Speaking at DORS/CLUC 2011

published on April 12, 2011.

DORS/CLUC is a conference about GNU/Linux and everything open source which takes place in Zagreb, Croatia, on May 16-18. I sent two talk proposals and both got accepted! Yey! The first talk will about PHPPlaneta.net, the story behind it, the ideas, the plans… The second talk will be an introduction to Zend Framework. I know, zf2 is right behind the corner with all it’s PHP5.3 goodness, but we are still, and unfortunately will be for a while, stuck with hosting providers running php5.2.

Hopefully I’m not going to be the only PHP dev there and someone will find the talk(s) worth their time :D

More than anything I’m looking forward to finally visiting Croatia and meeting fellow hackers :)

Tags: conference, dors/cluc, talk.
Categories: Blablabla, Development.

pecl install apc fails on Ubuntu

published on April 10, 2011.

I was just installing APC on an Ubuntu server (what else to do on a Sunday morning?) with the standard set of commands:

sudo apt-get install php-pear php5-dev
sudo pecl install apc

but the pecl install apc died with a bunch of “/tmp/pear/temp/APC/apc.c:430: error: “apc_regex” has no member named “preg”” and similar messages. Luckily, I can use google which led me to this serverfault answer: I was missing the “libpcre3-dev” package. After doing a quick sudo apt-get install libcpre3-dev APC got installed correctly.

Tags: apc, libpcre3, pecl.
Categories: Development, Software.

Installing FreeBSD 8.2

published on March 27, 2011.

As I’m currently in the progress of installing FreeBSD on my first machine (out of 4), writing the process down for future reference sounds like a pretty good idea :)

I’ve installed it from the CD image. The installation process was straightforward, altho either the boot loader or freebsd was getting confused in the first few attempts because I was installing it on the slave HDD. After installing it on the master, everything went fine.

On this machine I’m using a LevelOne WNC0305 USB wireless card which uses realtek’s dreaded RTL8187 chipset. After a bit of a googling, I ended up on the freebsd 8.2 hardware notes page, which in the wireless section lists all the available wireless drivers. From there I figured I need to use the urtw driver, that is to add:

if_urtw_load="YES"

to the /boot/loader.conf file. After rebooting the machine, it recognised my wireless card as urtw0. Hooray! Now to connect to the wireless router and onto the world.

For that, this message about (not) getting the ifconfig scan results helped me out, this bit to be precise:

# ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtw0
# ifconfig wlan0 up list scan

and it listed my router correctly. To make it stay that way after rebooting, I’ve added this to the /etc/rc.conf file (I might note that it was empty before this):

wlans_urtw0="wlan0"

At this time I figured I just could ssh to one of the servers in the office (we run freebsds there) and “steal” rest of the configuration, so I ended up with a /etc/rc.conf file something like this:

hostname="freebsd_box"
wlans_urtw0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="inet 192.168.0.100 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="192.168.0.1"

Reboot once again and I can ping anything via IP, but not via hostnames. Again, this (ooold) message about DNS settings in freebsd showed me the right direction - /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver ip.of.name.server1
nameserver ip.of.name.server2

Reboot and everything is working fine! Victory!

Next step was (is) to fetch/update the ports database:

# csup -L 2 -h cvsup.freebsd.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

From here I believe it’s all about installing software from the ports which should be all fine.

Happy hackin’!

PHP User Group, Novi Sad, Serbia

published on March 24, 2011.

For almost a year now, whenever time allows it, I’m working on a side project of creating a community of PHP programmers from around here. One of the first steps was, is, a website called PHPPlaneta about which I wrote back in October. After bringing this website to a relatively steady position, time has come to take another step: creating a PHP User Group! I’m really good at naming things so it is called “PHP User Group Novi Sad”, or pugns for short.

Actually I really don’t know what one has to do to create a user group, but I’ll just improvise along the way. So far, the date, time and the place for the first meeting is set: April 5th, 6PM, in a local coffee shop by the Danube river. A website thingy is also up: pugns, which is currently just a simple HTML page, but things will improve on that front too. The page of pugns is intentionally under a “directory”, because I’d love to host information about other PHP user groups from around here on the phpug.phpplaneta.net (sub)domain. It’d be nice to keep all relevant information under one “roof”.

Sooo… This will be an interesting ride, hope it’ll turn out fine :)

Of course, if anyone has some advice, tips and tricks about organizing user groups please do share them, that would be highly appreciated :)

Tags: meeting, pugns, user group.
Categories: Blablabla, Free time.

Contributing to open source

published on March 17, 2011.

Often times people ask me why do I contribute to open source, why do I “waste money and time” on free stuff when I could easily do the same thing for money? Don’t have I enough of staring at the computer at work where, well, I do the same thing - hack on code? Ummm. No.

Honestly, I don’t earn much. Enough for the rent, bills, food, but giving the fact that I don’t have a family, it’s enough for me, for now. So, I don’t make a s**t loads of money, but am still willing to work for free? Ummm. No.

Thing is, I really don’t consider this to be work. This is fun. This is hacking. This is creating stuff. This is solving problems. This is my passion. So no, I don’t work for free. I don’t work. I code, I hack.

But why open source?

Giving back

Giving back is nice. Not necessarily giving back to the same project, but just giving back to the open source community in general. It just makes you a better and nicer person :)

Knowledge

Both in high school and in college the fastest way for me to gain knowledge was to learn, collaborate with other students. Open source gives me the chance to share knowledge with hackers from all over the world; from Portugal, via Nova Scotia to Texas. It gives me the chance to be taught and to teach.

Experience

Open source gives the opportunity to work with people from every part of the globe. Getting ideas across by the means of email, chat, irc can be hard. Open source gives me the chance to improve my communication skills. Heck, I sometimes even have troubles explaining my ideas to my co-workers who sits right next to me.

Reading other peoples code, fixing bugs, writing documentation, adding new features, testing. Hack skills ++

Also, each and every accepted patch and merged pull request gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Contacts

Open source introduces you to new people. Who knows what can come out of these random introductions? Can’t be bad, that’s for sure.

This is why I contribute to open source: it is fun, it is hacking, it is creating stuff, it is solving problems.

It is my passion.

Robert Basic

Robert Basic

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