I know it’s a little late but the usual drive of new year innovation and releases within the Open Source world have been keeping me busy recently.

New years resolutions

1. Package AuthStor
2. Learn another RDBMS – Oracle / MSSQL?
3. Upgrade my local servers to FreeBSD 7.1
4. Pick up the guitar at least once a week
5. Lay down my first audio track in Ableton Live

The year started with my attempt at some resolutions (you know the ones you never keep) of which I am already making good progress on.

First on my list was AuthStor which is working on a basic level at the moment but there is so much more that can be done to make it easier to use. Why has it taken so long you may ask?

Well apart from being the only developer last year, I made several attempts to re-write the app in something like JSP or Zend Framework, partly because there is a lot of activity in those communities but mostly due to the complications faced with packaging around 50 Perl modules that each have their own compile time dependencies – some of which change frequently often breaking the application (no strict API/Interfaces to adhere to).

So after several prototypes why did I decide to stick with Perl?
Well for starters the changes that did break the application often forced me to change the app in a way that was more logical or introduced a more structured design. I also found that JSP and Zend although cool frameworks tended to feel incomplete and introduced complexities elsewhere e.g. containers / authentication / roles. Catalyst is simple and extremely powerful providing both a development environment and production framework that takes little effort to introduce new features quickly. I can start 2009 in the knowledge that Perl and Catalyst are the right language / framework for the job. I just need to work on the packaging now!

The next item on my list is to learn yet another RDBMS. Why? Enlightenment first and foremost, plus I am a big believer in gaining as much knowledge as possible in my chosen field. You’ll never complete the jigsaw if you have several pieces missing, and seeing as I spent a good part of last year getting to know DB2 I decided this year that my focus would by Oracle and MSSQL, thus completing the picture.

With the release of FreeBSD 7.1 there are now so many cool features that I decided to upgrade some of my older servers that have been sitting in the corner running nicely on FreeBSD 6 (they never fail). DTrace and ZFS put a stop to FreeBSD slipping behind OpenSolaris and the ULE scheduler helps improve performance over your average Linux distro, and with ULE 3 due for release in FreeBSD 8.0 (June) you can expect to see further dramatic performance improvements.

Last on my list will be to pick the Les Paul at least once a week!. One of my prezzies in 2008 was a new orange amp! If that does not encourage me to pick up the guitar I don’t know what will!. You never know I might even mix something up with the copy of Live I got for Christmas

It’s been a busy month so far and with Easter now upon us the year is showing no sign of deceleration.

I spent the last few weeks working hard to recover from my initial attempt at passing the Zend Certified Engineer exam. Having used PHP and other languages for several years I grabbed a copy of the Php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, bought a few online practice tests from Zend and spent a few days scoring Excellent before heading down to the test centre confident I would be leaving with a Pass.
Forty five minutes into the exam I was racing through the questions thinking I had it in the bag only to be presented with a Fail upon clicking the End button…..Bummer

The score report gave no real indication of how close I came to passing, so wondering where I went wrong I scoured the net for any information that could help me prepare for my next attempt (which you get a 10% discount on if you ask Zend nicely). During my search I found the Zend Certification Forum, however it was broken and I had to ask for it to be fixed (which took a couple of days) before I could read others views on the exam. The Zend forum and site I have to say are not good adverts for PHP. The site often takes ages to load (is this down to PHP? people will think) and the forum feels pre web 2.0.

After a few hours of searching I finally found this PDF, the PHP 5 course material that outlines everything you need to focus on for the exam and provides enough examples to to get your head around the “gotchas” that are hidden in many of the questions. Second time round I passed, although many questions were similar to my first attempt and I answered them no different, I can only put my initial fail down to the PHP “gotchas” like:

What is the output of echo 09;

Post certification I had to ask for the Yellow Pages entry to be added (a common problem it seems), and after finally getting the page updated it seems to have reverted to its former state…..If only it was written in Java I keep thinking to myself.
Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of PHP but feel its place is within the presentation layer (this site is written using PHP). When it comes down to middle tier processing I am yet to be convinced…

Speaking of Java, I decided that along with moving house this Easter (I need a server room ), I would open my mind to the world of software that is Oracle. The Oracle Database is hardly Open Source, however Oracle as a company do support the Open Source Community and to be honest I’m a knowledge junkie and need something fresh to feed my mind with (fear not MySQL).
Besides at the end of the day everything I learn from taking apart Oracle can be directly applied to the Open Source world, that is if it has not been applied already.

You may have noticed the Easter Bunny pic included with this post and if you are into Open Source you would have recognised him as Big Buck Bunny the star of the upcoming open movie Peach. That’s right there are only a few more weeks to the release of the movie and you can now take a look at the trailer before downloading your copy of Blender and having a go yourself – I can’t wait!