Yesterday I faced with really weird issue with PHP’s session handling. At work we are hosting dozens of sites on our servers and suddenly on one server we were getting lot of weird out of space errors when PHP tried to open session files. Error message was “Warning Unknown: open(/path/to/sessions/sess_somehash, O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28)” . Because of those errors I was believing we were somehow running out of space on apache’s temp file partition. Truth was there was only few megabytes data, but the problem was that we had over 200 000 files on one folder and PHP got crazy of that.

As I have mentioned I use now days Mercurial for my pet projects. There was one thing I was missing from Git. Git has nice feature to pick part of files for commit. Its really nice feature because I find myself regularly doing many small issues between commits which I want to commit separately.

Same kind of feature have been available for Mercurial over two years from now. It is called hg record which is made available by record extension. This increased Mercurials usability at lot. I hope this tip will help someone else who has also wondered if this kind of functionality exists in Mercurial.

Should we still consider to move on Mercurial at our work :-/

PHP 5.3.1 was released yesterday with 146 issues fixed. Today I found Sean Kerner’s blog post about it (I think link was in Reddit). I have to say I agree his feelings:

Quite provocative topic, but that was question which came in my mind when I wanted to try out new non relational databases like CouchDB or MongoDB. I will warn you: this post will contain some whining ;)

I don’t know was it the architecture or what but I had lot of problems when I was trying to install those databases. I have been using OS X 10.4 for over three years and most of the time all programs was compiling fine. If building failed it was mostly because of some missing libraries.

Recently I upgraded to OS X 10.6 which is first 64 bit OS X. With Snow leopard I haven’t even compiled anything by myself but using Macports. Whit this setup even one PHP upgrade has failed, but that was easy to fix. I run port clean php5 and tried after that again and everything went fine.

My FileVault image got corrupted and I lost all my settings and few documents (most of them were backed up on server). Because I had to create my configures again I was thinking if it’s time to upgrade to Snow Leopard. With fresh install it is good time for rethinking your own workflow and setups. This was what I did after OS install.

First of all Apple has made great work with this new version of OS X. They have also remembered web developers because Snow Leopard has quite fresh versions of Apache, PHP and even Subversion. OS X comes also with BIND DNS server. Before image-file corruption I had over 100 different web development projects installed on laptop. That means I needed easy way to create and install new projects. This is where properly configured DNS server and dynamic virtual hosts comes handy. In this tutorial we do required steps to achieve mature and easy to use web development environment with dynamic virtual host support.