The NetCircle – Now hiring PHP Developer in Shanghai

I’m in Germany at the moment, but I just overheard The Strange Case Of The Missing 8 Black Ball:

Alvaro: “If any of you see a lonely 8 black ball out there. Tell her to go back home, that we need it and we are totally confused because of her absence. Anyway, if you see it somewhere please return it to the pool table.”

Alvaro in reply to himself about three hours later: “Mystery solved, the black ball was trying to commit suicide inside the food fridge!!!!! Pocca found it there and rescued her.The ball alleged that she was depressed because our bad playing… Maybe we should hire a shrink or a coach.”

For one of our projects we have load balanced database servers. We needed to have a way to reflect that in our project code which is written using symfony 1.0. The problem was that symfony 1.0 came by default with Propel 1.2, so our database code was targeted to that version of Propel -version 1.3 supports loadbalancing out of the box-.

For the development environment this represented no problem, but when we faced the deployment to production we needed a way to support loadbalancing with Propel 1.2. After some research we decided to create our own loadbalancer plugin for symfony.

We have been testing it live and is performing good so far.

The good news is that we released the plugin as open source so you can go and get it from the symfony website. There we provided a README with the instructions to set up the plugin.

As for the inner workings of the plugin, what it does is override the symfony default Peer builder to add the loadbalance support. Then the database connection for the slaves are specified in the normal database.yml file, so there is no learning curve on the usage of the plugin.

If you want more details on the implementation just drop a line on the comments and we can write a small tutorial about it.

two events that are actually not connected but by this office.

1. We went to see the James Bond Premier Quantum of Solace on Wednesday in the VIP Room of a cinema. The VIP part was: The most comfortable chairs (more like private couches), soft drinks, popcorn, nachos. As Tom said the theatre itself was so great that he liked the movie before it even started. About the movie: There were no standing ovations, but it was solid entertainment. In my opinion the storytelling should have been sharper and less like a videoclip. Just watch it and make up your mind.

2. besides that inspired by the pirate talk, halloween and flickr I decided to take photos of the office dogs wearing an eyepatch. Django didn’t like it and Bodo had e great time trying new ways to wear an eyepatch.

Judge yourself who’s the better pirate dog: Here we HARRRRR!