Creative abuse of the OSCON submission system

OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂

The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.

That was a challenge.

[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

Terminology soup in x86

I’m trying to help someone in academia buy a unix workstation. The task involves intensive number crunching on very large (14 GB) data sets using packages like Maple, MatLab and SAS.

Here is a quote they got from their computing department:

There are two main UNIX servers:

  1. Sun Microsystems V40z with 2 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 852 CPU’s and 16GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).
  2. Sun Microsystems V40z with 4 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 880 CPU’s and 32GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).

Can you translate the above into English?

I appreciate any help.

[My translation after the jump.]
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

On PHP Debuggers

[The views expressed in this blog are definitely my own and not those of anyone I work for, have worked for, or even get drunk with.]

I’m used to Xdebug. We use Zend Platform. Am I going to have to have a Rodney King moment?

Here is Derek’s take on it, and here is some guy from Eclipse PHP IDE’s response.

I don’t care.

I want the developers here to use the development environment they want and me to use the debugger/profiler I want. Anyone know a solution? Currently it seems that if I use Zend Platform, we have to use Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT to debug. If I use DBGp, we can use ActiveState Komodo, NuSphere PhpED, or PHPeclipse.

Am I wrong? Are there other editors that support DBGp? Which should I use (in particular I want have valgrind for profiling output and I like the built in error system in XDebug, but I haven’t had a chance to delve into Zend Platform so you can try to sell me on that).

[Other rants after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2