Chris Graham's profile

Delivering innovation vs Leveraging value

In our community we often get questions that might sound something like:

How do I allow users to negotiate the dates of events posted to the calendar, by specifying the dates acceptable to each user, and having the system choose an appropriate date automatically?

or

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When Linux goes wrong

Our server's email wasn't going out for a couple of days, and it just clicked with me this morning when I wondered why I wasn't notified about some new issues posted on the tracker.

I thought I'd be a bit technical about what happened, and then a bit philosophical about why in 2013 we're still all dealing with such arcane software.

So, what happened?

We installed some new packages on the server, to…

PHP performance: array appending

Warning: this is a pretty technical blog post!

Something I've always wondered about with PHP, is how to efficiently append one array to another. There is no built in way to do it directly, so you need to choose something a bit inefficient:

1. Do a loop, doing a single append in each loop (seems slow because PHP has to run the loop as PHP opcodes, when a native implementation could be in pure C).
2. As with

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ocPortal build infrastructure Open-Sourced

It's played on my mind for quite a few years that only I could really package up versions of ocPortal for release. I think every release so far, bar possibly one or two by Philip Withnall, has been put out by me.

The reason for this is that the scripts to build ocPortal were a kind of black magic. Black magic doing a lot of complex stuff and designed with a solid process behind them, but still they were really cobbled together. Over time their construction branched further away from how ocPortal itself…

Firefox memory problems (part 2)

So last night I found Firefox had eaten 1GB by the end of the day, even though I'd closed all my tabs, and I blogged about it.

I came to the conclusion Firebug is a big part of the problem due to the orphaned compartments, and laid some scorn on the people at the top of Mozilla for not allocating sufficient resources so it gets fixed. Just to be clear, Firebug does seem to be funded by Mozilla,…