undertakingyou

While my brother-in-law was in town for Christmas he had brought his Amazon Kindle 3. I was instantly taken with it. So it comes as no surprise that a few nights later while I couldn’t sleep I got on ebay and bought myself a new Amazon Kindle 3g. Of course, my wife was asleep and was not able to tell me no. Thankfully she is extremely forgiving, quite understanding, and still let me come to bed the following night.

The packaging of the Kindle is actually awesome. The box says something about being no fuss and it is true. I like that it was so easy to open and start using. When you do open the box you have the Kindle on top, a quick start guide, a usb cable and plug adapter for it.

Putting books on the Kindle is of course a cinch. I like to use Calibre for my local PDF books and more books can be bought directly from the Kindle Store on the device. Also many of the classics are available for free. Once books are on the device I found it cumbersome to just have all the books out on the home screen. Scrolling through 7 or 8 screens to find your book was a pain. Thankfully there are categories to organize this. I think that categories for the books are a must and yet, it is somewhat cumbersome to place a book into a category. I would love a bulk add feature. I realize that one you have your device kind of set up just adding one new book and then add just the one book to a category is easy, but still. To start with 35 ‘computer books’ which must be added one at a time to the category was painful.

As far as reading, the Kindle holds true to all that you have ever heard about it. It is very easy to read. No screen fatigue. It doesn’t matter how bring the sun or lighting is it looks amazing, clear and glare free, all the time. It is a truly spectacular machine for this. I have read one book the whole way through, very comfortable.

If I had to do it again I would save the money and not get the 3g version, but get the wifi only model. This is for two reasons. I find that I am not downloading books at every point that I pull out the Kindle. The second I feel there is a conveniently left out caveat with the ‘free’ 3g service. Yes, anything that I download from the Kindle Store, or magazine or newspaper subscriptions through the Kindle Store are automatically sent to the device. But you can also email your own documents to the Kindle directly,(for instance, I have Cablibre download wired magazine and send it to my Kindle) and you must pay $0.15 per meg that is delivered via 3g. That is a little detail left out of the brochure. One other reason, call it reason 2b if you will, is that while there is a browser on the Kindle, it is not exactly what you will use to browse the web. There is a reason that it is in the ‘experimental’ section of the menu.

All in all, very worth the $139 bucks. I want to buy another one for my wife. She has been resistant but at some point I am going to.

I want to thank the Ubuntu Utah Users Group for the lend of this book. For those that don’t know this group meets together two times each month. One meeting is held in downtown Salt Lake at the University of Utah, and the other in draper, where we can thank our friend Victor Villa for hosting. The goal of this group is to promote linux and free software by offering support and friendship around the ubuntu linux distribution. They do this in many ways including having a ‘library’ of books to lend to others (some restrictions apply, show up to a meeting for complete details).

Today a book review of Linux System Administration, written by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic published by O’Reilly Media. A little about the authors. “In the early years of PC computing, Tom [Adelstein] saw the need for financial service applications and with the help of the investment community brought those applications into existence. He began using Linux in the 1990′s and has used it extensively ever since. Tom’s last book,”Linux System Administration” hit number seven (7) on Amazon’s Technical Best Seller list in 2007. He also won the “Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Award” in 2008. (Quoted from O’Reilly’s author page).” Bill Lubanovic started developing software for UNIX in the 70′s and has a wide range of expertise including UNIX and Linux administration.

I was particularly interesting in this book because I administer several linux machines. I find that there are a handful of tasks that I do all the time. So much so that I could do them with my eyes shut. Install Apache and set up some virtual hosts. Set up a MySQL server and have it accessible to said webserver. Set up SSH, write some simple scripts to do a backup, etc. are all things that I do on a regular basis and I don’t really need a any of reference on. But then there is the other stuff. The things that I do every so often, that while I have done them before and feel fine doing, I may need a crash course on each and every time. The old adage ’set it and forget it’ rings very true with me on these subjects. These are things like an email server with mailbox quotas. Installing and running a DNS server or caching DNS server. Linux System Administration provides walk-through’s on every aspect of administering a linux system, from file and print server to load-balancing and virtualization this book has an easy to follow work through it approach so that you can tackle even the toughest job.

The book takes a simple walk through of doing everything start to finish. It is based on debian (for the most part) and literally starts out with installing debian and using SSH to remote manage the system. From there you move to each aspect of making a system that can handle a huge array of needs. If you have a question about a specific task you can skip right to that section where it will guide you through that. In addition to giving a step-by-step on getting it done the book does a fine job of giving enough background so that you can understand the why behind the how. For instance, a history of DNS and an overview of how it works is given prior to diving into BIND and setting it up.

Some caveats with the book however, while 90% of the book is based around a working Debian system, there are some things that are not. For instance the chapter on virtualization is done on Fedora because “supports Xen 3.0 out of the box”. I find it odd though that at this point there is the sudden reference to yum when every other package installation command has been apt-get. (Note that it is not odd to use YUM on fedora, that is perfectly logical, but that there is a sudden introduction to a new tool without any other background or information.) Also if I had Debian as my server and wanted to do virtualization this book has turned from super helpful into a paper weight. Even with VMWare the host system was an ubuntu system and while that is closer to debian, I find this change in standard is odd. It also seems that the versions of everything through the book are older. Truly this is understandable as the book was written in 2007. But there is no newer edition out to this point. I did find that this created some issues following some tutorials as commands had become depreciated or removed all together, and at times packages had different names and I had to go digging around.

This book will assume that you have a somewhat working knowledge of linux and are not afraid to get you hands dirty with use of the command line or compiling. Overall I found the book useful enough that I have purchased the print book and eBook bundle and will return the original copy that I read to Ubuntu Utah to be passed out again.

Today we have a brief review of the book “Zend Enterprise PHP Patterns”. I want to thank the Utah PHP Users Group for the gift of this book, along with the great knowledge base and friendship that come with participating with them. If you are in Utah, and specifically in the Wasatch Front Area you should really check them out.

Zend Enterprise PHP Patterns written by John Coggeshall with Morgan Tocker. Published by apress publishing. About the authors: “John Coggeshall is CEO of Internet Technology Solutions . . . and the former Senior Architect of Zend Technologies’ Global Services team.” He has been using PHP since 1997 and can be followed on twitter by adding @coggle. Morgan Tocker “is a Consultant at Percona, a company that provides consulting and custom development for MySQL.”

Lets start by talking about what PHP is. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a server-side scripting language for web development. It started in 1995 and quickly became popular not only because it was easy and free to deploy but it was also easy to use. It has colloquially been called the little kids scripting language and often seems to be the but of jokes due to an apparent overuse by those with a lack of coding standards. My own friend Synic told me once that part of his issues with PHP was that code that does the work, and code that displays the UI should be held separate (MVC development model), and that without a proper framework PHP could not be separated.

In steps the Zend Framework (and consequently this book) do discuss a tool to put PHP applications into the enterprise level. As said on page 1, “When developing an enterprise application in any language, tooling is almost as important to you as the way you use the tools. . . When it comes to tooling, the PHP world is no different. While I’ll admit there are decidedly fewer options available to a PHP development team, those options that do exist are impressively robust and easy to use. One such category of tools is frameworks that help ease the pain of development and maintenance of application for their entire lifetime while promoting best practices. One such framework is Zend Framework (ZF).”

When deciding which of the frameworks to use, why use Zend Framework? Why not CakePHP or Codeignitor or any of the other php frameworks? “Zend Framework is quiet different than most other PHP-based frameworks in the sense that your commitment to using the framework is left entirely to you. Where most frameworks force you into specific coding practice or impose on you a specific way the framework must be used to be effective, Zend Framework is based on the notion that each component can be used completely independently of the rest of the framework.”

As you continue to explore the Zend Framework throughout the book you are lead through simple examples of every part of the development process. From creating a simple “Hello World” application using the MVC development model, to deploying your application on a PHP server farm this book gives an easy to follow formula for getting the job done.

Be forewarned, if you are a beginning PHP developer, or don’t feel quiet up to snuff as an intermediate user this book will be target over your head. To have a full grasp of what is going on an intermediate to advanced understanding of PHP and general coding is required. The book can be found on Apress.com.