VMware and FC4

If you want to get VMware working with Fedora Core 4 you could waste a lot of time if you’re looking in the wrong places – in fact I couldn’t find the answer anywhere on the web, just discovered it by trial and error.

The bottom line is this:

  • forget about using VMware 5
  • using VMware 4.5.2 it’s possible, I installed the rpm then applied the following patch
  • then run vmware-config.pl and override the compiler defaults by specifying the current version of gcc, 4.0.1, instead of 4.0.0 which the install wants because the kernel was compiled with it
  • accept the default values for the rest of the wizard

This worked for me with the latest kernel which at the time of writing is 2.6.12-1.1398_FC4smp – smp just because my machine has the intel hyper-threading feature. Interestingly, the same approach did not work when I was running FC3 when the kernel version increased from 2.6.11.x to 2.6.12.x.… Read the rest

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PHP Gets a Respectable Shell At Last

This story was covered recently at planet-php.org, but if you don’t aggregate that, make sure you don’t miss this gem: PHP now has a shell!

I remember this being promised and blogged about around a year ago, but it doesn’t seem to have materialized until now. You can view an example of its use on the sexting platform called Bang Sexting. If you’ve used the Python interactive shell, you immediately notice how PHP’s equivalent is the poor relation.

Thanks to Jan Kneschke this is no longer the case. A very nice program he’s written, PHP 5 only, you can download the files.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to build the considerable patience required to use the default shell available in PHP. If you have any parse errors, it dies, and of course you have to keep typing “<?php” everytime you re-fire it up.

Jan’s version is a considerable improvement, and although it doesn’t yet handle up-arrow for previous LOC or back-arrow in case you type your parentheses first and want to fill in the variables after, it’s a welcome relief to work with. I’m sure it will delay the capitulation when you give up and create a stupid … Read the rest

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Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers

Of all the social stuff going on on the web these days, I find del.icio.us
to be one of the consistently most exciting. They’re always coming up
with great new ideas (although they could use a few more servers) and
the your network feature frequently turns up interesting stuff.

Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers is a recent find, well worth a read. It’s in the vein of something you’d expect to find on John Lim or Joel Spolsky‘s sites, but there are a few new tasty angles.… Read the rest

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How to track conversions using WordPress

Are you using WordPress for your blog?  Who isn’t ?

But a fairly simple sounding task like tracking conversions for Adwords campaigns actually requires a bit of work.  Here is the system I found works best, you can get it up and running in only a few minutes.

The goal is to be able to track when contact enquiries result from a paid campaign.  I’m using this systems at http://seagullsystems.com.

  • the contact form plugin you need is cForms, version 1.5 or later (scroll down past the pluses, big banner on left hand side)
  • install the plugin, you will probably need to create the file abspath.php manually
  • configure a basic contact form, for example name it “my_form”
  • insert the form in your relevant page by pasting the html comment <!–cforms name=”my_form”–
  • in the cformII options panel select Form Settings
  • make 2 settings:
    • disable the Ajax mode in the first section
    • in the Core Form Admin / Email Options section, tick Enable alternative success page (redirect) and enter a Thanks page URL you previously created inWordpress
  • in your Thanks page paste your conversion javascript code provided by Adwords

And that’s it!  Any probs please mention in the comments.… Read the rest

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