37 Signals Tries 4 Day Work Weeks

Yeah, that’s right. The fine folks over at 37 Signals (creators of Backpack, Basecamp, Campfire, and more) have decided to try a few different things to “be one of the best places to work, learn, and generally be happy”, namely 4 day work weeks. I’ve seen quite a lot of posting about this announcement in my travels, and I didn’t really want to bother posting it again, but I just can’t help myself.

It sounds cool enough, and they have some really good rationale behind it, but I personally don’t see the need for it. The way I see it, most of the cool companies I’ve worked for have just gone by an even simpler rule: Make sure you get your work done, and do what you got to do afterwards. Beyond that, if you or your employees are TRULY passionate about the work that’s being done, the work week becomes irrelevant. I know that I’ll personally get engrossed in a project when it’s something cool, and work on it every moment I have.

So, I think the better solution to keeping people happy is to not work on things that suck… as much as possible. If your projects aren’t stupid or a waste of time, then you won’t have to worry about productivity, it takes care of itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really knocking these guys, it just seems like a superficial proposition. Most of us don’t have the money to play around three days a week anyway.

They do have some other really good ideas that I agree with like funding their employees extra-curricular interests and discretionary spending accounts. They’ve got a lot of good things to say, so why not check out their article and let me know what you think?

37 Signals: Workplace Experiments

Site / Life Overhaul - Good Things Coming Soon

I’ve been stuck in somewhat of a rut blogging / personal development-wise for the past months for many reasons, none of which are all that negative. While I have enjoyed my time working on such sites as Cellware and some other projects for the last 10 months, I feel like I’ve lost sight of a lot of things that are important to me in my life. To that end, it’s time for some changes…

What’s New

I’ve accepted a position at Aptana, and will be working on some pretty cool stuff with some of the brightest people in the industry. Look for a lot of really interesting and exciting things to come as I spend more time with them. This position will require me to move across the country (Florida to California), and I’m looking forward to a change of scenery (and lifestyle).

What’s more relevant to most of my readers (thanks to everyone who visits), is what’s going to change with my content. I’ve decided to go over every article I’ve posted on here, and get rid of anything that I’m not happy with. This will take me some time, so please be patient as I work through everything. My goal is to have nothing but great content up, and none of the other half-assed or weak articles that are scattered throughout. I’ve also changed the look of the site and upgraded to the most recent version of Wordpress.

What’s Not New

The thumbnailer project is still up, and I hope to be able to update it soon. If you came here looking for it, just check out the projects page, and you’ll find your way to what you need. I’ve also decided to wipe out all the comments I’ve received. As much as I love everyone’s feedback, it’s entirely too difficult to port these over from the old blog, so I’ve decided to start over.

I’m very happy to be able to get back to doing what I love… learning new things, working with developers that are like-minded with me, and writing stuff that (hopefully) ends up helping people out. I’ve said it a million times, I’ve only made it to where I am in large part because of everything I’ve learned from the community on the web, and I feel it’s important that I give back and help everyone out in whatever ways I can. Stay tuned, as I’m going to be updating a lot more often, and working on some really cool things!

Uploading Large Files With PHP

Let me first start by saying that I’m currently working at a startup, and for anyone who’s ever done this, you know it sucks up a LOT of your time… in my case pretty much all of it. I’m not complaining by any means, I’m doing some of the coolest work I’ve ever done in fact! However, I just wanted to explain my little posting hiatus…

Anyway, on to the matter at hand. I have found myself in a position where I am writing scripts that may need to upload fairly large files. My scripts were timing out, and I couldn’t seem to figure out why. For the unitiated, there are some standard things that you usually do to both your php.ini and in your script in this situation:

• Set your max_upload_size in php.ini higher (it’s only 2M out of the box)
• Set your script timeout to never (set_time_limit(0); in your scripts… don’t do this in your php.ini)

However, it turns out there are some other php.ini config variables that you may need to look at:

• memory_limit - This may also be an obvious one to some people, but for those of you who don’t know, this restricts how much memory PHP is allowed to consume while processing. When working with images and large files, this needs to be upped to accommodate these needs.
• post_max_size - This was the one killing me, and it was a major “Duh” moment as well. If you aren’t allowed to create a large post, how can you expect to upload a large file?? This should be set the same as your max_upload_size.
• max_input_time - the time that the script should spend in accepting input. This is setting defaults to 60 seconds, and you will probably need to update this as well

That’s about it! Quick and simple solution to a problem that is probably pretty common.

Quickie - Weird PHP Seg Faults & Custom Session Handlers

So, I have to say that I’m no server admin, but I certainly can accomplish most everything I need to do. Today I was working on setting up php on a production server to fit some unique needs, and ran into an interesting problem. The only unique thing about this setup is that mysql is installed in a non-standard way (two instances running on the same box so we can have replication), and basically all that was weird about this was the path to the mysql binaries and support files. So, what went wrong anyway?

Well, I got everything set up, and did my first test promotion from the production environment. I hit the site, and… nothing. Not an error message, just a white, useless screen. First thing I checked was that my show_errors directive was set to on, and it was, so no luck. The next step was to restart apache and check for any errors… again, nothing. Starting to get a little frustrated, I took a peek at my error logs (/var/log/httpd/error_log for the unitiated), and discovered a wonderful message:

[notice] child pid 32222 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

As any person scratching their head would do, I hit up google… to no real avail. Just a bunch of php bug reports. So, what happened, and how did I fix it? Read on…

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Speed Up Zend Studio

I’ve been using zend studio for quite some time now, and have found it to be extremely useful. My only compaint with it is that it’s written in java, but I do understand the cross-platform benefits of doing this. I’ve also heard from various people that they have issues with it lagging and crawling along, but never had any issue myself… until today. I just switched jobs, so I naturally needed to install studio on my new workstation. Well, wouldn’t you know, but I became one of those people. I did a lot of searching through many forums and came across many different things to try, but none of them seemed to work. Not being one to give up, I finally found the solution to my problem, and it was baffling to say the least. Oh well, problem solved, and I can get on with my day. However, to save everyone the time that I spent pouring over the forums, here’s a list of all the possible solutions for speeding up zend studio…

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