Installing symfony - setting up the virtual host

Well, here is another thing that I have learned using symfony.

The basic installation tutorial instructs you to set up a virtual host for symfony:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName myapp.example.com
  DocumentRoot "/home/steve/myproject/web"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  Alias /sf /$sf_symfony_data_dir/web/sf
  <Directory "/$sf_symfony_data_dir/web/sf">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
  <Directory "/home/steve/myproject/web">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

This was all new to me, so I set up "all" the paths correctly, and found that while it did allow me to use my symfony application properly and all the data_dir links where effectively aliased as planned, it also broke my other "localhost" links (e.g. I could no longer access http://localhost/other_app). Ouch.

Now I have figured out why: I hadn't changed the ServerName. So, the issue was solved by simply creating a new ServerName like so:

ServerName symfonyappname.localhost


To get this working the operating system must also be configured accordingly. To do this, simply add an entry to your hosts file, the location of which depends on which OS you are using.

Check out this link to find out where your hosts file is located.

Once the hosts file is properly configured (remember you may need to reboot), simply type:

http://symfonyappname.localhost

and magic happens :).

Thoughts?

A visual aid for RAID

Just a quick recap of how the most common RAID can be used for recovery (or not...).



Thoughts?

Netbeans support for Symfony

Now here's a nice and chewy piece of news posted by ppisl from netbeans.org:

The news is that the Symfony support will be part of NetBeans 7.0. We are going to start work on it very soon. I hope that it will be a part of continual build this year and community can comment the support and work with us to finish it in the best possible quality and usability.

This is straight from the Netbeans "issues" site: Issue 145913. You can vote to advocate Netbeans support for symfony from that same page. 468 votes so far...

According to the roadmap Netbeans 7.0 will probably be released around April 2009. It will be exciting to see how this pans out with the release of symfony 1.2 due in December of this year.

Anyone else looking forward to this?

CSS - Choosing colors

A colleague pointed me to this article recently (no offense taken :D). In my view, there are quite a few interesting things there, but still I think using HTML tables for layout is conceptually bad, even wrong, especially today.

Among the good stuff, this interesting link to do with colors and how to choose colors that actually work well together.

They have developed a useful ColorTool applet which you can access via:
PC version
Mac version

You can choose the background color, then select various text colors to go with it (by clicking first on the line of text you would like to change).

Rather clever.

Thoughts?