Another less-sysadmin-y, more code-y post today. Zend_Form is pretty handy, and takes care of a lot of the hard work in producing and validating forms. Unfortunately the default decorators aren't quite as sane in my opinion, which becomes obvious if you start using fieldsets, or display groups, as ZF refers to them - You'll see your fieldsets getting wrapped in an additional definition list which is basically crap if you ask me.

On the off chance you're intending to do any development with using SqlSrvand ZF, I'd suggest taking a cursory look at ZF-7431before hand. Equally if you're planning on doing any dev with Sqlsrv and plan to migrate to other SQL platforms later, then it could be just as helpful. The fact that SqlSrv will return PHP objects is rather nice, unless you already have existing code that assumes strings are returned, like almost all other database extensions available for PHP.

I've been playing around with CouchDB for a few nights, inspired by the work of Stuart Langridgeand others at Ubuntu, and also J Chris Anderson. To break myself into the CouchDB world I started poking around at the capabilities, and mostly trying to not think of SQL-isms. Understanding map/reduce and getting your brain out of the SQL world is worth it, if for no other reason than to get a different perspective on data storage.

Since I didn't come across an existing plugin after a quick google, and nor is there one in the official Munin repository that works on my Debian installations, I thought I'd post my implementation. It's exceptionallysimple, however it might save someone 10 seconds of research and coding in the future. #!/usr/bin/perl if ($ARGV[0] and $ARGV[0] eq "config") { print "graph_args –base 1000 -l 0\n"; print "graph_title Uptime in days\n"; print "graph_category system\n"; print "graph_vlabel uptime\n"; print "uptime.

Those of you interested in Live For Speed, and fancy a blast from the old* days, or want to see what pre-S2 was like, might be interested in checking out this threadon the official forums. I've simply patched the executables to look at the new master address, ensuring the executable size remained the same and with a little bit of luck discovered that the master server is still serving requests from older clients to unlock.

I've been looking at Wt(pronounced Witty), via Heartlesson #php, for the last 30 minutes or so. I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed. The name and concept seems inspired from Qt, or perhaps WxWidgets, and is quite robust. Hardly pretty at this stage and I've not yet hacked anything together, but quite cool. Especially if you insist on using C++ to develop your websites. Edit: Paul / Chiphas a very good point on using Wt;