrong. Personally I cannot stand licensing, and the only thing that I find more annoying (in this field) than the proliferation of Open Source and Free Software licenses (and figuring out what I'm allowed and not allowed to do and what is an "arms length" exactly - but thats another rant for another time), is the software licensing by Microsoft and other vendors who shall remain nameless for this article.

To try and make things easier at work two and a half years ago I put together a very small document/cheatsheet describing the licensing terms for various Microsoft products and virtualisation. Yesterday Microsoft released an updated document for Windows Server 2008 R2, and interestingly not much has changed for Window Server, with the exception of a few new products. The table below should help out a bit if you're confused ¹.

		Instances
Server Product	License Type	Physical 2	Virtual 3
Windows Server Foundation (2008 only)	OEM	1	0
Windows Server Standard	OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA	1	1
Windows Server Enterprise	OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA	1	4
Windows Server Datacenter	OEM, VL	1	Unlimited
Windows Server Web	OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA	1	0
Windows Server HPC	OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA	1	1

I decided to check the licensing for other products, just incase I'd missed any changes. It doesn't look like it, so here the run down (as I understand it).

As a general rule, for anything per processor licensed, if you're running it in a virtual environment it will simply count the number of virtual processors you assign it.

It gets a bit complicated with SQL 2005 and newer. To quote Microsoft:

When licensed per Server or CAL Workgroup and Standard editions allow you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server at a time. Previously, only the Enterprise edition of the Server license allowed multi-instancing. When licensed per Processor Workgroup, Web, and Standard editions for each server you have assigned the required number of per processor licenses, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in physical and virtual operating system environments on the licensed server. However, the total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server. For Enterprise if all physical processors in a machine have been licensed, then you may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2008 in one physical and an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine.

As far as I'm aware anything else licensed per server doesn't currently have any special rules regarding virtualisation; so this includes Exchange, Sharepoint, and so on.

1. It should be noted that I've only gone so far back as Windows Server 2003 for this table. I suspect that there are no particular dos or don'ts for anything older and you should probably just treat any virtualised instances as you would physical machines. If you know any different I'd love to hear it. ↩
2. You can, of course, use the licence in a purely virtual environment. ↩
3. On the same hardware as the physical licence. ↩

“Hydrogen is an odorless colorless gas which, given enough time, turns into people”

- SchuhleLewis: The Greatest Story Ever Told (or history in a sentence)

I was happy to attend the “Facebook Technology Tasting” event tonight, where they gave a presentation about their newest open source project, HipHop for PHP.

HipHop is definitely some very cool technology, built by an enthusiastic team, solving real world performance issues in large scale websites, and I have no doubt other companies using PHP (Hello Yahoo!) will find it invaluable, and hopefully help turn it into a successful open source project.

What I find most interesting and encouraging about Facebook’s most recent open sourcing efforts, HipHop today and Tornado last year, is how they are taking a dramatically different approach to their earlier open source projects like Thrift or Cassandra.

Thrift, purely as an example, was one of their first projects built internally, and later open sourced.  It originally open sourced on April 1, 2007, but it had a difficult time building a community around the code.  The approach was a blog post, and code basically ‘tossed over the wall’.  External developers did try to contribute, but I believe the interactions were less than optimal, as the original forum for discussion was a Facebook Group — they learned from this quickly,  programmers didn’t like web forums for submitting patches, and later proper mailing lists were setup.

Cassandra was another project that was essentially thrown over the wall, code was available, but there was no imitative to build a community around it.

Today, both Thrift and Cassandra found their way to the Apache Software Foundation, via independent paths.  Apache Cassandra is turning into a very healthy community, having made many releases, and is in the process of graduating to a top level project.  Apache Thrift, made their first release in December 2009, has been slowly gathering more external contributors and an open community built around the code.

What I see happening with both HipHop and Tornado is completely different, and that is what is most encouraging.  From the start, they are doing everything right to encourage an open community be built around these projects.  Open Communities are what create successful projects, and give companies creating the open source projects the most rewards.

When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it.  For infrastructure projects, like HipHop, Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe, and Tornado, the most important thing that gives you the most rewards from open sourcing it, is having other people hack on the code — but more than that, to use the code in their own company.

Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.

Thank you Facebook for getting it — community is just as important as the code that you are open sourcing, and I would like to wish the HipHop for PHP developers the best of luck with their new open community project!

“If a trend cannot continue, it will stop. - Stein’s law”

- News Analysis - A Decade of Enormous Deficits May Alter American Politics and Power - NYTimes.com

I just wanted to apologise for any noise that may've been caused by this feed over the last 3 days. I've switched the underlying software and in the process changed the URL slightly. I've attempted to ensure that any old URLs will continue to work, as well as the feeds.

So far it's worked out fairly well, with only facebook and one or two desktop based feed readers giving people a few duplicate articles. PlanetPlanet seems to be coped very well, so my hat goes off to the PlanetPlanet team!