Archive for April, 2012

While I’m busy with my new venture, I’m also working on a project to add a further arm to the prolific Worfolk Online empire, in the form of Worfolk Games. It’s going to be publishing it’s first game in the next few months with a focus on the social gaming (Facebook) arena. Stayed tuned.

From time to time, Firefox might try to update itself and get itself stuck an a loop where every time you try and open it, it tries to upgrade itself, fails, closes and then you have to try and open it again and the same thing happens.

95% of the time, this problem is caused by Logitech webcam software.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but the problem has hit my system several times and every time after some googling, the suggestion to try and close my Logitech camera software comes up and as soon as I do, Firefox is able to upgrade itself and open fine.

Sometimes, you might install your dependencies via composer but find that the tests don’t work for it. You could get an error similar to the following.

phpunit
PHP Fatal error:  Class 'Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml' not found in
/home/example/Gherkin/src/Behat/Gherkin/Keywords/CucumberKeywords.php on line 31

This could be because if you have just run composer install, it will only install the main packages, but some packages could be specified as dev only. You may find a “require-dev” section in the composer.json file.

If you do, you can install the packages using the following flag.

composer install --dev

This will install the development packages as well, which should allow you to run the tests.

If you try and compile APD on PHP 5.3, you may get an error similar to the following.

error: 'struct _zend_compiler_globals' has no member named 'extended_info'make: *** [php_apd.lo] Error 1

This can be solved by modifying a few of the APD files. To do this, you need to download the APD archive file and uncompress it.

Then make the changes as detailed on the PHP bug tracker. Once this is done, it should install as normal.

phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

APD should now be installed.

You know, except for the fact that I don’t have a dubiously serviceable spaceship named Serenity (I don’t have a perfectly serviceable one for that matter either). Nor do I have a crew, rugged good looks or such a free-spirited approach to whether to follow the law or not.

Look at him there, what a man.

Pioneers, out there, working for themselves. Well, that is what I will be doing. I recently handed in my notice at Buzz Sports. It has been an amazing three years, but the time has come to move on and establish my own technical consultancy, which will be opening its doors in April.

So if you need help with your software project, get in touch. With expert knowledge of scalable web application architecture and a reassuringly expensive price tag, you’re in safe hands.