Saturday 30th June saw a one off event organised by the PHPNW community called LAMP and Beyond. The idea was that it would bring together people of differing abilities with the aim of sharing skills and experience with servers, programming, source control, or whatever happened to be of interest at the time.

The good thing about working in a city like Manchester is that there is an active digital community. This means that there are quite a few digital events as well as a number of communities and user groups. I have been going to (and even organising) local user groups for a while now and I always learn something or help someone out, but the groups are more than that.

I recently built a Drupal site on an Apache server sertup and everything seemed fine until someone running IE8 tried to download a .docx file. For some reason IE8 insisted that this file was a .zip file and would open it as such, causing a bit of confusion as to what the problem was. I assumed that this was due to the mime type of the file not being set properly, but I decided to do a quick search to see if I could find anything to corroborate this. I thought it might be something odd that IE8 was doing as everything else was downloading the file perfectly.

Understanding what it is that the client needs is an integral part of software development. The client will usually help you out by telling you what they need the system to do. What you will generally have is a big list of the things that the system should do. Rather than explain the difference between the terms "function requirements" and "non-functional requirements" to the client, you can save time by using MoSCoW.

This week I was pointed, somewhat ironically through Twitter, to a blog post from Chris Shiflett about how we need a blogging revival. Which is something I quite agree with as although Twitter is great for a sense of community, it is impossible to impart good technical knowledge and/or experience through 120 characters.

An IP address is an address for a computer on the Internet. The usual example used is of a web server that can be accessed via a URL that is translated behind the scenes into an IP address, but IP addresses can be used to find any computer on the Internet.