I recently used Amazon Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a PHP web app that used $_SESSION. Initially, things did not work. My logs filled up with errors caused by session_start(), indicating that the session data could not be written to disk. Permission denied. The messages all looked like this:

PHP Warning...

The Go language has a built-in logging system, as well as a built-in syslog interface. It is convenient to be able to call Go's log.Print() from anywhere in your code and know that the message will make it's way somewhere useful. But Go's basic logging mechanism simply logs to STDOUT.

However, it...

With several books under my belt, I didn't think writing a dissertation would require different writing tools. I fully expected to be able to make do with the word processor-centered workflow that I had grown accostomed to.

But when it comes to a serious writing project, a word processor just didn...

The HP Cloud blog is running what is likely to be my last HP Cloud video. This one focuses on HP Cloud Object Storage.

Working with object storage has been one of my favorite projects while at HP Cloud. Together with Matt Farina, I built:

• A PHP library for working with object storage and CDN.

The HP Cloud blog is running the second in my series of videos about dev/test. The focus this time is on how we accelerated our agile development using the cloud.

In case you missed it, the first installment was on Image Snapshots for Dev/Test. I also wrote an article in the same series on The Holy...

Would you like to build your own PaaS-like playground? It works like Heroku, runs on Ubuntu, and is entirely Open Source. What's it called? Dokku.

In this article, I explain how to install Dokku on an HP Cloud instance to build your own mini-PaaS with hardly any work. <!--break-->

Step 1: Create...

Are LXC-style containers the alternative to using cloud-based virtual machines? There's been some hype suggesting that "the cloud" is moving away from virtual machines and toward containers. In a way, this is yet another misunderstanding of what the cloud is. These are not two solutions to the same...

The Go programming language provides the cgo tool for calling C code inside of a Go program. At compile time, Go can even compile C code into the Go executable.

One of the gotchas for using this functionality is that from within Go, you cannot execute C function pointers. I ran into this while working...

HP Cloud asked me to do a quick 2-minute video on how we use phoenix images to manage dev/test/production platform stability. There's a short blog post at HP Cloud, but here's the video.

(Craig Winters at HP did all the fancy stuff. I was just the talking head.) <!--break-->

Fabric is a network-aware build tool. Think of it like make (or rake, or pake, etc.) for remote servers. With Fabric, it is just as easy to script a remote environment as it is to script a local one. In fact, with Fabric, you can do both.

Fabric can actually be used to automate installing a server...