Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
Below is a simple shell script which can be used to control execution of tasks on a Linux system based on the systems current load value – with the intention that if the 5 minute load average is greater than a given value the script exits with an error return code (1) or completes without […]
Today, I interviewed a number of second year Aberystwyth Computer Science students at Gregynog. The aim of the exercise is to help prepare them for upcoming industrial placement interviews. As a whole, the students were better this year – their CVs and covering letters had fewer obvious mistakes and appeared better prepared. The majority of students […]
We use munin to monitor servers to help identify server performance issues (and improvements). It’s a great tool, and we keep finding the need to install it. Munin compromises two parts – firstly ‘munin-node’ which runs as a daemon, and is responsible for running various plugin (statistics retrieval) scripts and storing the output values. Typically […]
Recently on the PHP NorthWest mailing list, there has been some discussion over the causes of security vulnerabilities within PHP applications. The original poster provided a questionnaire – however, this didn’t really allow for much in the way of a detailed answer, so here’s our 2 pence. As a caveat: there are obviously other causes…. […]
So, we’ve just changed our website… why? The previous website was based on Drupal, but an outdated / now unsupported version, which would at some point probably give us maintenance problems. By moving to WordPress we move to something we have more day-to-day experience with The new theme has HTML5 elements within it (header, footer, […]
Xerte Online Toolkits is an open source Flash+Ajax+PHP web application which allows tutors to create rich multimedia presentations through a web browser. We’ve been hosting a couple of Xerte based sites (for Techdis and Warwick University) for a couple of years now. Being an open source project – we initially added support to the Techdis […]
Background A WordPress site we maintain had one page (warning: some of the pages/images may offend) displaying a large number of posts (they all happen to be galleries) using the nextgen-gallery plugin. The Problem The page in question, on each load, would perform a query on posts within a specified category, and display them inline. […]
As with previous years, Pale Purple is proud to sponsor one of the leading PHP events in the UK – PHPNW‘s annual conference.
(This is a ‘legacy’ blog post written in April 2010 – transferred over from our old website. Hopefully it will remain of use to others.) In April 2010, I interviewed seven Computer Science students from Aberystwyth – with the intention of looking for a student to work for us on an Industrial Placement year from […]