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.

In that past I've created custom live unix distro CDs for myself and although it worked I found that it was so time consuming and generally such a pain in the bum that it just wasn't worth it. Yesterday I had the need (that nerd need, not because I had to, but because I wanted to) to create a customised CD for the house1. I'd heard good things about RemasterSysand figured now was the time to try it.

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.

I've rambled onabout Karmasphere in the past, but I've not actually done anything with it since mentioning it. Sadly today was the day when spam started getting through my crazy system. This clearly was a signal from the gods themselves; to take the next step. The dreaded DNSBL. You might be surprised, but I don't like DNSBLs. In the past they've made my life hard at work - especially when we've inherited an IP that was previously used by spammers, in some way, shape or form.

Being the good little customer that I am, I tend to try and keep an eye on what upstream are doing. To that end I've been keeping an eye on VPS.net; UK2.net's newest business venture. I'm one of the lucky 80 or so that have gotten into the beta, and I've got to say, I'm really impressed with what the guys have put together so far. Basically what they're providing is a fault tolerant, brilliantly easy to use virtual server infrastructure, based on Linux and Xen.

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.

…redirected App data directories, and causes a crash (Visual C++ Runtime error). Unfortunately after updating one or two of our customers at work it appeared that a few user accounts still had a redirected app data directory, presumably because they weren't around when it was removed. Thankfully fixing it is pretty easy (although potentially time consuming depending on your setup), if the redirection policy isn't active and is simply a case of changing the relevant entry under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders, and then logging off and back on, and migrating the redirected files back into the local profile directory.

Here's another one that caught me out today, but I've never come across before. Under a DFS share, any linked shares are created as junctions. It appears that the permissions on these junctions do affect the permissions of the data within the linked share. Whilst this is logical, given how junction points work, what really threw me was that the wonderful, wonderful GUI didn't reflect this and the permissions on the junction point had been inadvertently changed.

Given it's all over the forums and it's now the end of day after the release of the episode: “LUGRadio will be finishing after LUGRadio Live UK 2008” (so that's basically 2 remaining episodes, including LRL)! There are various reasons for this, and if you're not already aware of them I'd suggest listening to S5E21yourself. To have a hovis moment, I discovered LUGRadio at the start of season 2, which culminated in LRL 2005.