http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog We provide consultancy, PHP web development and support for web applications and ecommerce sites in the UK. Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:41:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is a quick shell script which is how I make sure I keep the latest nightly version of Chromium on my Mac without much hassle... #!/bin/sh rm -f chrome-mac.zip chrome-mac export CHROME_VERSION=`curl http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-mac/LATEST` curl http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-mac/$CHROME_VERSION/chrome-mac.zip > chrome-mac.zip unzip chrome-mac.zip rm -rf /Applications/Chromium.app mv chrome-mac/Chromium.app /Applications/Chromium.app rm -rf chrome-mac chrome-mac.zip Paste the above in to a file and then execute it ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/08/keeping-chromium-updated/ Image by hoerner_brett via Flickr Friday was awesome; a combination of geeks, MongoDB, Pizza, Beer & free swag. I wasn't expecting the MongoDB London conference to be quite as good as it was, but it was really insightful and useful for non beginners. We learnt about proper indexing, useful ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/06/mongodb-london-2010-why-you-should-have-gone/ Last Saturday, the 15th of May 2010, I presented at Kohana London 2010 -  the first Kohana PHP conference in the UK. My talk was about using the awesome Gearman, came with some sample code written specifically for Kohana. I've attached my slides as a PDF here, HTML version here and ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/05/gearman-kohana-an-introduction/ Amazon announced a new option for their S3 service today which allows a reduced GB/mo price (starting from $0.10 / gb / mo, rather than $0.15 / gb / mo) - the catch is reduced redundancy. The redunancy is decreased from 11 9's to 4 9's, which is according to Amazon still ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/05/amazon-s3-reduced-redunancy-service-is-it-worth-it/ After reading the announcement for the new Amazon AWS product, Amazon SNS (Simple Notifcation Service) it seemed like a great idea, though there is as yet  no PHP sample code provided. If you've not seen it, it's a cloud notification service - it allows creation of "topics" (think a mailing list / channel) ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/04/a-simple-amazon-sns-client-in-php/ Amazon AWS have just announced a new addition to their S3 simple storage service, versioning. After you apply for the beta program, you'll have the ability to enable versioning on a per-bucket basis, rather than per item. Versioning will save you from accidental deletion of files and enable a few other ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2010/02/amazon-aws-announces-versioning-for-their-s3-service/ Picking the best weekday for a website launch can be difficult. When considering it, there are a number of key things to take in to account: Expected traffic / business volume Launching on the busiest day of the month is not likely to be the best choice - a trail by fire ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2009/11/picking-the-best-weekday-for-a-website-launch/ High Performance Web Sites is another book which we've found highly useful here at UKD1. The book includes good advice from the guys who wrote YSlow for Firebug in the form of fourteen rules. It's aim is to advise a front end developer how to improve the performance of your site - ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2009/11/recommended-book-high-performance-web-sites/ This is a pre-launch checklist - things a developer probably needs to get ready before the big day (ideally long before). It's critical to prepare for the launch before the last minute day. So, the list: 1. The domain You need to have either bought the domain or if its already registered have ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2009/11/checklist-7-critical-pre-website-launch-things-to-check/ I got this book a while back after reading the authors blog - MySQL Performance Blog. The book is well written, full of helpful information and not for complete beginniers - which is a nice change! It has has good sections on benchmarking, profiling, backups, security, as well as MySQL tools. Get ... http://www.ukd1.co.uk/blog/2009/10/recommended-book-high-performance-mysql-optimization-backups-replication-and-more/