Dogbert: barking up the wrong tree

Do you do any PHP development? If so, you’ll be aware of the LAMP acronym. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP: all open source development tools available under the GNU license. The Open Source community has fully embraced the LAMP set of technologies and this combination is rather robust and has also been used to implement commercial-grade web solutions.

I’ve wanted to implement one of the client-server applications at my workplace into a web application but since we run Windows Server 2003 on our servers, I couldn’t quite use LAMP. But guess what I just found: WAMP Server .This is Apache,MySQL,PHP on Windows platform. One of the first hurdles to cross with these tools is installing each one. It can easily take a working day to install and configure MySQL to work with PHP and Apache. Especially if you haven’t done it before.

With WAMP, you download one exe installation file, run it and you have all the tools installed and all the services running in 3 minutes flat! Morever, you get a little icon in your task bar that allows you to stop start the services. Here’s a screen shot:

[Courtesy of WAMP]

OnLAMP is an excellent resource for LAMP developers.

With all the hoopla about Maps, I couldn’t help tinkering around with them myself.

Over the weekend, I took the Google Maps API out for spin and I was impressed by the ease of use of the javascript API. Checkout my quick hack here:

Google Maps – Kuwait

It’s only a very crude application that allows you to click around on the flags and see the name of the cities. It may take a while to load since it’s mapping about 200 locations.
But these basic tools can be used to conjure up some wicked apps like these:

oodle maps
Bicycle Route (Let’s you map your bicycle tour as an animation on Google Maps. Very innovative hack to animate the route.)

If people can provide me geocodings (latitude/longitude) of popular Kuwait landmarks, I can add them to the map.

I’ll do a small write-up later on if anyone is interested in playing around with the API (You don’t really need to be a programmer to do simple things with it).

I saw some “How many books do you own?” type questions on some blogs recently and IMHO, it was either using a really silly premise (your intelligence is directly proportional to the number of books you have) or was just good ole’ ego-inflation at it’s best.

In order to disprove the abovementioned premise consider the fact that I have about 3000 books and am told that I have (under?) average intelligence.

You don’t believe that I have 3000 books? Just take a look at my library.

Working where I work, I get free subscription to this wonderful resource called Safari Online . Safari Online (SO) is an online library of IT-related books from leading publishers (O’Reillys, Pearsons, SAM Publishing etc.). SO contains not only the full-text books online for your viewing pleasure but also includes a really good search tool that let’s you search for text, and more importantly, relevant pieces of code.

That’s incredibly useful because I can directly copy-paste code rather than have to type it out from a book. The only issue right now is that I have to read the books online and can’t print them out or save them as PDF (I’m guessing this is for IP reasons). Although there does seem to be a more expensive subscription where you can download and print chapters.

Subscription to Safari Online is “Enterprise-only” which means that your organization has to purchase group-wide subscription for SO. I’m not exactly sure why they’ve done that. One reason may be that if books are illegally distributed, they can hold your company liable (If that is the reason, then it’s one smart move).

Oh yes, they also have a library for Business professionals (which is a lot of handwaving if you ask me).

Here are some useful links:

Safari Online
Test Drive SO instantly
Trial Subscription to SO-Tech Books Online
Trial Subscription to SO-Business Books Online