Tag: links

World IPv6 Day with Irish Statistics

In case it passed you by, today was World IPv6 Day. In a nutshell: “Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.” This includes top content providers such as Facebook (see under their hood), Google (read what they had to say), Yahoo! and Microsoft. In fact, you may not even have noticed but Google were advertising it front and centre on their search page:

Google Announcing World IPv6 Day on Their Search Page

Over at INEX, we were unable to pull out IPv6 traffic statistics on the exchange until recently and my colleague just got the first pass of that project complete this week in time for World IPv6 Day. Here’s how it looked over the hours leading up to and into World IPv6 Day:

Now, the peek of almost 40Mbps is, most assuredly, small compared to the overall peek of 24Gbps, but there is a very pronounced jump in IPv6 traffic which is certainly a good sign and a move in the right direction. The overall peering statistics at INEX are public and we’ll be breaking out IPv4 and IPv6 into separate graphs shortly also.

Why does IPv6 amount to < 0.2% of the traffic at the exchange? Well there are two main factors:

  • Until today, there has been very little mass or popular content available over IPv6. So, even if you were IPv6 enabled, there was very little for you access.
  • None of the large ISPs in Ireland are providing IPv6 connectivity to end users outside of certain closed test programs.

This is the classic chicken and egg problem: with no content available the ISPs were not motivated to provide IPv6 connectivity; and, conversely, with no IPv6 enabled eyeballs the content providers were not motivated to make their services available over IPv6.

While today was not necessarily a content provider only day, I’m unaware of any Irish ISPs that got involved. But, now that we have significant content available over IPv6, hopefully the ISPs will begin to ramp up their own programs. And – to be fair – it’s not all bad news with the ISPs in Ireland. Most have their core and edge networks IPv6 enabled, it’s the access layer that’s the issue (and it’s a really really big issue and a very difficult issue).

AMS-IX (the Amsterdam Internet Exchange) is in the top three IXPs in the world by traffic volume and they also make their IPv6 statistics public. As a second demonstration of traffic levels on World IPv6 Day, here is the week to date showing a huge differential for today:

If you’re not sure what all this is about, well then here are a few words from the creator of the Internet himself:

And if you’re keen to start experimenting with IPv6, first email and ask your ISP. They’ll say no, but do it anyway! Then head over to SixXS (and be sure to choose either HEAnet or Digiweb as your PoP as both are INEX members and as such you’ll have the lowest possible latency).

Top 15 UI Libraries on GitHub (with 1500+ watchers)

I was just reviewing an accessibility presentation where the author had an interesting slide on the top 15 UI libraries on GitHub with 1500+ watchers. Here they are with links and descriptions (my own comments in italics):

  1. Bootstrap, from Twitter - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions. A favourite of mine and I’ve used it on Open Solutions, ViMbAdmin, TallyStick, ePayroll and more.
  2. impress.js – It’s a presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind prezi.com. (GitHub page).
  3. chosen - Chosen is a library for making long, unwieldy select boxes more friendly. Another plugin we love and use in a number of projects.
  4. jQuery-File-Upload - File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop support, progress bars and preview images for jQuery.
  5. jquery-ui – jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications. (GitHub page). Another favourite of ours and we use it along side Bootstrap with the jquery-ui Bootstrap theme.
  6. spin.js - An animated CSS3 loading spinner with VML fallback for IE.
  7. deck.js – Modern HTML presentations (GitHub page).
  8. Skeleton - A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development.
  9. Foundation - An easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device.
  10. showoff - the best damn presentation software a developer could ever love (example).
  11. ajax-upload - A file upload script with progress-bar, drag-and-drop (GitHub page).
  12. isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts.
  13. Timeline JS - Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. This actually looks really cool and very pretty.
  14. etherpad-lite - An Etherpad based on node.js – Our goal is to make collaborative editing the standard on the web.
  15. ColorBox - A lightweight customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery.

 

As an honourable mention, if you use Bootstrap and it’s modal dialog, take a look at Bootbox which provides wrappers for JavaScript alert(), confirm() and other flexible dialogs.

Some thinks that jump out at me from the above is that frameworks are very popular and, similarly, prestation frameworks are also very popular. There must be a deep hatred of PowerPoint and Keynote among web developers! The other take away for me is how a very small project – such as chosen – can become hugely hugely popular.

Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4 (again)

My previous post, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4, has been extremely popular but I left some work for the user to figure out.

In a nutshell, here is how you install PHP 5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

1. Install the signing key for the PPA (which also adds the sources to apt):

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5

If the above command is not available, install it using:

apt-get install python-software-properties

2. Now update the package database and then upgrade the system. As part of upgrading, PHP 5.4 will be installed automatically:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now, you should have PHP 5.4 installed:

# php -v
PHP 5.4.3-4~precise+1 (cli) (built: May 17 2012 13:00:25)
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies

As an aside, at the time of my previous post, PHP Memcache packages were not available from the PPA but that has since been rectified.

New Replication Features in MySQL 5.6

I’ve just been reading an article on replication in MySQL 5.6 and there are quite a few new cool features that will vastly improve replication environments with MySQL. Some of these include:

  • Optimised row based replication (documentation here) – replication used to mean execute the exact same queries on the slave server(s) as the master. This, as you can imagine, was incredibly inefficient. With row based replication, the resultant changed row of an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operation was replicated saving significant resources on slave servers. This was a big win. It now looks like it’s been further optimised in that only the changed elements (and a primary key) need to be replicated.
  • Introduction of Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) allowing the source and sequence of a replication statement to be globally unique within a replication cluster. This with some cool new utilities (mysqlfailover and mysqlrpladmin) create a lot of native options for failover for maintenance or failure (see more about GTIDs and the utilities).
  • Time delayed replication allowing a slave to purposefully remain behind the master for any given delay. This may be a life saver for that table you accidently dropped!

There’s a lot more too and you can read about it all here.

ViMbAdmin 2.1 Released – POP3/IMAP Access Restrictions

We’ve just pushed a new release of ViMbAdmin – version 2.1. The main highlights are:

  • it’s now possible to restrict access to a mailbox via either IMAP, POP3 or both. See this page on the wiki for more information.
  • it’s our first release requiring a database migration. But it’s really really easy – see this page for those instructions.

As always, a live demo is available at: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/.

Looking at New Features in PHP 5.4

PHP 5.4 was released at the start of March and heralds a key new feature which I have long bemoaned the lack of: traits.

Traits (see PHP’s documentation and Wikipedia’s description) allow programmers to define a set of functions which can be shared among different classes in ways that normal inheritance cannot do.

A Trait is intended to reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling a developer to reuse sets of methods freely in several independent classes living in different class hierarchies.

I’ve banged my head against the desk a number of times trying to work around the lack of traits in PHP and I hope PHP 5.4 makes its way into mainstream Linux distributions a lot quicker that 5.3 did.

There are also a number of other interesting features which look really cool:

  • Simpler array dereferencing: $secondElement = getArray()[1];
  • A shortened array syntax: $a = [ "foo" => "bar", "bar" => "foo" ];
  • A built in web server (for development) which could be really interesting – see here.

 

We’ve Just Launched TallyStick

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

[TallyStick Logo]

Overt at Open Solutions, we manage networks, build Internet infrastructure, consult and develop web applications for many customers. Tracking the time our engineers spent on different projects – especially those on the front line hopping from customer to customer – was becoming an issue.

And we had enough. So we built TallyStick. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention.

We believe in web applications that are simple, beautiful and functional. And after an exhaustive search, we couldn’t find one to fit our needs… so we built it. And who better to build a time tracking application for IT and other consulting professionals than those same professionals!

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. We believe it’s simple, efficient and quick. And we hope you agree.

As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

Also, all users signing up during the beta period will receive a lifetime discount of 10% on that account!

ViMbAdmin – We Have a Logo!

As an example of open source in action, we had a note on our Google Code page for ViMbAdmin with a wanted section asking for a logo. Yesterday morning I received a mail from Robert Bell, self professed Head Nerd of Limeworks Australia offering some of his designers time to create one.

24 hours later, we proudly present the new face of ViMbAdmin:

ViMbAdmin Logo

With a cool new logo, we decided we needed to overhaul the login page. You can see the new face of ViMbAdmin at our updated live public demonstration page: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/. This has also been incorporated in a new release version, 0.2.4, which can be downloaded from here.

A sincere thanks to Robert Bell and his team Limeworks Australia for the logo.

 

Link: MySQL Best Practices

I came across this site today which has some good advice for MySQL. I’m particularly happy to see that Doctrine, a relatively new ORM for PHP which we’re big fans of, is gaining some traction.

I came across this site today which has some good advice for MySQL. I’m particularly happy to see that Doctrine, a relatively new ORM for PHP which we’re big fans of, is gaining some traction.

I also noticed that Piwik, an open source analytics package, are using some interesting quality assurance tools which may be of interest to PHP developers (along with a continuous integration tool I came across recently: phpUnderControl).