Fedora Core 5 ships with SELinux. Even having installed all the requisite Apache, PHP and Libcurl packages, cURL may not work correctly. It's not a package dependency conflict, or a bug - just an overprotective security manager keeping things safe.

I encountered this behaviour when trying to send a post request from my server to another. It manifested itself as a 'Failed to connect to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (ip): Permission denied'.

By default 'Allow HTTPD scripts and modules to connect to the network' is unticked in 'system-config-securitylevel' ('SELinux' tab). Relaxing this security restriction solved the problem.

As part of a wider effort to make Lightenna Intellectual property publicly available, we've now made the first part of our Database Training course available online.

For those working to a commercial timescale, Lightenna will still operate our highly demanded one week intensive course. We've already got courses scheduled for later this year and early in 2007.

Over the coming months the online course materials will continue to grow.

Lightenna also runs bespoke training courses for larger companies. If you'd like to discover how one of our courses could empower your staff, please contact us.

Fantastic technologies like RDP and LogMeIn mean that the I'm spending a lot of time logged into remote machines. Like many users, I like my Desktop to look a certain way, so I configure my user account on each of the remote machines to look similar, if not identical, to my local machine. The problem is that I can't always see at a glance what computer I'm working on.

Taskbar naming

...but now here's a fix. You can effectively write names onto the Taskbar by configuring a custom Toolbar. Right-click the task bar, select Toolbars -> New Toolbar. Windows prompts you to select a folder, intentionally one containing a set of shortcuts making up this toolbar.

Cygwin provides Unix/Linux services for Windows. For small organisations, those without a dedicated Linux server, Cygwin enables tunneling of less secure services, such as Windows Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) through port 22 (SSH). Crucially, it mitigates the need for exposing insecure ports to the Internet, which compromises security and increases the likelihood of digital intruder attacks.

The following instructions comprise a rough guide:

• Install OpenSSH, and dependent packages, using the Cygwin installation tool (CTRL + click to run)

In writing this circular buffer class, I was faced with an interesting problem. I wanted to pass a negative offset (e.g. -2) to the get() method, but bound that within the range of allocated array cells (e.g. 0-3).

One option would be to rely on Java's mod function: e.g.

• k = Lookup((next_free_slot + offset)%total_slots)

Alternatively, this negative mod could be replaced by a positive mod, by adding the total number of cells to the offset:

• k = Lookup((next_free_slot + (total_slots+offset))%total_slots)

The attached code implements a Circular Buffer in Java, using this positive mod method. (CircleBuff.java has been renamed CircleBuff_java.txt for browser compatibility.)

I have just become a Zend PHP Certified Engineer. It's not quite letters after my name, but Zend have sent me a snazzy logo and all those months of study seem suddenly worthwhile!

I do solemnly swear to uphold the art of PHP programming, to never again mention all those other 'web' languages and to fight for truth, justice and more debugging time from hence forth!

Alex Stanhope
Lightenna Ltd.

On June 16th, Lightenna delivered a new training course designed to help technologists and programmers better design and evaluate Database systems.

"The course demystified Databases - it's been a real help."
Mark, Cramer Systems Europe           

All course materials including notes, references and a syllabus are available here.

More courses are planned later this year. If you'd like more information on what kind of bespoke training Lightenna can provide for your business, please contact us.

If like us you use Orange as your mobile phone service provider, you may have received calls from companies purporting to be 'working with Orange' or 'on behalf of Orange'.

In our experience these companies are typically trying to convince us to upgrade our handsets or change tariff.

We contacted Orange and received this policy description back.

Hello Alex

Thank you for your mail regarding marketing calls.

I can confirm if Orange representatives make an outbound call for promotional or sales purpose a notepad is applied to your account with details of the call. Unfortunately independent dealers will also call customers in order to generate a sale, they would know that mobile numbers have prefixes ie: 07973****** and use predictive diallers to make contact.

We've launched a news service to keep you updated with the latest goings on at Lightenna.

These bulletins will contain not only company information, current work and contract wins but also technology news.

Our tech reports are a way we share information we've learned in the course of designing and building database-driven web sites.

All the news items will be archived and Google searchable and, we're hoping, will build into a useful online resource.