For those unable to really understand these ultrasound scan jobbies, the head is on the left facing the screen, and the larger right hand blob is the upper torso. The whiter line at the bottom, and the tiny little paw-print looking thing is it’s hand.

This photo is actually from the second scan over 2 days - we had a regular 20 week scan yesterday, and the sonographist spotted that the kidneys were slightly larger than normal. We doubt it will be anything major, but we were referred to a consultant we saw this morning to check the scan in more detail. The placenta is a bit low, so we’ll be having a 32 week scan, and possibly even a 36 week scan as well… we’ll see.

The other thing we got from the scan is our initial suspicion that it’s a boy may indeed be wrong - neither the sonographer yesterday or the consultant today could find any winkies, and today it was in a very good position for checking. The rather annoying thing about that is that we’ll have to think of a girls name (on which we have still not agreed, and probably never will, heh!). Freya is a name we both seem to like at the moment… but we shall see!

Evidently there are too many problems using the Paamayim Nekudotayim due to scope, and static classes and whatnot, but I don’t understand why when real programming languages such as C++ manage it fine. I have to agree with “dmitry”, I think using a backslash is ugly, and double colon is much cleaner.

What does this mean for the PHP community? Well anyone currently using namespaces will have to fix their code, and anyone not using namespaces will have to get used to using the backslash separator. Of course this change is going to ruffle a fair few feathers - people will wonder what on earth possessed them to use the backslash instead of double colon when backslashes are so ugly, and double colon is so… well… standard I suppose.

As this Slashdot post shows:

• Perl

use My::CPAN::Module qw();
my $instance = My::CPAN::Module->new("junk");

• C#

System.Windows.Controls.Listbox box = new System.Windows.Controls.Listbox();
// or
using System.Windows.Controls;
ListBox box = new ListBox();

• C++

ABC::bar();
// or
using namespace ABC;
bar();

• The New PHP

$object_instance = new My\PEAR\Module("myvar");
// or
using My\Pear;
$object_instance = new Module("myvar");

I doubt people will stop using PHP though. I expect people will either not use namespaces (explicitly anyway - technically they’d just be writing in the global namespace), or get used to it. But then, one must think - what if there is a big backlash against this change and PHP is just a bubble waiting to be burst? I doubt that’d happen, but it’s interesting to wonder…

Using iCal, I can also view my calendar in Outlook at work, and another really cool thing is that I can sync my Nokia 6500 slide with my Google Calendar, using GooSync.

So hopefully I won’t miss a thing…

It isn’t really a new concept, just like AJAX was never a new concept, it’s just when people realise things can be used in a certain way, it gets popular real fast. Basically, the concept of clouds is providing an abstraction layer, and normally a physical seperation between several nodes, for example cloud storage (Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable), cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2) and cloud services (Google Checkout). In fact, you’ve probably already used cloud computing without even realising it… Google Maps and Google Docs are a couple of examples. Google, as you might have guessed, are pushing forward with the cloud computing bits quite a lot, and the only other real competitor in my eyes is Amazon, especially their hugely popular EC2 and S3 services.

It’s a pretty cool concept though - instead of having a laptop with 10GHz processors and 1TB of RAM and all that, we’ll all be using Eee PC with just Firefox running, most likely connected to Google. The concept of that forces buying hardware into the providers hands - the companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. and all we do is use the services. I’ve not really gone into too much detail about what it is, but one of the advantages of this whole thing is that you don’t have to worry about data storage, and you can access your stuff anywhere you want.

The big thing holding UK back from diving headfirst into this cloud computing stuff is the fact that most residential UK internet connections suck. We’re still using ADSL and cable broadband for christs sake. And unreliable at that. Despite Virgin Media having a 35% market share, and BT Broadband having 40%, I still hear endless complaints about them. At the end of the day, even 24meg just doesn’t cut it (although in reality, I’ve rarely seen someone actually get anywhere near the potential throughput of a 24meg connection, due to contention ratios and all that). We need Fibre to the Home, and we need it with low contention ratio - we need Gigabit internet (or maybe 40 gigabit anyone?). The problem with that is that no-one wants to foot the £28.8 billion bill. I digress, that’s a different story…

Except for one thing… Outlook. It’s a huge drawback because, like most corporate offices, we use calendaring functions, tasks, global address books, and loads of other features on our Exchange server. I did a bit of Googling and found out that since 2007-odd, Evolution (the default mail client with Ubuntu) supports Exchange out of the box. Always wary of things like this, to check it worked, I loaded up a new Ubuntu VM and fired it up. There was a bit of confusion getting it to work, and it repeatedly asked for my password. Once it finally got it working, it slowly loaded. I tried going through a few folders, and it was repeatedly slow. I did another quick Google, and others shared the problem. I restarted Evolution and then it repeatedly asked me for password.

Essentially, it’s obviously a hack to get it working efficiently, which really isn’t what a corporate environment needs. The beauty of Outlook is that you stick in the name of the user, and it loads up everything. In any corporate environment, this is a huge stumbling block for people considering switching to Linux who use Exchange servers.

There are two solutions I see to this - fiddle with Evolution more until it works, or use VirtualBox to run a little VM of Windows with Outlook (see this guide). Personally, I wouldn’t mind running VirtualBox to do it at work, it would provide me with other advantages too…

Update 23rd Oct ‘08: Well it turns out I was wrong. I’m not sure if it was simply a problem of me running it in a VM and having network issues or something, but I just tried it here at home using exactly the same settings and it actually works like a dream!

Unfortunately, I asked our tech lead, Kelvin, and I’m not allowed to install Linux on my work PC (unless it’s in a VM) due to him “being able to access stuff”… although I don’t see why not as I can set up everything just the way other networked PCs are set up in Linux. I tried to set up Ubuntu in a VM image, and supposedly VMware supports multiple monitors, but I couldn’t get it to work, so until I can convince Kelvin otherwise, I’m stuck with Windows….

Thankfully, after a quick Google, this guide helped me out and got it working.

The solution is that Windows sucks, and you should always generate your keys in Linux.

• Use PuTTY to connect to your server
• If you haven’t already got Subversion (type “svn” to check), follow this guide to install it.
• Set up an SVN repository:

svnadmin create [repository name]

• Import your existing files:

svn import name-of-folder file:///path/to/repos -m 'First Import'

That’s the repository set up, now to set up Eclipse PDT.

• You need an SSH client for this - I use TortoisePlink which is built into TortoiseSVN. You can either go down the private key route and have password-less SSH logon, or alternatively the simpler (and much less secure) way is to include the -pw option on TortoisePlink. If you are not concerned about security, then do this. If not, there are plenty of guides on setting up a password-less SSH logon.
• Open the Subversion config (on Vista, that is C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Subversion\config) and in the [tunnels] section, add this line:

ssh = C:/Program Files/TortoiseSVN/bin/TortoisePlink.exe -pw [your-password]

• Once you’ve done that, right click the PHP Explorer, select Import. In the SVN folder, select “Checkout Projects from SVN”.
• The URL to your SVN repository should be:

svn+ssh://[1and1-username]@[hostname]/[full-path-to-repository]

• You can find the full path by typing navigating to the repository directory in PuTTY, and typing “pwd” if you don’t already know.
• For 1and1, I just use the default website (sNNNNNN.websitehome.co.uk) rather than any of my domains, but I expect it would work with any of the domains you have set up with the destination as your home directory.
• Clicking next should load up the list of folders in the repository and you can select one, or the entire repository to checkout.
• Change any options you want changed, and then Finish to import it. You should now see a new (or existing project if you already had one) project in your PHP Explorer, ready for you to use with Subversion enabled.

This list is the steps that I took to do this, and I sourced my information from these various places. This should hopefully help anyone get through the problems of setting up a repository on 1and1 who uses Eclipse PDT.

• Nick Sergeant
• P J Hile
• “Ramblings”
• Mark Grabanski - you might find this one useful for adding an auto-update hook to SVN
  

The scan to the left is indeed our baby at 12 weeks and 2 days old, and at that point, he was just 6cm big. By this time I think he’s nearly twice that, and Hannah’s bump is getting bigger by the day (although still hardly noticable to the casual onlooker).

In addition to the random posts about Airsoft, Frosthold, and general computer-related bits, it’s pretty likely I’ll have a baby category, and this is the first post. Cheers!

We’re pretty sure it’s a boy, but we’ll find out at the 20 week scan with a bit more certainty. If it is a boy, we’ve decided on the name, and if it’s a girl, we haven’t. And we probably won’t. So it’ll be called “Baby Girl” heh.