So, I finally managed to get the Mailman setup working with Exim. This comes as quite a surprise, particularly given my relative inability of using Exim. Nonetheless, I have got it working, and I can officially announce the West Midlands PHP User Group.

The aim of the group is to provide a place in which PHP users, developers, hackers and enthusiasts can combine together to form a community in which everyone can discuss, help and otherwise interact with each other people and PHP. This is not intended to be like a LUG – I don’t envisage physical meetings at first, but this is certainly an option as the group grows. The main intention of the group is to provide a solid mailing list for discussion and help.

As you can see, the group is based in the West Midlands, UK. The reason for this is that there is something quite nice about having a geographical reference for a group. It helps people in that area get in touch, people can meet up locally, jobs can be posted and it is pleasant to know that you have a local group of PHP fans. Although the group is based in the West Midlands, anyone is welcome to join. There are relatively few groups that provide help and general discussion around PHP, so anyone is welcome to join ours.

To join the mailing list, click here, and you can also view the archives. I now just need to figure out how to stop Yahoo Mail screwing up the in-reply-to header with this list.
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Today my first print copy of php|architect arrived and it is pretty darn good. I have been waiting for this for ages, and although I have bought a few of their PDF back issues, it is far more satisfying having a print copy to leaf through. I found this particularly useful today when banger was attempting a shit in the garden. It was nice having something to read as opposed to watching a shaking dog with a pained expression squeezing one out.

After some discussion with ging-a-ling-a-ling-a-bling-a-sing-a-song-a-sixpence, we are considering the move over to Postfix on our server. The reason for this is quite simple. Firstly, the amount of knowledge the ging and I know about Exim can be placed neatly into an ants lunchbox. Secondly, I want to set up Mailman and it looks potentially easier with postfix. Thirdly, we know people who know postfix whereas no-one seems to know Exim. I am going to have a crack at setting up a test server on my dev server and then port the config over. Anyone out there know about Postfix and Mailman?

As a new dog owner, I have recently discovered the wide range of joys of owning a pooch. One of the joys is laying on the couch watching TV with a pup asleep on you:

Another joy is writing a blog entry at 5pm on a Friday while your faithful hound is desperately trying to eat the inner-sole from your shoe.

Have a nice weekend people. 🙂

I am working with a client to possibly get funding for a SugarCRM plugin for Evolution, and it struck me today that I don’t instantly know who to ask to code this. Sure, I could possibly contact Novell, Red Hat or maybe Sun, but I thought there must be some small scale companies who can write bespoke GNOME software. Any of you know who could? It is a shame that there is not a company I can just pick out of the air. The other option is just contacting a GNOME hacker. Maybe this is what bounties are for…

Fingers crossed I should have some interesting news coming up over the next few weeks. I am working on a small project at the moment and I will let you know when it is ready.

OH, and I voted Labour today. It was the best of a pretty shit choice. The tories are well…the tories, and I could not bring myself to vote tory, the lib dems are are wet behind the ears and want to tax everyone to buggery, and I actually like Tony Blair most of the time. There were no other choices at my polling station.

So, SugarCRM 3.0 has been released. This is great news. As the CRM boy at OpenAdvantage, I have quite a fondness for Sugar. Although very much a corporate and sales driven CRM, it does satisfy many of the needs of organisations. What does concern me however is the price of Sugar Professional. At $250 or so per user, this strikes me as quite expensive for a CRM. Sure, I know other CRM vendors charge a lot more, but if Sugar are targeting SMEs, I think they could get more buy in with lower prices and maybe not using the nasty per-seat licensing model.

I have been hacking on lots of PHP this week. This has the dual purpose for providing a stack of source code that I am familiar with for the FastTrack training courses as well as projects that can go in a new book I am working on. Yesterday I pretty much hacked most of a a forums web application in a day. LAMP is such a nice platform because of the ability to knock up applications quickly. I like productivity. 🙂

I am declaring that the iRiver is one double-hard bastard of an MP3 player. Last night I edited the latest edition of LUGRadio, and I wanted to copy it to my iRiver, which I had left in the car. I went out to grab it before I went to work and it was laid face down on the concrete next to my car. It seems that I not only dropped the poor bugger on the floor, but it rained all night too. Nonetheless, I turned it on and it works a treat. I am considering entering the faithful little device into some kind of cage wrestling tournament. It obviously kicks some arse.

In the tradition of Planet #lugradio, here is my Southpark character:

Oh, and go and buy this book:

Two good pals of mine (Justin Davis and Roger Whittaker) wrote it and my name is inside it as a proof reader. It is a great book! 🙂

After finally getting VMWare going, I determined that aside from using it to run Windows to demo Open Source software that actually runs natively on Windows, I also want to use it to run bleeding edge distros. The last time I run a bleeding edge system (running Hoary a good four months before it was released), I got a little burnt. So, today I installed a stable hoary on VMWare and I am now upgrading to Breezy:

It looks like Breezy goals are taking shape now at Ubuntu Down Under. Nice!

We record LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 15 tomorrow! Woo!

Recently inspired by Xgl, I have been playing with getting it working today. I managed to compile Xgl no problem, and then I got it running in a window with the X.org composite effects working. Nothing really OpenGL based here, but it gives you an idea of where things are going:

In addition to Xgl, I got all the xorg extensions working, and I also compiled Cairo and Glitz. I did try running some of the demo programs David has written, but none seemed to work.

Right, back to work…

Yesterday I had a day chock full of meetings. The meetings went well, and one particular project I am working on is going to prove to be a fantastic Open Source case study. The guys in this organisation are very keen on Open Source, and they are exploring CRMs in different ways. It seems I have defaulted to the OpenAdvantage point man on CRM, and I have been recommending Sugar to people. One of the challenges in the meeting was that they have a slightly different approach to CRM. In most CRM systems, the contact/client is the top-level node and the project is based off the contact/client. This particular organisation really need the project to be the top-level component and the client to be based of the project. This is slightly more akin to project management, and I did explore dotproject. Sugar still seemed the best bet as they need more CRM capabilities than project management, so we explored options in terms of employing someone to hack the Sugar code to make it happen. In the meeting I was checking the Sugar website and then discovered the Sugar 3.0 beta. This pretty much solves all the problems and includes project management and even document control – another desired, but not essential feature. I have set the 3.0 beta up and it looks great.

Sugar is a pretty awesome tool, but one of the challenges is to build better support from client applications such as Evolution into it. Sure, there is possibly a Thunderbird plugin (well, it seems there is a plugin for vtiger, which is based heavily on Sugar and should be easy to port), but we also need Evolution, Sunbird and more. Ultimately we need this. Incidentally, I mailed a link to that article to Luis and Seth, and Luis replied asking if we can meet up at GUADEC to discuss it. This is definitely a GNOME 3.0 direction, and I am eager to get a feeling of how people are approaching the challenge at GUADEC.

Sheesh, plenty going on. Today I battled with kernels to try and get the VMWare kernel modules working. As I banged my head against the table to get the Ubuntu supplied kernels to compile, I could not understand why it was becoming so difficult to simply get VMWare working. I tried a number of times to compile my kernel and managed to do it but could not tear it away from initrd enough to get it to boot. initrd is a game of freaky-ass bongo that I don’t understand. The problem was solved when Paul came in, suggested I use more recent VMWare 4.x release and it all magically worked. Argh!

So, the latest LUGRadio episode is getting some discussion on OSNews, and so is Trust and Zeal in Open Source Advocacy. It is always fascinating to read people’s views on this, and it is also interesting to see how people sometimes wildly misinterpret or misunderstand some of the points. I am certainly not saying they are wrong, but it is such a complex subject to write about, it is sometimes difficult to be clear to everyone all the time.

Good to see an Xgl webpage now. I am gonna compile some of it if I get time. Also see the Cairo examples.

Davyd – thanks for your help on VMWare modules by the way. 🙂

Yesterday at work I managed to reinstall a fresh hoary on my laptop and claim back half the hard disk that was reserved for Windows – I have decided to run Windows in VMWare. I just need to compile the fricking vmware kernel module. Anyone know what this kernel module actually does?

In addition to the laptop, a few nights back I upgraded the Powerbook to hoary and last night the Mac Mini was upgraded to it too. All smooth upgrades. 🙂

Went to lovely Herefordshire today to speak to a chap about furthering his companies use of Open Source. He is quite an Open Source fan as it is and goes to Herefordshire LUG, so he is heading in the right direction anyway. I am noticing that there is some opportunity for small collaborative projects between engineering firms. It seems like lots of them want a SolidWorks type application that is Open Source but independently lack the resources to make it happen. This could work as a coalition between a number of companies, but this requires some planning. Food for thought.

I have discovered in recent weeks that I am finding it increasingly difficult to blog enough. Much of the reason for this is because I am so busy busy doing stuff, I rarely seem to get the time to tell the world about it. As such, from this blog entry onwards, I am going to try and blog more often but less of the huge posts that I typically write.

So whats been going on? Well, two articles published on the O’Reilly Network. This includes some thoughts on a project orientated GNOME desktop called Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop (something Aq and I are talking about writing) and the second part in my advocacy series called Trust and Zeal in Open Source Advocacy.

Oh and Series 2 Episode 14 of LUGRadio is out. In addition to this, my blog is now aggregated on the spankingly good Planet #LUGRadio and there is also a LUGRadio Live Blog where you can keep up with the latest news on the fantastic LUGRadio Live 2005.
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