Hawk Host Blog

Things have been quiet the past week or so with nothing to really report.  So I figured I’d post what little information I have about things as they stand. Read More

Zend Framework 1.6 was just released and we already have it on all our servers.  I can honestly say I did not have time to play around with the release candidate versions so my knowledge of it is not great.  I am however as I write this working on porting our website to use Zend Framework 1.6.  This basically means I need to drop in the new folder and confirm the smarty view system works fine which it does!  I’ve actually already found one use for it which is the Zend_Service_ReCaptcha functionality as it is the quickest solution.  Our site currently makes use of it using an outside library I’m assuming (Cody setup the captcha).  Here’s a quick run down of how easy this is to implement: Read More

The Subversion and Trac Manager I was talking about ages ago and recently a few months ago is finally on some of our servers and working!  I would like to thank the good people over at RV Global Soft for creating this module and taking the time to read all my feedback.  It was originally going to be a different add-on however it is now part of Rvskin so a lot of hosts may end up using it eventually.  I’ve been working with Rvskin working out all the bugs for some time and last night they were able to fix the last remaining issues I encountered.  I was really committed to solving all the problems which meant I was actually using gdb to debug crashes in the patched subversion as well as determining issues with their installer.  I believe all the issues are worked out and 2 of our machines now have it fully working.  Those machines are Venus and Skyline and you can find the subversion and trac manager if you’re using the rvskin.  All our 32bit machines should have it showing up once the next release is made with all the latest fixes.  As far as our 64bit systems they’ll see it on their systems once RV Global Soft patches things up for 64bit system. Read More

It appears our blog has been neglected for a few days so I decided to write a brief blog about some tools I use on a daily basis that increase my producitivty and can’t imagine living without. I’ll break the list down into two legacyPost: 1 type: blog categories: programs and FireFox Extensions (yes, I’m a junkie). Programs Read More

We recently had a couple of clients ask about announcements via RSS feed. Well if you weren’t aware we post all of our announcements through our forums - which has RSS feeds enabled as an ouput type! Read More

Yesterday there was a report of a strange bug by a user on a system I’m currently working with.  I was told a specific row was not showing up in the data set.  The system was using PostgreSQL for the database and used ExtJS grid component to render the data set so my first instinct was the user was not paging to the next set of data.  To my surprise even when paging I was unable to find the data as well.  I was really confused on this one so I decided to throw the query into my trusty SQL editor and see what is going on.  The first thing I did was remove the limit and offset portions of the query as I had no interest in paging.  To my surprise the entry did in fact show up when I ran it without the limit and offset.  When I ran the query with a limit and a offset and paged through each page I could not find this row. Read More

The Hawk Host site currently uses a semi framework I built several years ago to do MVC.  It was great at the time was very light weight and did the job.  As we’ve grown over the past year we’ve found it necessary to change things on our site and add pages.  This is now where it gets tricky as my framework system did not actually have any search engine friendly URL system built into it.  We actually manually specify the rewrites in our .htaccess which has become troublesome as more than just myself need to modify our site.  Not to say there aren’t some things that are easy to change.  One of them being the features of our pages which are dynamically loaded for the most part and can inherit that of other pages.  For example our reseller page inherits a lot of the features from our shared hosting page. Read More

Tomorrow some time during the afternoon all our servers will have PHP 4 removed from them due to the end of life being today (August 8th 2008).  Although there was new release on Thursday the 7th to address some security holes it’s quite clear it’s time to stop using considering in the PHP news post it also says it’ll be the last release.  For anyone who’s curious here’s what was part of the PHP 4.4.9 release: Read More

Well as most of you are aware we introduced a 1-800 about a month and a half ago. This has been a godsend and a burden all at the same time. Why? Well currently the 1-800 number forwards to only Tony and I’s cell phones, which is all peachy except the fact that we have a horrible tendency to miss calls. After debating if we should remove the 1-800 number from the public until we can properly staff it we’ve decided to introduce certain “business hours” for the 1-800 number to assure people someone will be on the other line. Read More

I check the PHP site once in a while to see if there are any new updates and to my surprise the other day they announced that PHP 5.3 alpha has been released.  We’d love to put it on Hawk Host to play around, but at this time it’s not meant for a production environment.  This of course does not stop you from loading it up on a virtual private server from us and playing around with it that way. Read More