Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

Been meaning to get this working for ages - using apache 2.0 on my ubuntu dev server to proxy requests to an IIS server on the local network - to avoid having IIS facing the internet directly and to be able to have a central place to configure virtualhosts. Finally got it working with a bit of help from the helpful people on underscore. First enable mod_proxy, and then set up a virtual host something like the following:-

(note this is just to enable access to dev servers for testing etc. - not a production environment)

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName myvirtualhost.whatever

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://myiisserver/
ProxyPassReverse / http://myiisserver/
</VirtualHost>

I’ve been sent a couple more books to review from Packt publishing - Codeigniter for Rapid PHP Development, and Object Oriented Programming with PHP5. I have immediate use for these as I am currently working on a few PHP5 projects and was looking around for a PHP framework to use for part of one of them, so expect reviews next month.

I’m also feeling a bit guilty as I still haven’t had time to review the Plone 3 book they sent me a while back - I need a nice Plone 3 project to get stuck into before I can do that justice, but will try to at least give it a read next month too, and report back my initial impressions.

I was having some real headaches getting mysql to work with a fresh install of php5 and IIS on a windows XP machine earlier. I was eventually put out of my misery by this excellent how-to.

The trick is: do not use the installer - it comes without mysql support by default. Use the zip package and follow the relevant instaructions in the article mentioned above, to configure it for mysql support. In addition to the steps described, I also found I had to move my php.ini file to the windows directory for to be picked up.

I recently got a mac mini and decided to give bootcamp a try as I needed a native windows machine from time to time. I initially created a 10GB bootcamp partition, thinking that would be enough, but after installing Visual Studio and a load of other stuff I was soon down to about 200mb. I had been fooled by the bootcamp setup into thinking that it would allow me to resize the partition later, but it doesn’t - the only choice you have is to delete the partition and start again. I didn’t want to install windows yet again, so after googling around I found an excellent bit of free software called WinClone. This allowed me to create an image of the bootcamp partition from within OSX, then delete the bootcamp partition, create a new one - (20gb this time) and restore the windows image. The added bonus is that I now have a backup of the windows install, should I ever stuff it up.

I’ve just returned from a Silverlight seminar/ workshop run by Mason Zimbler, where I was lucky enough to be one of a few Bristol freelancers invited to attend. This wasn’t a Silverlight evangelism seminar, but rather a practical hands on seminar that introduced the Expression suite of software (Design, Blend and Encoder) and some basic tasks using each piece of software. Having said that, we were able to discuss the all important question that always crops up for Silverlight - why would you use it rather than Flash?

I haven’t done a recent side by side comparison, and I don’t want to risk inviting a flame war from MS averse developers and fans of Flash, but Silverlight certainly has a few nice features, that weren’t in flash last time I looked. Notably it has excellent HD video streaming and handling, including a really nice video fill feature where multiple movies can be efficiently rendered at runtime into other (skewed, flipped, animated, reflected) containers from a single source movie, and I love the uncompiled nature and the fact that it uses XML (XAML) and javascript for scripting, and can integrate seamlessly with the DOM.

Downsides of course - the development tools are MS only, and even with Microsoft’s pervasiveness it is going to take a while for the critical mass to install the browser plugin - currently available for a handful of browsers for PC and Mac, not yet (ever?) for linux.

I was hoping to see a few more components provided in the box for common functionality such as form fields. I was under the impression that Microsoft would try to take advantage of silverlight’s .net underpinnings and sell Silverlight to hordes of Visual Studio developers by creating a library of form elements like you would find in a typical visual studio project. Third party components do exist, but I was surprised not to see it built into Blend.

Overall impression: it’s actually pretty good. If it wasn’t for the MS-only tools (and .net hosting to take full advantage of the features?) i’d be pretty enthusiastic about it. Being platform agnostic, I will certainly install the Expression suite trial (180 days), and experiment with it further. The “Design” program alone may make a decent cheap alternative to photoshop/ fireworks, but that’s not such a big deal - i’m more interested in the DOM interaction aspect, and the fact that I can use my JavaScript knowledge to create rich media interaction.

I’ve just started renting some studio space in the infamous Tobacco factory in Bristol. This will be where most of the day to day running of Olivewood will take place, though I will still be working from the Ubley office from time to time. I actually worked in a studio in the tobacco factory at the beginning of the decade, when a certain large digital agency were based here. This is a much more relaxed vibe though, as i’m renting space from (and sharing tea making duties with) the lovely Fanatic Design.

If you are anything like me, you might be nervous about installing the recent plone hotfix in case you either break something or are under the impression it involves some unix command line foo. Don’t worry, it is much simpler than that - the hotfix comes in the form of a product - download it, unzip it (well actually untar/ gunzip it) ,and drop it in your products directory and restart zope. Of course you will need access to your products directory, and the ability to restart zope to do this. If you haven’t then it is probably safe to assume that it isn’t your responsibility, so go and nudge whoever it is that deals with that stuff for you

Idea for a killer firefox or email client plugin - a script that scans your outgoing emails for the words “please find attached” and flags up if there isn’t actually an attachment on the email when you hit the send button. Go on someone write one please and save me from the humiliation again!

Hot on the heels of the Bristol Drupal Users group I set up recently, comes the Wessex Plone Users group, aimed at Plone users in the Bristol, Bath and surrounding area.

As i’ve been doing a few projects with Drupal recently I’ve set up a google group for people in the Bristol (UK) and surrounding area:-

http://groups.google.com/group/bristol-drupal

For anyone wondering if this means i’m deserting Plone, the answer is no - i’m also working on a couple of Plone projects too! I will post an article when I get time outlining my experiences of both - comparing and contrasting the development.