James Titcumb

Well its Monday morning again, I’m back at work, and Chris has given me some kind of lung death throat destroying illness. I’ve sorted through the barrage of spam e-mail and general rubbish that arrives in my Inbox over the weekend, revealing that there are actually no e-mails worth reading.

I’m not the only one who is ill though, Chris was the originator, and he’s passed it onto Sii, Jon and myself. In turn I’ve passed it onto Hannah, and its likely Jon has passed it onto Jake has he had a lift this morning. What makes this worse, in a matter of minutes, we’ll all be going into our weekly meeting and spreading the lung death throat destroying illness even further.

This morning the office here at Netbasic was greeted with the good news that we made it to position 3 in The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 for 2008.

The Tech Track 100 is published annually and ranks Britain’s fasting growing private tech companies over the last three years. Netbasic started in 2003 and in 2004, the company made £255,000 in sales, which soared 235% to £9.6 million in 2007.

This huge increase makes Netbasic rank at number 3, just below Lovefilm International, which in my eyes is a damn good feat!

PHP4 for me since starting at Netbasic has been a mere lifeless form of PHP that I used to get into web development. But reading this article reminded me that PHP4 will soon die.

Well, as I said recently, on a day for the PHP community dubbed as “8-8-8″ (referring to 8th August 2008), PHP4 will officially be halted. This means there will be no more development done for PHP4. Any new bugs will remain forever. Any developers still using PHP4 won’t get the support they used to. There won’t even be any security updates to seal up loopholes and hacks.

But on the upside, PHP5 will be the choice. We’re already on PHP 5.2.6 (stable), and the next version is well on the way. Now the article I linked to poses several questions:

• What if in 2 months time, evil hackers will find a bug in PHP4 that is exploitable?
• What if they write a spider that crawls the internet in search for applications that run PHP4?
• What if they target all those sites with malicious code?
• What if indeed there will be no fix for this exploit?
• What are you going to do?

There’s a simple answer to all these questions :- people really need to upgrade to PHP5. It’s really that simple. For developers, I think there’s actually very little to do (the odd thing is listed in the PHP5 Migration Guide). My move from PHP4 to PHP5 was simple and very very pain free (perhaps I was lucky?). Personally, I think it’s the web hosts that need to get their bums in gear. Following my article about Newnet, they’ve actually started using PHP5 for new hosts, and are offering free migrations from PHP4 to the newer PHP5 UNIX servers, so good on them, I fully back Newnet 100% in this descision.

At the end of the day though, a day will come when web hosts really do NEED to upgrade, perhaps because of some horrific bug that will destroy the universe. If I were those web hosts, I’d do it sooner rather than later. But as is the way with some companies - they use the ethos “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I used to think that, but I’ve learnt recently that with some things, even if it ain’t broke, you can make it more secure, work faster and work better.

Thankfully, here at Netbasic, we use PHP5 already, so I’m happy as chips.

At lunch, I asked Sii (one of our design guru’s here at Netbasic) to see what he thought of my new theme. He said pretty much straight away to get rid of the solid black lines, so I’ve replaced them all (except the date by the post titles as I stupidly put the border in the image itself…) with more subtle greys. So if you’re still seeing solid black lines around stuff, clear your cache and enjoy the new easier-on-the-eye greys. Cheers Sii!

Am I lazy? Yes, probably. Now that my Twitter digest posts are working again it tells me how much I’m not posting… and I haven’t posted here in a whole 4 days! Oh noes, whatever will become of me… Truth be told, I’ve not had much of a chance to blog to be honest, even about things I’ve wanted to blog about at work or at home.

I have just recently got back from a meeting with one of our partners in (stupidly busy, traffic-wise) Farnham, which ended sooner than I thought. I also thought I’d have little-to-no envolvement as I didn’t think I’d have any idea what anyone was talking about. On the upper hand, I actually had a reasonable amount of input (at least when the other tecchie guy came in), and knew more-or-less what they were talking about. All-in-all, a successful meeting I think.

Well, I’m back in the office now anyway, after getting aggravated at all the stupidly slow drivers on the A32 (30mph in a national speed limit, anyone?), and we have an hour to go ’til we depart to Southampton to check out the delights of the masterful Bon Jovi. Should be fun to see the classics such as “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Bad Name” and “It’s My Life”, amongst others. I’ve never been a huge fan of Bon Jovi, but I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to see him for free, courtesy of Netbasic! Looking forward to it though.

Oh, and while I’m bloggin’, check out dis shizzle: Rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs. A few of them are quite funny, but I think you have to know about the music to get some of them. Some gentle lols came out of me anyway…