Review of the N95 and the Forerunner 305
I've had a Forerunner 305 for a while now. On the rare occasion I go running, I find it really useful. At first, I thought t would be a great geeky toy that I'd get bored of - I honestly expected it would find its way into a draw and never be used again after the first couple of uses.
However, it's actually a great running accessory, and I advise this kinda hardware to all by the most casual of joggers. It's far too easy to run too fast when you're out running - you can set the forerunner up to beep at you when you go too fast or too slow - obviously you configure these speeds yourself. Recently I ran a half marathon, I did virtually no training for it, and without the forerunner on my wrist making sure I didn't run too fast or too slow, I'm not sure I'd have finished!
Continue readingDell PERC 6/i and RAID monitoring
A few pointers for people trying to get Dell's PERC 6/i RAID monitoring working under Ubuntu, and any other linux for that matter. It also applies to PERC 5/i too, and... other stuff 
First, visit Dells Linux site. Have a poke about, see what's there.
Next, we need to download a tool to get information from your array. Download LSI's MegaRAID CLI tool for linux. It comes as a .RPM, so if you're an ubuntu user, you can convert it to a .deb using alien, or convert it to a .tar.gz.
# alien --to-tgz MegaCli-1.01.39-0.i386.rpm
You then have a CLI tool you can use to get all your data now! For example:
# ./opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep State
State: Optimal
One thing I spent a while figuring out was how to get the rebuild progress, so here's how:
# ./opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -PDRbld -ShowProg -PhysDrv \[32:1\] -aALL
There's also a really useful cheat sheet for common tasks
Don't forget to actually monitor this output with nagios, or your favorite monitoring tool!
My non-conclusion about MVC
A you might has been in my previous post there's quite a discussion about how a lot of PHP frameworks break MVC.
I stayed clear of commenting, as I didn't want to get drawn in, however one comment did ask what I thought, so here it is!
Continue readingphplondon08 – the ‘crazy guy’ mail
As you'll know from my previous post, I was 'heckled' during the Q&A of the framework talk I did. This wasn't aimed at me, but rather at all 3 of us on the panel, and more importantly, at 'MVC' frameworks as we commonly see them today. Marcus Boniton also mentions this incident on his blog.
Personally, I don't think he's a crazy guy, I just like the title and find it quite amusing 
I pointed the 'crazy guy' to my previous blog entry, where he replied to an author of one of the comments, and CCed me in. I thought it was a very interesting mail, so it's included below. I put this here with full permissions from Mike.
Continue readingphplondon08 – My symfony talk
I talked at PHPLondon Conference 08 yesterday. I'm putting my slides online, here they are!
My phplondon08 symfony Presentation
I got slightly heckled, and was amazingly nervous because it was my first time talking, but I think it went well! Apparently the audio recordings will be available at some point, I'll update this post when they are.