Jason E. Sweat's weblog

Absolutely Hilarious

Jason — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:11:59 +0000

Thanks to Sebastian via Twitter in this tweet. + + + + + + + +

PHP Oracle Web Development

Jason — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:03:19 +0000

I was recently given the opportunity to review a new book on the subject of PHP and Oracle databases. We use Oracle databases nearly exclusively at work, so this seemed like a good opportunity to me. +“PHP Oracle Web Development” itself resembles many other technical references available for PHP, soft cover, approximately 375 pages, from [...]

php|tek TDD live code

Jason — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:34:32 +0000

Many thanks to everyone who attended my Test Driven Development tutorial today at php|tek in Chicago. As promised, here is the code we developed during the live coding sections of the tutorial.

Fixing RCA Lyra’s “File System Corrupted” error

Jason — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 03:59:20 +0000

If you have an RCA Lyra RD2762 and you have encounted the dreaded "File System Corrupted!" error, here is a few easy steps using Linux to recover your MP3 player.

PHPLondon

Jason — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:17:38 +0000

On October 5th, I attended the PHPLondon meeting and gave a talk on Test Driven Development. This blog shows the code we developed in a live TDD demonstration, has a link to the slides I used, and some general observations about the event and my trip.

Places I Would Rather Be

Jason — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 15:24:17 +0000

Right now I am sitting in the B concourse of Chicago OâHare airport. The next two flights to Pittsburg have been canceled, so I am going to be late to my corporate eBusiness summit meeting. + + +Where I would rather be is with Marco and crew in Toranto at the PHP|Works conference. I am sad to miss the chance to hobnob with my PHP buddies. + +Another interesting conference comming up is the DC PHP conference in Oct. It looks like many of the familiar PHP faces will be around there as well. + +If you are in the UK, perhaps we can hook up at the October PHP London meeting, I am on a business trip to the UK and was able to schedule it to attend this as well.

Farewell, buy why did you go?

Jason — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:40:16 +0000

Recently, Jani Taskinen publicly decided to disassociate himself from the PHP project. An individual is certainly able to choose how they allocate their time, particularly when it is a volunteer effort, I and respect his decision. For the past few days I have been mulling over how he came to make that decision though.

PHP Conferences

Jason — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 04:04:14 +0000

If you have never been to a PHP Conference, you owe it to yourself to make 2006 a year to attend one. There are of course the obvious benefits of attending the presentations and being able to see these presentations first hand as well as being able to interact with the presenters, ask questions, etc. A more subtle benefit is the networking which happens at these conferences. People whom you recognize from email addresses on mailing lists, pseudonyms on forums or names on the covers of PHP books are actually living breathing people (and usually fine, upstanding people at that). PHP conferences are a great opportunity to interact with both the presenters, conference organizers and the other attendees, who likely share many common interests with you, chiefly a passion for PHP and web development.

Nerd Score

Jason — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 03:23:44 +0000

Check out your nerd score.

Advise for an Aspiring PHP Developer

Jason — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:57:05 +0000

A self described "aspiring PHP developer" recently asked me for advise on how to improve his skills since there were no PHP offerings at his school. Here was the advise I gave him. What advise would you give to an aspiring programmer?

Absolutely Hilarious

Jason — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:11:59 +0000

Thanks to Sebastian via Twitter in this tweet. - - - - - - - -

PHP Oracle Web Development

Jason — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:03:19 +0000

I was recently given the opportunity to review a new book on the subject of PHP and Oracle databases. We use Oracle databases nearly exclusively at work, so this seemed like a good opportunity to me. -“PHP Oracle Web Development” itself resembles many other technical references available for PHP, soft cover, approximately 375 pages, from [...]

php|tek TDD live code

Jason — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:34:32 +0000

Many thanks to everyone who attended my Test Driven Development tutorial today at php|tek in Chicago. As promised, here is the code we developed during the live coding sections of the tutorial.

Fixing RCA Lyra’s “File System Corrupted” error

Jason — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 03:59:20 +0000

If you have an RCA Lyra RD2762 and you have encounted the dreaded "File System Corrupted!" error, here is a few easy steps using Linux to recover your MP3 player.

PHPLondon

Jason — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:17:38 +0000

Places I Would Rather Be

Jason — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 15:24:17 +0000

Right now I am sitting in the B concourse of Chicago OâHare airport. The next two flights to Pittsburg have been canceled, so I am going to be late to my corporate eBusiness summit meeting. - - -Where I would rather be is with Marco and crew in Toranto at the PHP|Works conference. I am sad to miss the chance to hobnob with my PHP buddies. - -Another interesting conference comming up is the DC PHP conference in Oct. It looks like many of the familiar PHP faces will be around there as well. - -If you are in the UK, perhaps we can hook up at the October PHP London meeting, I am on a business trip to the UK and was able to schedule it to attend this as well.

Farewell, buy why did you go?

Jason — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:40:16 +0000

PHP Conferences

Jason — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 04:04:14 +0000

Nerd Score

Jason — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 03:23:44 +0000

Check out your nerd score.

Advise for an Aspiring PHP Developer

Jason — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:57:05 +0000

Interesting Developments at Zend

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-05-21T14:41:15Z

+ For those of you who haven't been following it, Zend on Monday went through a series of lay-offs which was picked up by the Washington Post. According to the brief article (which was a syndication from TechCrunch) Zend has laid off approximately 25% of their R&D staff in at attempt to become cash-flow positive and potentially line themselves up for an acquisition. I don't have any hard figures as to what that means but I'd estimate that Zend's recovered somewhere between $600-800k in revenues based on an educated guess of the average R&D salary for someone in Isreal (where R&D is based) of $60->$80k USD and the number of people estimated by TechCrunch as being laid off (about 10 people, which sounds right). If I'm anywhere in the ballpark there I think that's a significant recovery for Zend and very well could put them into the black.. Which is why Everyone I've spoken to who is familiar with the subject considers the lay-offs a positive thing (except of course those who lost their jobs -- sorry guys/girls -- I'd love to hire you but I can't open up an R&D shop in Isreal just yet..), but here are some things I've either heard from within the organization or read online which I think are worth commenting on:
+
+

R&D wasn't the only department to get hit, although it was clearly the primary focus. The IT department, Business Development, Sales, and Global Services were also affected to a much smaller degree

Despite speculation from Internet News that the most likely buyer is IBM, but I find that very unlikely. I think it is much more probable that Microsoft is the buyer if one exists

+Why do I think I'd put my money behind Microsoft instead of IBM? Well, there are a lot of reasons.. Firstly, despite the impression given by the reporter at Internet News, IBM to me has shown more negativity in general toward Zend then it has positive in recent dates. For instance, Project Zero (cited as a positive reason IBM would buy Zend) in my mind is hardly such. If you haven't seen this before, Project Zero is a platform for dynamic languages implemented entirely in Java (one of which is a PHP implementation). The thing is, the PHP which exists in Project Zero is completely incompatible with all of Zend's product line -- hardly something I would say means IBM is trying to align itself with Zend. In reality, I think Project Zero is really a shot at Microsoft's .NET architecture and an answer to the recent moves from Microsoft to port implementations of popular dynamic languages to run in the .NET DLR and IBM's willing to step on Zend's toes to do so. Secondly, while it is true that QEDWiki is a PHP application and built on top of Zend Framework, in recent months I've heard more and more rumors from contacts inside of IBM that QED is going to be re-implemented entirely in Java long-term.. Again, I just don't see how IBM's recent behavior adds up to an acquisition.
+
+That said, I do think Microsoft has a lot of good reasons to add Zend to their empire. Firstly, Zend has been a huge asset to Microsoft through their Technology Collaboration to make PHP a first-class citizen on the Windows platform and get it certified for Windows Server 2008. This partnership, to me, is huge for Microsoft -- to the point I expressed concern over Microsoft's ultimate intentions -- the same justifications for my paranoia could very well be reason enough for Microsoft to acquire Zend. Secondly, I think a Zend acquisition makes a lot of sense to a company like Microsoft if you believe they well ultimately prevail in purchasing all or part of a company like Yahoo! which is entirely based on PHP technologies (incidentally, I don't think Facebook is out of the picture either as a potential Microsoft acquisition target -- they already have an equity-interest there and the Facebook advertising engine could prove equally useful in the battle with Google). Bottom line to me is both of Microsoft's best options to compete with Google are PHP-based technology shops and Zend has been Microsoft's biggest ally in making these two very different technology platforms operate harmoniously -- that's got to be worth a few bucks. Oh, and did I mention that the rumor on the street is that Zend's co-founders Andi and Zeev have been making recent visits to Seattle? Not that it means anything, but it does make one wonder..
+
+Then again, I could be entirely wrong about the whole thing -- it sure is fun to speculate about it though.
+
+ +

On MicroHoo!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-05-05T05:13:55Z

+ If you don't read the Wall Street Journal Blog, this entry is particularly amusing for those of you who were interested in following the Microsoft-Yahoo! potential acquisition. +

Fairwell, Zend!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-04-01T22:47:26Z

+ After 3 1/2 years at Zend Technologies I am both excited and saddened to announce that I will be resigning from my role of Sr. Professional Services Architect in the Global Services group as of April 11th. While it saddens me to leave such a vibrant, exciting and cutting-edge company I am excited to accept a CTO position at Automotive Computer Services (ACS).
+
+I can't share the details in a forum such as this as to why I have made such a change just yet, but needless to say despite the mid-90s look of the web site of my new employer I will be heavily involved in Web 2.0 technology, including Zend Framework/PHP and am quite excited at my new opportunity!
+
+On that note, I am actively seeking out quality developers, graphics designers, and system administrators for a new Silicon Valley based development and production office with a start date of the next few weeks. If you are a solid PHP developer (Javascript a plus), Graphics wizard, or system admin who is interested in working on exciting Web 2.0 technologies for great pay and benefits in the Bay Area, please send me your resume john at coggeshall dot org! I am looking for 25 quality people for the new office, so please don't hesitate to apply!!
+
+Finally, I'd like to give a huge thank you to Zend. It's been an amazing experience to spend the last three years in this environment and there is absolutely no measure to the amount of personal and professional growth I have been given the opportunity to realize through my time here. I wish all of my colleagues at Zend the best both as an organization and as individuals and know (not expect) that they will continue to achieve great things.
+
+
+
+
+ +

Clinton Campaign Checking Acc!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-02-15T02:17:12Z

+ In an amazing example of how a lack of security can lead to really bad things, Seacoastonline.com has posted this article on their web site regarding a $500 check the Hilary Clinton campaign reimbursed someone for some rental space.. The thing is, they have a picture of the gentlemen holding the check -- with the Clinton campaign full routing and account number in plain view! I'm not a particularly experienced hacker, but it seems to me the full banking and routing information of my checking account would be a bad thing to post online -- oh well, it's not like there are millions upon millions of dollars to protect. +

Sorry for the downtime

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-02-02T03:28:59Z

+ For those of you who visited my web-site recently and found my blog to have require_once errors -- sorry! Apparently my hosting provider, Media Temple decided to change something which resulted in my paths being broken. As I have recently relocated from Buffalo, NY to San Jose, CA I didn't notice the issue until recently.
+
+There are so many things to talk about recently! I have been swept up in a wave of very interesting PHP and business things lately..
+
+

The purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems for 1 billion dollars

The offer to purchase Yahoo! by Microsoft for upwards of $45 billion dollars

+
+There are a few others too.. I'm sure I'll find some time to blog about my thoughts this weekend..
+
+John +

West Coast recruiters wanted

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-01-29T02:48:19Z

+ Zend Technologies is looking for some more PHP rockstars.. If you are interested let me know (john at zend dot com). If you aren't interest but know some *good* recruiters in the SF Bay Area for this sort of thing I'd appreciate it as well!!
+
+ +

Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-01-08T02:15:37Z

+ Over the past few months there has been an increasing amount of conversation about Zend Core, especially around how best to compile custom extensions for it. While Core does ship with a large list of extensions (which are all QA'd and supported by Zend) there are times when you would like to include non-official extensions from PECL for various reasons. Since there isn't a great deal of documentation out there about how to do this I thought I'd write a quick tutorial.
+
+Basically, to compile an extension for Zend Core you need to go through the following steps:
+
+1) Download the source of your desired extension
+2) Create the ./configure script for the extension as a stand-alone shared lib ("PHPize" it)
+3) Compile and install the extension
+4) Add the extension to your php.ini file
+
+Where most people get caught up is in step two of this process. So, how does one create the correct ./configure script? In a vanilla PHP from php.net, you would do this by executing the phpize command in the extension's source directory:
+
+



+$ cd /path/to/my/pecl/ext 

+$/usr/local/bin/phpize

+

+
+When executed, this shell script will execute the necessary commands to prepare the extension for compilation and create a configure script in the extension's directory which you can then use to compile your extension. Think of this configure script as a mini-version of the standard PHP distribution version which only will work for the specific extension you are building:
+
+



+$ ./configure --enable-my-ext

+$ make

+$ sudo make install

+

+
+When building an extension for Zend Core, the process is almost identical. In fact, the only real difference is that you need to use the Zend Core version of phpize (and perhaps provide some paths to certain files)..for example:
+
+



+$ cd /path/to/my/pecl/ext

+$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

+

+
+Because Zend Core is installed it a directory under /usr/local/Zend, chances are when you attempt to execute the ./configure script it will complain that it can't find a program called 'php-config'. To get around this, you'll need to make sure you also include --with-php-config as part of any ./configure command you need to compile the extension:
+
+



+$ ./configure --enable-my-ext --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

+$ make

+$ make install

+

+
+For most cases that should be all you need to compile the extension for Zend Core!
+
+

If you need to compile a PDO Driver

+One of the few exceptions to the directions above is when you attempt to compile a custom PDO extension. For example, many people are interested in compiling the pdo_sqlite drivers for PDO into Core. Unfortunately, currently such a process is not officially supported by Zend. However, if you feel that you are comfortable enough you can "tweak" Zend Core to allow you to do so by following these steps:
+
+1) Determine the PHP version your version of Zend Core uses by viewing the phpinfo() page of Zend Core.
+
+2) Download the same PHP version from php.net (or check it out from the repository)
+
+$ cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co -r php_5_2_5 php-src
+
+3) Copy all of the PDO header files into Zend Core
+
+



+$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo

+$ mkdir /usr/local/Zend/Core/includes/ext/pdo

+$ cp *.h /usr/local/Zend/Core/includes/ext/pdo

+

+
+4) Use the procedure outlined above for compiling a custom extension for Core to compile a custom version of the PDO base extension (in the ext/pdo directory of your PHP source install)
+
+



+$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo

+$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

+$ ./configure --enable-my-ext --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

+$ make

+$ make install

+

+
+5) Compile your custom PDO drivers
+
+



+$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo_sqlite

+$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

+$ ./configure --with-pdo-sqlite --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

+$ make

+$ make install

+

+
+Note, when doing this process chances are you will have to compile custom version of all PDO-related extensions for compatibility reasons. Once you have everything compiled you can enable the extensions in PHP by modifying the php.ini file (don't forget to restart the server afterwards!). Assuming everything worked as planned, you should be able to see the extension's information within phpinfo() and the Zend Core GUI will show the extension in the extension list (although you will not be able to control it, etc as you would a standard supported extension).
+
+Hope this helps! +

Merry Christmas!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-26T00:18:58Z

+ Merry Christmas everyone! I hope all of you have an opportunity to relax, spend time with your loved ones, and enjoy the holiday!! +

Lighten up your day

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-11T22:31:43Z

+ Here is a little video to lighten up your day. A co-worker of mine sent me the link, and I just had to share it some more!
+
+
+
+
+ +

Zend_Service_SlideShare approved

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-11T03:39:12Z

+ Today I received an e-mail informing me that my proposal for the Zend_Service_SlideShare component was accepted into the Zend Framework incubator. Woo hoo!
+
+What's the component? If you haven't seen it before, Slideshare.net is an excellent site for hosting various Powerpoint slide shows for public consumption (think YouTube for slide shows). I wrote the component during the my site redesign to host my various slide shows which can be found in the resources section.
+
+While it is not quite complete (everything but uploading slide shows is there), you can check out the source code by pointing your SVN to the Zend Framework Repository. Please use the Zend Framework bug tracking system if you find bugs. +

The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-30T05:09:58Z

+ Recently I've had Microsoft on my radar a lot, mostly because I'm wrapping up development of the Zend_InfoCard component for Zend Framework, but also because everyone has been talking about the recent release of the FastCGI support in IIS.
+
+Wonderful, now I can also run PHP in a reasonable fashion on IIS -- that's good for everyone right?
+
+I'm not so sure, to be honest. I mean let's face it there is competition out there for the web. A company like Microsoft would be simply neglectful if they didn't do everything in their power to sway, control, and if at all possible dominate this space right? Over the years when it came to public-facing web development PHP has been without a doubt been the leader, but why? I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that Microsoft didn't have a reasonable platform for their web development technologies then it had to do with PHP just being better..
+
+
Continue reading "The Microsoft Trojan Horse?" +

Train at Zend!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-28T01:15:02Z

+ Zend needs, pretty much immediately, a part-time trainer who can do online trainings periodically (generally in two hour blocks starting either at 11am or 2pm EST). Must be able to speak intelligently and authoratively on various PHP subjects you know and have the time to learn any subjects being taught you might be lacking in.
+
+If you think you can fit the bill, e-mail me: john at zend dot com. +

Making your boss like you more..

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-19T22:45:51Z

+ I've seen this about a million times at various clients working in the services business, so I thought I might take a moment to mention it on my blog -- perhaps someone will find it valuable. From where I stand, there is a huge portion of the development community in general (not only PHP really either) that seem to think their job is nothing more then to write code without consideration for anything else in the organization.
+
+Guess what? Your boss doesn't care how awesome your code is, or how slick your super-duper AJAX auto-complete wiz-bang thing is if you write something which doesn't support the business needs of the company.
+
+Here are some of the classic blunders I've seen:
+
+* Spending two days refactoring a piece of code which not only were they not asked to refactor, but it was working just fine before (no, the fact it was ugly is NOT always a good enough reason to refactor)
+
+* Trying to be the developer version of Vincent Van Gogh -- code can be art, but it is always a means to solve a real business need. Over-architecture doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like an idiot when the next guy shows you how to solve the same business need in 30 lines of code instead of 400.
+
+* Not understanding you are responsible for your own time lines. I don't care if you have a project manager or not working in the group -- ultimately at the end of the day as the guy writing the code if you say it's going to take 3 weeks to develop something and it takes you 3 months that is entirely your problem. What does that mean? It means when your boss comes over and constantly changes the scope or features of what you are trying to build if you don't push back and make him decide between getting the project done in 3 weeks or his feature that's your fault.
+
+* Know your business - its amazing how many developers are out there writing code without having any idea what-so-ever why they heck they are getting paid to write it. If you can't speak intelligently about the business your company is in and why your application is going to benefit that business for at least 30 minutes then you aren't being a very good developer. We all sometimes like to imagine that the world revolves around us, but let's face it -- you're working in a company and that company is trying to do something which you probably should understand before you try to write the code to do it.
+
+I'm sure there are more if I had more time, but that's good enough for now. Bottom line: Code is not the most important thing in business, even though it might be in OSS. If you want to be a successful professional OSS developer you need to understand both and react accordingly!
+
+ +

Hey Planet PHP!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-16T23:09:07Z

+ Hey Planet PHP! I sent an e-mail and used your form on the site but I still don't see my blog back on the blog roll... Did I do something to upset the syndication Gods?
+ +

Alan has smoked too much PHP

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-16T00:16:55Z

+ Alan, I think you were smoking way too much PHP when you wrote this post.. This in particular really surprised me to hear you say:
+
+

+"...if there was an apache module that did mysql stored procedure calls based on the request URL, and returned JSON, I suspect PHP would be practically obsolite....."
+

+
+While I do understand the concept your explaining, I simply can't see how the model is practical at all for two big reasons:
+
+Reason 1: Businesses will never build applications designed to make money when the entire application is transmitted open-source to any client which requests it.
+
+Reason 2: Without a server-side language such as PHP, there is not a viable security model. Javascript data validation is a half-measure at best, and do you honestly believe that it makes sense to use stored procedures written in SQL to scrub data?
+
+While I think Alan really did go a bit off the deep end, he has touched on a pretty interesting point though. While I can't see the server-side ever going away I do think that in the near future the development model will change from what it is today to a completely event-based model based on a json-powered message bus between the client and server. IBM's QEDWiki uses Zend Framework to create such a bus and I have to say it's a very impressive architecture. The idea that PHP programming will for a lot of people resemble Visual Basic is really a lot closer then a lot of people might think.
+
+ +

Interesting Developments at Zend

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-05-21T14:41:15Z

- For those of you who haven't been following it, Zend on Monday went through a series of lay-offs which was picked up by the Washington Post. According to the brief article (which was a syndication from TechCrunch) Zend has laid off approximately 25% of their R&D staff in at attempt to become cash-flow positive and potentially line themselves up for an acquisition. I don't have any hard figures as to what that means but I'd estimate that Zend's recovered somewhere between $600-800k in revenues based on an educated guess of the average R&D salary for someone in Isreal (where R&D is based) of $60->$80k USD and the number of people estimated by TechCrunch as being laid off (about 10 people, which sounds right). If I'm anywhere in the ballpark there I think that's a significant recovery for Zend and very well could put them into the black.. Which is why Everyone I've spoken to who is familiar with the subject considers the lay-offs a positive thing (except of course those who lost their jobs -- sorry guys/girls -- I'd love to hire you but I can't open up an R&D shop in Isreal just yet..), but here are some things I've either heard from within the organization or read online which I think are worth commenting on:
-
-

R&D wasn't the only department to get hit, although it was clearly the primary focus. The IT department, Business Development, Sales, and Global Services were also affected to a much smaller degree

Despite speculation from Internet News that the most likely buyer is IBM, but I find that very unlikely. I think it is much more probable that Microsoft is the buyer if one exists

-Why do I think I'd put my money behind Microsoft instead of IBM? Well, there are a lot of reasons.. Firstly, despite the impression given by the reporter at Internet News, IBM to me has shown more negativity in general toward Zend then it has positive in recent dates. For instance, Project Zero (cited as a positive reason IBM would buy Zend) in my mind is hardly such. If you haven't seen this before, Project Zero is a platform for dynamic languages implemented entirely in Java (one of which is a PHP implementation). The thing is, the PHP which exists in Project Zero is completely incompatible with all of Zend's product line -- hardly something I would say means IBM is trying to align itself with Zend. In reality, I think Project Zero is really a shot at Microsoft's .NET architecture and an answer to the recent moves from Microsoft to port implementations of popular dynamic languages to run in the .NET DLR and IBM's willing to step on Zend's toes to do so. Secondly, while it is true that QEDWiki is a PHP application and built on top of Zend Framework, in recent months I've heard more and more rumors from contacts inside of IBM that QED is going to be re-implemented entirely in Java long-term.. Again, I just don't see how IBM's recent behavior adds up to an acquisition.
-
-That said, I do think Microsoft has a lot of good reasons to add Zend to their empire. Firstly, Zend has been a huge asset to Microsoft through their Technology Collaboration to make PHP a first-class citizen on the Windows platform and get it certified for Windows Server 2008. This partnership, to me, is huge for Microsoft -- to the point I expressed concern over Microsoft's ultimate intentions -- the same justifications for my paranoia could very well be reason enough for Microsoft to acquire Zend. Secondly, I think a Zend acquisition makes a lot of sense to a company like Microsoft if you believe they well ultimately prevail in purchasing all or part of a company like Yahoo! which is entirely based on PHP technologies (incidentally, I don't think Facebook is out of the picture either as a potential Microsoft acquisition target -- they already have an equity-interest there and the Facebook advertising engine could prove equally useful in the battle with Google). Bottom line to me is both of Microsoft's best options to compete with Google are PHP-based technology shops and Zend has been Microsoft's biggest ally in making these two very different technology platforms operate harmoniously -- that's got to be worth a few bucks. Oh, and did I mention that the rumor on the street is that Zend's co-founders Andi and Zeev have been making recent visits to Seattle? Not that it means anything, but it does make one wonder..
-
-Then again, I could be entirely wrong about the whole thing -- it sure is fun to speculate about it though.
-
- -

On MicroHoo!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-05-05T05:13:55Z

- If you don't read the Wall Street Journal Blog, this entry is particularly amusing for those of you who were interested in following the Microsoft-Yahoo! potential acquisition. -

Fairwell, Zend!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-04-01T22:47:26Z

- After 3 1/2 years at Zend Technologies I am both excited and saddened to announce that I will be resigning from my role of Sr. Professional Services Architect in the Global Services group as of April 11th. While it saddens me to leave such a vibrant, exciting and cutting-edge company I am excited to accept a CTO position at Automotive Computer Services (ACS).
-
-I can't share the details in a forum such as this as to why I have made such a change just yet, but needless to say despite the mid-90s look of the web site of my new employer I will be heavily involved in Web 2.0 technology, including Zend Framework/PHP and am quite excited at my new opportunity!
-
-On that note, I am actively seeking out quality developers, graphics designers, and system administrators for a new Silicon Valley based development and production office with a start date of the next few weeks. If you are a solid PHP developer (Javascript a plus), Graphics wizard, or system admin who is interested in working on exciting Web 2.0 technologies for great pay and benefits in the Bay Area, please send me your resume john at coggeshall dot org! I am looking for 25 quality people for the new office, so please don't hesitate to apply!!
-
-Finally, I'd like to give a huge thank you to Zend. It's been an amazing experience to spend the last three years in this environment and there is absolutely no measure to the amount of personal and professional growth I have been given the opportunity to realize through my time here. I wish all of my colleagues at Zend the best both as an organization and as individuals and know (not expect) that they will continue to achieve great things.
-
-
-
-
- -

Clinton Campaign Checking Acc!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-02-15T02:17:12Z

- In an amazing example of how a lack of security can lead to really bad things, Seacoastonline.com has posted this article on their web site regarding a $500 check the Hilary Clinton campaign reimbursed someone for some rental space.. The thing is, they have a picture of the gentlemen holding the check -- with the Clinton campaign full routing and account number in plain view! I'm not a particularly experienced hacker, but it seems to me the full banking and routing information of my checking account would be a bad thing to post online -- oh well, it's not like there are millions upon millions of dollars to protect. -

Sorry for the downtime

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-02-02T03:28:59Z

- For those of you who visited my web-site recently and found my blog to have require_once errors -- sorry! Apparently my hosting provider, Media Temple decided to change something which resulted in my paths being broken. As I have recently relocated from Buffalo, NY to San Jose, CA I didn't notice the issue until recently.
-
-There are so many things to talk about recently! I have been swept up in a wave of very interesting PHP and business things lately..
-
-

The purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems for 1 billion dollars

The offer to purchase Yahoo! by Microsoft for upwards of $45 billion dollars

-
-There are a few others too.. I'm sure I'll find some time to blog about my thoughts this weekend..
-
-John -

West Coast recruiters wanted

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-01-29T02:48:19Z

- Zend Technologies is looking for some more PHP rockstars.. If you are interested let me know (john at zend dot com). If you aren't interest but know some *good* recruiters in the SF Bay Area for this sort of thing I'd appreciate it as well!!
-
- -

Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2008-01-08T02:15:37Z

- Over the past few months there has been an increasing amount of conversation about Zend Core, especially around how best to compile custom extensions for it. While Core does ship with a large list of extensions (which are all QA'd and supported by Zend) there are times when you would like to include non-official extensions from PECL for various reasons. Since there isn't a great deal of documentation out there about how to do this I thought I'd write a quick tutorial.
-
-Basically, to compile an extension for Zend Core you need to go through the following steps:
-
-1) Download the source of your desired extension
-2) Create the ./configure script for the extension as a stand-alone shared lib ("PHPize" it)
-3) Compile and install the extension
-4) Add the extension to your php.ini file
-
-Where most people get caught up is in step two of this process. So, how does one create the correct ./configure script? In a vanilla PHP from php.net, you would do this by executing the phpize command in the extension's source directory:
-
-



-$ cd /path/to/my/pecl/ext 

-$/usr/local/bin/phpize

-

-
-When executed, this shell script will execute the necessary commands to prepare the extension for compilation and create a configure script in the extension's directory which you can then use to compile your extension. Think of this configure script as a mini-version of the standard PHP distribution version which only will work for the specific extension you are building:
-
-



-$ ./configure --enable-my-ext

-$ make

-$ sudo make install

-

-
-When building an extension for Zend Core, the process is almost identical. In fact, the only real difference is that you need to use the Zend Core version of phpize (and perhaps provide some paths to certain files)..for example:
-
-



-$ cd /path/to/my/pecl/ext

-$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

-

-
-Because Zend Core is installed it a directory under /usr/local/Zend, chances are when you attempt to execute the ./configure script it will complain that it can't find a program called 'php-config'. To get around this, you'll need to make sure you also include --with-php-config as part of any ./configure command you need to compile the extension:
-
-



-$ ./configure --enable-my-ext --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

-$ make

-$ make install

-

-
-For most cases that should be all you need to compile the extension for Zend Core!
-
-

If you need to compile a PDO Driver

-One of the few exceptions to the directions above is when you attempt to compile a custom PDO extension. For example, many people are interested in compiling the pdo_sqlite drivers for PDO into Core. Unfortunately, currently such a process is not officially supported by Zend. However, if you feel that you are comfortable enough you can "tweak" Zend Core to allow you to do so by following these steps:
-
-1) Determine the PHP version your version of Zend Core uses by viewing the phpinfo() page of Zend Core.
-
-2) Download the same PHP version from php.net (or check it out from the repository)
-
-$ cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co -r php_5_2_5 php-src
-
-3) Copy all of the PDO header files into Zend Core
-
-



-$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo

-$ mkdir /usr/local/Zend/Core/includes/ext/pdo

-$ cp *.h /usr/local/Zend/Core/includes/ext/pdo

-

-
-4) Use the procedure outlined above for compiling a custom extension for Core to compile a custom version of the PDO base extension (in the ext/pdo directory of your PHP source install)
-
-



-$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo

-$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

-$ ./configure --enable-my-ext --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

-$ make

-$ make install

-

-
-5) Compile your custom PDO drivers
-
-



-$ cd /path/to/php-src/ext/pdo_sqlite

-$ /usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/phpize

-$ ./configure --with-pdo-sqlite --with-php-config=/usr/local/Zend/Core/bin/php-config

-$ make

-$ make install

-

-
-Note, when doing this process chances are you will have to compile custom version of all PDO-related extensions for compatibility reasons. Once you have everything compiled you can enable the extensions in PHP by modifying the php.ini file (don't forget to restart the server afterwards!). Assuming everything worked as planned, you should be able to see the extension's information within phpinfo() and the Zend Core GUI will show the extension in the extension list (although you will not be able to control it, etc as you would a standard supported extension).
-
-Hope this helps! -

Merry Christmas!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-26T00:18:58Z

- Merry Christmas everyone! I hope all of you have an opportunity to relax, spend time with your loved ones, and enjoy the holiday!! -

Lighten up your day

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-11T22:31:43Z

- Here is a little video to lighten up your day. A co-worker of mine sent me the link, and I just had to share it some more!
-
-
-
-
- -

Zend_Service_SlideShare approved

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-12-11T03:39:12Z

- Today I received an e-mail informing me that my proposal for the Zend_Service_SlideShare component was accepted into the Zend Framework incubator. Woo hoo!
-
-What's the component? If you haven't seen it before, Slideshare.net is an excellent site for hosting various Powerpoint slide shows for public consumption (think YouTube for slide shows). I wrote the component during the my site redesign to host my various slide shows which can be found in the resources section.
-
-While it is not quite complete (everything but uploading slide shows is there), you can check out the source code by pointing your SVN to the Zend Framework Repository. Please use the Zend Framework bug tracking system if you find bugs. -

The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-30T05:09:58Z

- Recently I've had Microsoft on my radar a lot, mostly because I'm wrapping up development of the Zend_InfoCard component for Zend Framework, but also because everyone has been talking about the recent release of the FastCGI support in IIS.
-
-Wonderful, now I can also run PHP in a reasonable fashion on IIS -- that's good for everyone right?
-
-I'm not so sure, to be honest. I mean let's face it there is competition out there for the web. A company like Microsoft would be simply neglectful if they didn't do everything in their power to sway, control, and if at all possible dominate this space right? Over the years when it came to public-facing web development PHP has been without a doubt been the leader, but why? I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that Microsoft didn't have a reasonable platform for their web development technologies then it had to do with PHP just being better..
-
-
Continue reading "The Microsoft Trojan Horse?" -

Train at Zend!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-28T01:15:02Z

- Zend needs, pretty much immediately, a part-time trainer who can do online trainings periodically (generally in two hour blocks starting either at 11am or 2pm EST). Must be able to speak intelligently and authoratively on various PHP subjects you know and have the time to learn any subjects being taught you might be lacking in.
-
-If you think you can fit the bill, e-mail me: john at zend dot com. -

Making your boss like you more..

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-19T22:45:51Z

- I've seen this about a million times at various clients working in the services business, so I thought I might take a moment to mention it on my blog -- perhaps someone will find it valuable. From where I stand, there is a huge portion of the development community in general (not only PHP really either) that seem to think their job is nothing more then to write code without consideration for anything else in the organization.
-
-Guess what? Your boss doesn't care how awesome your code is, or how slick your super-duper AJAX auto-complete wiz-bang thing is if you write something which doesn't support the business needs of the company.
-
-Here are some of the classic blunders I've seen:
-
-* Spending two days refactoring a piece of code which not only were they not asked to refactor, but it was working just fine before (no, the fact it was ugly is NOT always a good enough reason to refactor)
-
-* Trying to be the developer version of Vincent Van Gogh -- code can be art, but it is always a means to solve a real business need. Over-architecture doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like an idiot when the next guy shows you how to solve the same business need in 30 lines of code instead of 400.
-
-* Not understanding you are responsible for your own time lines. I don't care if you have a project manager or not working in the group -- ultimately at the end of the day as the guy writing the code if you say it's going to take 3 weeks to develop something and it takes you 3 months that is entirely your problem. What does that mean? It means when your boss comes over and constantly changes the scope or features of what you are trying to build if you don't push back and make him decide between getting the project done in 3 weeks or his feature that's your fault.
-
-* Know your business - its amazing how many developers are out there writing code without having any idea what-so-ever why they heck they are getting paid to write it. If you can't speak intelligently about the business your company is in and why your application is going to benefit that business for at least 30 minutes then you aren't being a very good developer. We all sometimes like to imagine that the world revolves around us, but let's face it -- you're working in a company and that company is trying to do something which you probably should understand before you try to write the code to do it.
-
-I'm sure there are more if I had more time, but that's good enough for now. Bottom line: Code is not the most important thing in business, even though it might be in OSS. If you want to be a successful professional OSS developer you need to understand both and react accordingly!
-
- -

Hey Planet PHP!

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-16T23:09:07Z

- Hey Planet PHP! I sent an e-mail and used your form on the site but I still don't see my blog back on the blog roll... Did I do something to upset the syndication Gods?
- -

Alan has smoked too much PHP

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — 2007-11-16T00:16:55Z

- Alan, I think you were smoking way too much PHP when you wrote this post.. This in particular really surprised me to hear you say:
-
-

-"...if there was an apache module that did mysql stored procedure calls based on the request URL, and returned JSON, I suspect PHP would be practically obsolite....."
-

-
-While I do understand the concept your explaining, I simply can't see how the model is practical at all for two big reasons:
-
-Reason 1: Businesses will never build applications designed to make money when the entire application is transmitted open-source to any client which requests it.
-
-Reason 2: Without a server-side language such as PHP, there is not a viable security model. Javascript data validation is a half-measure at best, and do you honestly believe that it makes sense to use stored procedures written in SQL to scrub data?
-
-While I think Alan really did go a bit off the deep end, he has touched on a pretty interesting point though. While I can't see the server-side ever going away I do think that in the near future the development model will change from what it is today to a completely event-based model based on a json-powered message bus between the client and server. IBM's QEDWiki uses Zend Framework to create such a bus and I have to say it's a very impressive architecture. The idea that PHP programming will for a lot of people resemble Visual Basic is really a lot closer then a lot of people might think.
-
- -

Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise PHP Development”

enygma — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:21:20 +0000

I’ve been working through this book for the past few days and let me just say from the get-go, this book would be any asset to pretty much anyone on the PHP development food chain. It’s not a book for programmers telling you how to survive in an enterprise environment (there’s some of that, but that’s not the focus). The book gives the reader one of the most valuable things anyone in a corporate environment can have - how it all works. It might not be 100% the same as things around your office, but Ivo does a great job of giving everyone involved in the development of web apps (and it doesn’t have to be PHP!) a better idea of how all the pieces fit together.

The flow of the book follows a typical project flow with topics like: +

Gathering requirements +
the Planning stages +
which of your Building Blocks you’ll need to get the job done +
Developing the application +
Pushing it out to the public and keeping it maintained for its users +

For each, there’s lots of great tips crammed in with suggestions and recommendations based on some of his previous experiences.

There’s little to no code in the book, so don’t buy it expecting tutorials on writing code in an enterprise environment. What you will find here, though, is a better idea of where that code you’re writing will fit in the bigger picture.

Let me also reinforce that this book is not just for developers. Honestly, anyone involved with the creation of web-based applications can benefit from it. Managers, developers and testers will all find bits in here that they can pick up and hang on to for current and future projects.

I also like that he included the part there at the end about the different development methodologies. It’s a nice addition that can help open up the reader/developer’s eyes to new ways of doing things (Agile is especially fun).

I’d definitely recommend that you pick up this book if you’re going to be doing development in anything more than a one man shop. Actually, strike that - I’d recommend it for anyone that wants to get more familiar with the management side of development and how their code works in.

More information: php|architect’s Guide to Enterprise PHP Development

Subdomain Setup with Solar

enygma — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:38:12 +0000

So here was my situation - I wanted to have a subdomain off of my main site, but I didn't want to have to create a whole new docroot with an entire new Solar framework application in it. Besides being "yet another install" of the same sort of thing, it would also be a pain to keep up more than one codebase that does a lot of the same things.

This got me to thinking that there had to be a way to convince Solar that it could use the same code with the subdomain without issue. Sure enough, it could - and it was actually really easy. Here's my situation:

I wanted to have the main domain's stuff still work (www.mydomain.com) just like it always has but I wanted the subdomain to point to one controller out of the main application (in this case, the Solar_App_Foo controller) when the subdomain was called (foo.mydomain.com). Solar makes it dead simple - it's just a change in your config file.

Since it's PHP driven, you can do fun things like checking to see what the value of $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] is right there in the definition:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: +

+
$act=($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']=='foo.mydomain.com') ? 'foo' : 'index';
+
+
$config['Solar_Controller_Front']['default']=$act
+

That's all there is to it - the ternary check looks for the subdomain and sets the default controller to our Solar_App_Foo instead of the Index the rest of the site calls. And, since it's just part of the same site, all of the links and other functionality work just fine. Plus no extra code to maintain!

Hope this helps to anyone else out there trying to work with subdomains with Solar. Thanks to the crew in #solarphp on Freenode for the help!

Enterprise PHP (the Magazine)

enygma — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:53:21 +0000

Opening my mailbox yesterday welcomed me with a brown paper envelope addresses to "Herr Cornutt" and postmarked. I was confused since I wasn't expecting any bit of German to be coming my way. I was happily surprised, though, when I opened it to find the free issue of Enterprise PHP, one of the newest offerings into the PHP magazine category.

The publication is from the IT Republik folks and is a nice looking magazine. It comes in at about 50 pages but it has a good ad to story ratio so you don't feel slighted. Stories include:

Test 'em all! (by Sebastian Bergmann) +
Worlds apart... (by Patrick Lobacher covering PHP intagration and SAP systems) +
an interview with Jens Paul Berndt about decisions regarding PHP +
a case study of the Fiat Group SpA's use of PHP in their systems +
and the cover story, "Java is not PHP" +

The quality of the articles if good - it's interesting to see their use of so much clip art as illustrations. I suppose its due to the different audience than some of the other magazines. It's less about the development and more about the high-level thoughts and processes behind PHP in business - how it can function in their corporation (or small business!) and what sorts of considerations need to be made. The articles are good quality and keep consistent with the tone of the magazine. The quality of the printing is nice too (always a plus) and the thicker pages make the "enterpriseness" of it all feel even better.

Oh, and let's not forget about two articles by Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone! One covers several of the popular PHP frameworks and the other about how PHP security has advanced in the past few years.

If you get a chance and want to check out something a bit different in PHP Magazines, head over and grab a trial issue of this newest addition to the PHP publication world. Here's hoping we'll see great things from them!

Simple Content Management (with Templates & Permissions)

enygma — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:47:18 +0000

I've been working on a sort-of content management system at work and I wanted to get some opinions on the structure of it. Here's the basic summary:

I have a database table that keeps the content for me (title, content, date stamp, etc) - each item has a type. My goal was to have a system that would be flexible and allow me to store both hierarchal and date sorted information easily and all in one place. I set out with the intent to make it something I could potentially use for simple blogs, forums and even static content like FAQs.

Basically, everything is a child of something - there's a starting point (the top parent) and all of the children from there down. Since it's on Oracle, CONNECT BY is my best friend. I can point it at a parent and get back a recursive array of the values. So, if our top level was "blog" then its children might each be a "blogentry" with each of those having a collection of "blogcomment" content blocks.

You can see how the same sort of thing could apply itself to a forum layout (remarkably similar, actually). Parent/child all the way down, allowing for any number of nested levels of categories and topics.

Now comes the fun part - the PHP code.

I'm not quite done working all of the kinks out of it yet, but it's close. Here's the though process behind it, though. A fetch() function is called on the top-most parent to get it and its children's data. This is passed to a display() call to be handled. Inside of the display() call is a bit of logic that starts looking at the types of the data. The TYPE column in our table is really the key to how the whole system works. The display() logic looks at the type of the first item of data passed in and loads in a Helper from a predefined directory (include_once, of course). These are named according to the type they help with - so HelperBlog helps with type "blog", HelperBlogentry helps with "blogentry", etc. These are loaded, a new object is made and the display() method is called on it.

The children are passed in to this method where, if the child class (HelperBlog or whatever) chooses, they can be iterated over. The fun thing is that since the class extends our main class (in my case DynContent), we can just call the parent::display() method with the child data and it will recurse down through each of the layers.

There's more to it than just this (templating, permissions, etc) that I'm still working on, but it seems like it has potential. I'm curious as to if anyone else out there has approached this kind of idea in a similar way. I'd love to hear feedback/comments/whatever about the idea from anyone out there.

I don't have the code posted anywhere yet, but if you have an interest let me know in the comments.

Book Review: Beginning PHP and Oracle (Apress)

enygma — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:54:04 +0000

The nice friendly people over at APress sent me a few new books the other day, one of which is "Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional" by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla. Of the three, I was most interested in this one as a possible resource to hand off to other people in our company (the Oracle developers, specifically) for them to get started with PHP. Thankfully I can say that, after going through the book, it looks like an excellent fill to bridge the gap between most Oracle developers and the world of PHP.

If you're a PHP developer, pick up your copy of the book and follow my lead - set the book, spine down, on the table and stick your finger right in the middle. To your left is all of the PHP knowledge you've already learned and to your right is a wide open range of Oracle goodness just waiting for you to soak it all in. The first half of the book is an excellent introduction to PHP and can be handed to that special Oracle developer in your life who would like to get to know the language. The usual topics are there - the basic syntax, functions, arrays, object oriented programming, PEAR and lots more. If you're just going in for the Oracle/PHP combo, you'll find a lot more than you were asking for (which can be good and bad).

Things switch around at about the Chapter 26 mark where the first hints of Oracle start to show. This is where a lot of the Oracle developers out there can tune out a little more. The first few Oracle chapters deal with setting up and getting to know the Oracle environment, how to use views and transactions. Things get interesting when PHP jumps back in, though. PHP and Oracle developers alike can learn lots here.

Starting from Chapter 32 on, the rest of the book is devoted to the happy union of PHP making requests via the Oracle drivers to a local database (they use a local copy of Oracle Database XE in their examples). They include examples using transactions, generating a table of results with PEAR's HTML_Table and using views and triggers in your application.

This book works well for both audiences - the PHP developer wanting to learn what all the fuss surrounding Oracle is about and the Oracle developer looking for a peek into the world of the web's most popular web development language. There's a little something here for everyone (there's even a chapter on web services!) and it will be finding its way to the desks of several Oracle devs around here that have been bugging me to show them "that PHP thing" they've been hearing about.

Something a little more substantial - the Table of Contents: +

Chapter 1 Introducing PHP +
Chapter 2 Configuring Your Environment +
Chapter 3 PHP Basics +
Chapter 4 Functions +
Chapter 5 Arrays +
Chapter 6 Object-Oriented PHP +
Chapter 7 Advanced OOP Features +
Chapter 8 Error and Exception Handling +
Chapter 9 Strings and Regular Expressions +
Chapter 10 Working with the File and Operating System +
Chapter 11 PEAR +
Chapter 12 Date and Time +
Chapter 13 Forms +
Chapter 14 Authentication +
Chapter 15 Handling File Uploads +
Chapter 16 Networking +
Chapter 17 PHP and LDAP +
Chapter 18 Session Handlers +
Chapter 19 Templating with Smarty +
Chapter 20 Web Services +
Chapter 21 Secure PHP Programming +
Chapter 22 SQLite +
Chapter 23 Introducing PDO +
Chapter 24 Building Web Sites for the World +
Chapter 25 MVC and the Zend Framework +
Chapter 26 Introducing Oracle +
Chapter 27 Installing and Configuring Oracle Database XE +
Chapter 28 Oracle Database XE Administration +
Chapter 29 Interacting with Oracle Database XE +
Chapter 30 From Databases to Datatypes +
Chapter 31 Securing Oracle Database XE +
Chapter 32 PHPâs Oracle Functionality +
Chapter 33 Transactions +
Chapter 34 Using HTML_Table with Advanced Queries +
Chapter 35 Using Views +
Chapter 36 Oracle PL/SQL Subprograms +
Chapter 37 Oracle Triggers +
Chapter 38 Indexes and Optimizing Techniques +
Chapter 39 Importing and Exporting Data +
Chapter 40 Backup and Recovery +

Deploying PHP Applications?

enygma — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:35:28 +0000

So, a question for everyone out there - we're looking to do a bit of an overhaul for our build and release system and I was wondering what kind of setups you all out there had for your releases?

I've seen all sorts of different things (including a version control->rsync to production push and a fully CruiseControled push for everything) but I wanted to hear back from you fellow PHPers out there as to the kind of stuff you're using. We're looking to try to keep it open sourceish stuff, so suggestions down that line would be best but we're pretty open.

I don't have much experience with a more formalized build process but we're coming up against a need to separate out the responsibilities a bit more.

What do you use for your build (and deployment) process for your PHP applications and websites?

Keep PHP Alive! Grow a Beard!

enygma — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:42:10 +0000

Apparently, beards and programming languages have a direct correlation with each other, at least according to Tamir Khason. His latest list (a "take two" from this older post) reinforces the idea, pointing out lots of different languages and the people involved. Basically, the facial hair (beard, mutton chops, goatee, soul patch, whatever) of the major players involved is an indication as to how well the programming language is doing. Language in the "No Facial Hair" crowd include F#, IronPython and Prolog while the cool cats in the "Facial Hair Everywhere" group include C, Perl, Ruby and Python.

So, where does PHP fit on the list? Well, he points to this picture of Rasmus Lerdorf as a positive indicator for our beloved language, but there just might be enough other developers out there to counteract his effect.

For example: +

not a mustache to be found here +
a bit found here (go John and Ilia!) +
a huge point for the good guys with Zak's crumb-catcher +
Ben Ramsey sporting a mighty fine bit of face fuzz +
awesome representation from Belgium (I have been corrected) +
a bit of fuzz from Cal Evans (of Zend) +
a sad lack of facial hair from the Zend Twins - Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski +
another plus from Marco Tabini (of php|architect) +
and, of course, The Wez +
Marcus, Dan and Wez showing off their contributions toward the cause +
and this guy gets a little extra credit for not only the mutton-chops and goatee but also for the amount of time he put in to make the rest of the hair on his head do that +

Though thankfully, there's one growing part of the PHP community that makes it so much better without even having to worry about the facial hair (thank goodness) - the PHP Women (coming soon to a conference near you!)

So, what's the result? Does PHP pass the "Khason Test" for survival? Could the best way to support the community possibly be to let that facial hair grow? It's too soon to tell, if you ask me - right now, though, I'd say the current follicle count is tipping in favor of PHP being around for a good long time...

(Oh, and in case you're wondering - yes, I am a little on the scruffy side myself)

Save your Site, Cache that Data!

enygma — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:38:06 +0000

One of the things that I've noticed in running PHPDeveloper.org is that the highest traffic (most of the traffic for the site, actually) is going to the RSS feed giving the latest news I've posted. When I first relaunched the site with Solar, things were fine - but only for about ten minutes. As soon as everyone's aggregators came back on and started pulling the feed, the load on my server shot straight up. Thankfully I was able to get it back down to a more manageable level with a static version before the box took a nosedive. I had to do something about it and I figured that caching the feed's information was definitely a start.

I'd never really used the Solar_Cache stuff before, but thankfully - it's super easy. I figured that the biggest bottleneck in making the feed was pulling the data from the database each time. I opened up the controller for my feed (Feed.php - I know, very creative) and added a Solar_Cache object.

You can set this stuff up in your configuration file too, but I dropped it into my controller as a quick solution.

In my _setup() call: +

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: +

+
$config=array(
+
+
'adapter'=> 'Solar_Cache_Adapter_File',
+
+
'path'=> '/tmp',
+
+
'life'=> 200
+
+
);
+
+
$this->cache = Solar::factory('Solar_Cache', $config);
+

This creates a cache object in $this->cache that I can use for whatever I want. It's file caching and the results will get put in /tmp. That "200" for the life is in seconds, so it's at about three minutes right now. There's lots more options for caching besides files already built into the framework too like APC, eAccelerator, variables and XCache.

With our object made, we apply it down in our default actionIndex() wrapped around our database fetch: +

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: +

+
$ret=$this->cache->fetch('feed_data');
+
+
if(!$ret){
+
+
$news=$this->news->fetchNews();
+
+
$this->cache->save('feed_data',$news);
+
+
$ret=$news;
+
+
}
+
+
$this->news_items=$ret;
+

Pretty simple, really - the cache object checks to see if the data already exists and, if it does, just passes it on through to our view. If it doesn't (either that it's the first time it's being made or it has expired) it will pull the new news and push it out to the cache. The view then takes this array of values and makes a basic RSS feed out of it for all the world to see.

You wouldn't believe how much something simple like caching your feed can help on even a moderately popular site. Check out the class list for details on the other caching options.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-23

enygma — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@ramsey: did you ever get that "too many requests" issue solved with spaz? #
work you damn jquery selector! i command thee! #
@funkatron on spaz? every time I fire it up I get that "too many API requests" message after a few seconds #
@funkatron @ElizabethN trying the passowrd thing first... #
hmm, interesting - an onclick on an anchor and an onclick on a div firing at the same time #
@jeichorn nice! #
@ElizabethN heh...me too...wonder what it was #
okay, this cough is officially getting old #
grr....slow people-- #
how many dbas does it take to check permissions on a sequence...(apparently 3) #
@elazar heheh #
i <3 last.fm #

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-22

enygma — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Happy Earth Day all (or for me and my wife, our anniversary - woo!) #
we now return to "damn nature, you're scary!" #

Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise PHP Development”

enygma — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:21:20 +0000

The flow of the book follows a typical project flow with topics like: -

Gathering requirements -
the Planning stages -
which of your Building Blocks you’ll need to get the job done -
Developing the application -
Pushing it out to the public and keeping it maintained for its users -

For each, there’s lots of great tips crammed in with suggestions and recommendations based on some of his previous experiences.

More information: php|architect’s Guide to Enterprise PHP Development

Subdomain Setup with Solar

enygma — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:38:12 +0000

Since it's PHP driven, you can do fun things like checking to see what the value of $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] is right there in the definition:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: -

-
$act=($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']=='foo.mydomain.com') ? 'foo' : 'index';
-
-
$config['Solar_Controller_Front']['default']=$act
-

Hope this helps to anyone else out there trying to work with subdomains with Solar. Thanks to the crew in #solarphp on Freenode for the help!

Enterprise PHP (the Magazine)

enygma — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:53:21 +0000

The publication is from the IT Republik folks and is a nice looking magazine. It comes in at about 50 pages but it has a good ad to story ratio so you don't feel slighted. Stories include:

Test 'em all! (by Sebastian Bergmann) -
Worlds apart... (by Patrick Lobacher covering PHP intagration and SAP systems) -
an interview with Jens Paul Berndt about decisions regarding PHP -
a case study of the Fiat Group SpA's use of PHP in their systems -
and the cover story, "Java is not PHP" -

Simple Content Management (with Templates & Permissions)

enygma — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:47:18 +0000

I've been working on a sort-of content management system at work and I wanted to get some opinions on the structure of it. Here's the basic summary:

Now comes the fun part - the PHP code.

I don't have the code posted anywhere yet, but if you have an interest let me know in the comments.

Book Review: Beginning PHP and Oracle (Apress)

enygma — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:54:04 +0000

Something a little more substantial - the Table of Contents: -

Chapter 1 Introducing PHP -
Chapter 2 Configuring Your Environment -
Chapter 3 PHP Basics -
Chapter 4 Functions -
Chapter 5 Arrays -
Chapter 6 Object-Oriented PHP -
Chapter 7 Advanced OOP Features -
Chapter 8 Error and Exception Handling -
Chapter 9 Strings and Regular Expressions -
Chapter 10 Working with the File and Operating System -
Chapter 11 PEAR -
Chapter 12 Date and Time -
Chapter 13 Forms -
Chapter 14 Authentication -
Chapter 15 Handling File Uploads -
Chapter 16 Networking -
Chapter 17 PHP and LDAP -
Chapter 18 Session Handlers -
Chapter 19 Templating with Smarty -
Chapter 20 Web Services -
Chapter 21 Secure PHP Programming -
Chapter 22 SQLite -
Chapter 23 Introducing PDO -
Chapter 24 Building Web Sites for the World -
Chapter 25 MVC and the Zend Framework -
Chapter 26 Introducing Oracle -
Chapter 27 Installing and Configuring Oracle Database XE -
Chapter 28 Oracle Database XE Administration -
Chapter 29 Interacting with Oracle Database XE -
Chapter 30 From Databases to Datatypes -
Chapter 31 Securing Oracle Database XE -
Chapter 32 PHPâs Oracle Functionality -
Chapter 33 Transactions -
Chapter 34 Using HTML_Table with Advanced Queries -
Chapter 35 Using Views -
Chapter 36 Oracle PL/SQL Subprograms -
Chapter 37 Oracle Triggers -
Chapter 38 Indexes and Optimizing Techniques -
Chapter 39 Importing and Exporting Data -
Chapter 40 Backup and Recovery -

Deploying PHP Applications?

enygma — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:35:28 +0000

So, a question for everyone out there - we're looking to do a bit of an overhaul for our build and release system and I was wondering what kind of setups you all out there had for your releases?

I don't have much experience with a more formalized build process but we're coming up against a need to separate out the responsibilities a bit more.

What do you use for your build (and deployment) process for your PHP applications and websites?

Keep PHP Alive! Grow a Beard!

enygma — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:42:10 +0000

For example: -

not a mustache to be found here -
a bit found here (go John and Ilia!) -
a huge point for the good guys with Zak's crumb-catcher -
Ben Ramsey sporting a mighty fine bit of face fuzz -
awesome representation from Belgium (I have been corrected) -
a bit of fuzz from Cal Evans (of Zend) -
a sad lack of facial hair from the Zend Twins - Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski -
another plus from Marco Tabini (of php|architect) -
and, of course, The Wez -
Marcus, Dan and Wez showing off their contributions toward the cause -
and this guy gets a little extra credit for not only the mutton-chops and goatee but also for the amount of time he put in to make the rest of the hair on his head do that -

(Oh, and in case you're wondering - yes, I am a little on the scruffy side myself)

Save your Site, Cache that Data!

enygma — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:38:06 +0000

You can set this stuff up in your configuration file too, but I dropped it into my controller as a quick solution.

In my _setup() call: -

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: -

-
$config=array(
-
-
'adapter'=> 'Solar_Cache_Adapter_File',
-
-
'path'=> '/tmp',
-
-
'life'=> 200
-
-
);
-
-
$this->cache = Solar::factory('Solar_Cache', $config);
-

With our object made, we apply it down in our default actionIndex() wrapped around our database fetch: -

PLAIN TEXT

CODE: -

-
$ret=$this->cache->fetch('feed_data');
-
-
if(!$ret){
-
-
$news=$this->news->fetchNews();
-
-
$this->cache->save('feed_data',$news);
-
-
$ret=$news;
-
-
}
-
-
$this->news_items=$ret;
-

You wouldn't believe how much something simple like caching your feed can help on even a moderately popular site. Check out the class list for details on the other caching options.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-23

enygma — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@ramsey: did you ever get that "too many requests" issue solved with spaz? #
work you damn jquery selector! i command thee! #
@funkatron on spaz? every time I fire it up I get that "too many API requests" message after a few seconds #
@funkatron @ElizabethN trying the passowrd thing first... #
hmm, interesting - an onclick on an anchor and an onclick on a div firing at the same time #
@jeichorn nice! #
@ElizabethN heh...me too...wonder what it was #
okay, this cough is officially getting old #
grr....slow people-- #
how many dbas does it take to check permissions on a sequence...(apparently 3) #
@elazar heheh #
i <3 last.fm #

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-22

enygma — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Happy Earth Day all (or for me and my wife, our anniversary - woo!) #
we now return to "damn nature, you're scary!" #

Equifax ID Patrol - Sponsored Link

Ad - www.equifax.com Sep 22 2008 1:52AM GMT

'Daily Show,' 'Colbert Report' win Emmys

CNN Sep 22 2008 1:52AM GMT

Obama climbs in polls

MSNBC Sep 22 2008 1:47AM GMT

High-risk era wanes on Wall Street

Los Angeles Times Sep 22 2008 1:46AM GMT

One dead after Basque car bombs

BBC Sep 22 2008 12:53AM GMT

Iraqis trained for assassination coming home

CNN Sep 21 2008 11:49PM GMT

Democrats: Insulate 'Main Street from Wall Street'

CNN Sep 21 2008 11:03PM GMT

Democrats push back on bailout

CNN Sep 21 2008 10:05PM GMT

Miliband moves to end leader talk

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:18PM GMT

South Africa president steps down

BBC Sep 21 2008 8:09PM GMT

Taxpayers lash out over bailout

CNN Sep 21 2008 7:33PM GMT

McCain and Obama trade charges on financial crisis

International Herald Tribune Sep 21 2008 6:03PM GMT

Ramadan: prime time for TV

Los Angeles Times Sep 21 2008 1:14PM GMT

Boutique medicine worth it?

CNN Sep 21 2008 12:28PM GMT

I will do better, Brown pledges

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:39AM GMT

A land of opportunity lures Poles back home

International Herald Tribune Sep 21 2008 9:24AM GMT

I want to do better, says Brown

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:16AM GMT

Czech ambassador killed in Pakistan hotel blast

CNN Sep 21 2008 8:18AM GMT

Federal, state agents raid evangelist compound

CNN Sep 21 2008 6:51AM GMT

Bomb seen as warning to Pakistan

MSNBC Sep 21 2008 6:43AM GMT

Candidates' August spending is record

MSNBC Sep 21 2008 4:16AM GMT

S. African President Mbeki to Step Down

Washington Post Sep 21 2008 4:07AM GMT

Marriott's Biggest Loss in 81 Years

Washington Post Sep 21 2008 4:07AM GMT

Jet crash witness: 'Nothing anyone could do'

CNN Sep 21 2008 1:46AM GMT

A leader who impressed abroad, but not at home

Guardian Unlimited Sep 20 2008 11:20PM GMT

Terror pledge after Pakistan bomb

BBC Sep 20 2008 10:10PM GMT

Truck bomb destroys packed hotel in Pakistan

CNN Sep 20 2008 8:18PM GMT

Bomb hits Pakistani hotel

Guardian Unlimited Sep 20 2008 5:01PM GMT

Deadly blast hits Marriott Hotel in Pakistan

CNN Sep 20 2008 4:39PM GMT

Dozens killed in Pakistan attack

BBC Sep 20 2008 4:13PM GMT

Brown pledges action on economy

BBC Sep 20 2008 3:41PM GMT

Equifax ID Patrol - Sponsored Link

Ad - www.equifax.com Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

The Latte Era Grinds Down

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Do You Zune?

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Honey, iBricked the New Mobile Phone!

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Equifax ID Patrol - Sponsored Link

Ad - www.equifax.com Sep 22 2008 1:52AM GMT

'Daily Show,' 'Colbert Report' win Emmys

CNN Sep 22 2008 1:52AM GMT

Obama climbs in polls

MSNBC Sep 22 2008 1:47AM GMT

High-risk era wanes on Wall Street

Los Angeles Times Sep 22 2008 1:46AM GMT

One dead after Basque car bombs

BBC Sep 22 2008 12:53AM GMT

Iraqis trained for assassination coming home

CNN Sep 21 2008 11:49PM GMT

Democrats: Insulate 'Main Street from Wall Street'

CNN Sep 21 2008 11:03PM GMT

Democrats push back on bailout

CNN Sep 21 2008 10:05PM GMT

Miliband moves to end leader talk

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:18PM GMT

South Africa president steps down

BBC Sep 21 2008 8:09PM GMT

Taxpayers lash out over bailout

CNN Sep 21 2008 7:33PM GMT

McCain and Obama trade charges on financial crisis

International Herald Tribune Sep 21 2008 6:03PM GMT

Ramadan: prime time for TV

Los Angeles Times Sep 21 2008 1:14PM GMT

Boutique medicine worth it?

CNN Sep 21 2008 12:28PM GMT

I will do better, Brown pledges

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:39AM GMT

A land of opportunity lures Poles back home

International Herald Tribune Sep 21 2008 9:24AM GMT

I want to do better, says Brown

BBC Sep 21 2008 9:16AM GMT

Czech ambassador killed in Pakistan hotel blast

CNN Sep 21 2008 8:18AM GMT

Federal, state agents raid evangelist compound

CNN Sep 21 2008 6:51AM GMT

Bomb seen as warning to Pakistan

MSNBC Sep 21 2008 6:43AM GMT

Candidates' August spending is record

MSNBC Sep 21 2008 4:16AM GMT

S. African President Mbeki to Step Down

Washington Post Sep 21 2008 4:07AM GMT

Marriott's Biggest Loss in 81 Years

Washington Post Sep 21 2008 4:07AM GMT

Jet crash witness: 'Nothing anyone could do'

CNN Sep 21 2008 1:46AM GMT

A leader who impressed abroad, but not at home

Guardian Unlimited Sep 20 2008 11:20PM GMT

Terror pledge after Pakistan bomb

BBC Sep 20 2008 10:10PM GMT

Truck bomb destroys packed hotel in Pakistan

CNN Sep 20 2008 8:18PM GMT

Bomb hits Pakistani hotel

Guardian Unlimited Sep 20 2008 5:01PM GMT

Deadly blast hits Marriott Hotel in Pakistan

CNN Sep 20 2008 4:39PM GMT

Dozens killed in Pakistan attack

BBC Sep 20 2008 4:13PM GMT

Brown pledges action on economy

BBC Sep 20 2008 3:41PM GMT

Equifax ID Patrol - Sponsored Link

Ad - www.equifax.com Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

The Latte Era Grinds Down

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Do You Zune?

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Honey, iBricked the New Mobile Phone!

Newsweek Oct 15 2007 3:07AM GMT

Perception is 99% of reality

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:53:44 -0500

Jeff Atwood writes: +

+If you've used Windows Vista, you've probably noticed that Vista's file copy performance is noticeably worse than Windows XP. I know it's one of the first things I noticed. Here's the irony-- Vista's file copy is based on an improved algorithm and actually performs better in most cases than XP. So how come it seems so darn slow? +

PS: Jeff adds that Vista SP1 has switched back to XP's algorithm. Duhh!

Octalpussy

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:24:06 -0500

In my previous post I asked what would be the output of of the following numbers: +

+echo 09," => (09) <br>";
+echo 9," => (9) <br>";
+

The answer is: +

+0 => (09)
+9 => (9)
+

+That's because any number preceded by 0 is treated as an octal number, and 9 is an invalid octal number. Octal numbers are base 8, e.g.: +

Octal Value	Decimal Value +
1	1 +
2	2 +
3	3 +
4	4 +
5	5 +
6	6 +
7	7 +
10	8 +
11	9 +

The silly thing is that hardly anyone uses octal nowadays, but it continues to be part of the C, C++, Java and PHP standards. The mistake is also very common. C-style languages pride themselves in their terse and minimalist syntax, but this is one scenario where a language design error was probably made. Perhaps 0c should have been used to represent octal in analogy to 0x for hexadecimal, but this suggestion is sadly 35 years too late. 0 for octal is too deeply imprinted in modern compiler DNA. +

PS: Here's the mistaken ADOdb bug report that started it.

Octopussy numbers in PHP

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 10:59:24 -0500

Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem. Here's a little gotcha you can try: + +

+echo 09," => (09) <br>";
+echo 9," => (9) <br>";
+

+ +

If you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken. Try it. Also see the followup.

Code's Worse Enemy

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 04:45:57 -0500

+Steve Yegge talks about choosing the right programming language in the face of Code's Worse Enemy: +

+I'll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code. +

+There's a lot of truth in what he says. You can't fault his taste: He prefers Mozilla Rhino, a Javascript/Ecmascript implementation. +

+When we coded in ASP, we were a JScript shop. When we were looking for something that ran cross-platform, the closest thing that fit the bill was PHP. Javascript with perl-style $variables. Neither language is perfect. But good enough - or as some prefer to put it: worse is better.

Why Should PHP ever be taught in school?

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:04:43 -0500

Happy New Year Folks! Let's keep on blogging. +

This posting by Ka-Ping Yee on why PHP should never be taught is precisely why PHP should be taught. If something is popular but hard to understand then we need an education process. To just shake our heads and give up is simply immature (or trolling). Otherwise we might as well say that English (or any other spoken language for that matter) should not be taught, because spoken languages are illogical, imprecise and therefore ... useless :) +

Most programming languages have similar gotchas. Oracle's PL/SQL has "" being equivalent to null. Javascript believes that 0 and "" are equivalent. C has non-zero being equivalent to boolean true. Lisp's gotcha begins with ( and ends with ) -- (just a joke). Java's gotcha begins with J2EE and the obsolete baggage that comes with it. +

PS: The confusion is because === is the real equality operator and should be used here. In PHP, == is equality after typecasting, where 0 == "0" and "" == "0" evaluating to true are accepted conventions. They are useful constructs in many situations in a similar vein to C's convention of 0 being boolean true and non-zero being boolean false, which the critics cleverly ignore. See the PHP Manual on type comparisons

Web cluster redundancy with mod_backhand revisited

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:57:40 -0500

In my last blog entry on mod_backhand, I mentioned that you could implement redundancy in a web cluster by having multiple load balancers and using round robin DNS pointing to the load balancers. This technique is mentioned in the mod_backhand presentation notes by Theo Schlossnagle, one of the author's of mod_backhand. +

But if you think about it carefully, in my opinion, this solution doesn't really work well: +

Round robin DNS systems simply return a list of IP addresses (sorted randomly) that resolve that domain name. Most DNS servers do not perform checks to detect if any of the IP addresses are down. So clients will get the IP addresses of load balancers that are down too. The DNS client normally just picks the first IP address in the list to use - and it could be the IP address of a load balancer that is down. +
Secondly, when a client resolves the domain name, this IP address is cached on the client. So a failure in one of the load balancers would still mean that all web browsers that previously connected to that load balancer successfully because of DNS caching would be unable to access the system for quite a long time (e,g. 10-15 minutes). +

I can think of several solutions, but the best one as far as I can see (if you still want to use mod_backhand of course) is to run mod_backhand on a high availability hardware solution (or if a few minutes downtime is acceptable, keep a spare box configured with mod_backhand around to swap with any balancer that goes down), and not push the hard problem of high availability and redundancy to DNS. +

Ahmad Amran Kapi from Melaka, Malaysia, points out that you can use Wackamole: +

+Wackamole is an application that helps with making a cluster highly available. It manages a bunch of virtual IPs, that should be available to the outside world at all times. Wackamole ensures that a single machine within a cluster is listening on each virtual IP address that Wackamole manages. If it discovers that particular machines within the cluster are not alive, it will almost immediately ensure that other machines acquire these public IPs. At no time will more than one machine listen on any virtual IP. Wackamole also works toward achieving a balanced distribution of number IPs on the machine within the cluster it manages. +

Back and Backing Backhand on top of that!

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:22:11 -0500

Since I got married last year, I haven't had much motivation to blog. The good news is that since the previous year, I've accumulated a list of accomplishments and experiences that i feel are worthwhile sharing. +

+Recently, my company implemented our first mod_backhand implementation. Mod_backhand is a load-balancing and clustering solution that runs on Apache. Let's say you have 3 web servers that you need to load balance in a cluster. When a server goes down, it will auto-detect that server is down and route subsequent http requests to other servers. You can buy a load-balancing box such as Cisco Redirector, or roll your own package using Linux, Apache 1.3 and mod_backhand. +

+The mod_backhand load balancer is basically a Linux system with Apache 1.3 (httpds) with the mod_backhand patches installed. The load-balancer also supports redirects and https. Load balancing uses the Apache virtual directory mechanism, so you can configure different load balancing behaviour for different applications on a directory basis. +

+The nice thing about mod_backhand is that it autodetects servers going up and down in the cluster, with no additional configuration required. All web servers in the cluster need to broadcast that they are alive and available on the cluster at regular intervals. So if you want to add another web server to the cluster, you just need to install the backhand broadcasting service and start it on the server, and the load balancer will pick it up. CPU and load information is also broadcast to the load balancer, so the load balancer can make an intelligent guess as to which web server to pass the http request to. +

+There are some issues that you need to be aware of: +

No support of https on the internal network. Communications between the web browser and load-balancer can use https but not between load-balancer and web server. So if you have confidential information and you don't trust your internal network, you need to setup another layer of encryption on top of that (e.g. SSH tunnel). That's what we did for our login system. +
The load balancer, like any other system in the network, becomes another point of failure. If you want total redundancy, one method is to have multiple mod_backhand load balancers, and round-robin DNS the load balancers. +
AFAIK, automatic failover to another server of a http request if the 1st web server goes down is not supported. +
There is Windows support (for the web servers in the cluster, not as a load-balancer) thanks to Rob Butler, but you currently need Visual C++ expertise as the binary "NT Backhand Broadcaster" doesn't work out of the box anymore with mod_backhand. There are patches in CVS but no existing binary download. As a service to the community, I have compiled my own: NT Backhand Broadcaster. +
Keep-Alives reduce the availability of the load balancer, as web clients can lock a mod_backhand process for unreasonable amounts of time. You need to change your Keep-Alives on to a low value (eg. 1 second), and if possible, move your static HTML and images to the load balancer (which is just Apache after all). +
Your web page URLs need to be relative URLs of course. The one exception is https, which needs to use the address of the load-balancer. +

Additional Windows Notes +The Windows Registry settings for Backhand Broadcaster are a bit obscure. Here is a sample config: +

+HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft]
+
+[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft\Backhand_Broadcast]
+"Arriba"=dword:28213950
+"numCPU"=dword:00000002
+
+[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft\Backhand_Broadcast\BroadcastParams]
+"HostName"="Windows Server 1 BHB"
+"ContactIP"="192.168.0.121"
+"SendIP"="192.168.0.255"
+"SendPort"=dword:0000115d
+"ContactPort"=dword:00000050
+"SendTTL"=dword:00000001
+

The ContactIP is the IP address of my Windows server running BHB: 192.168.0.121 +The SendIP is the broadcast IP for the subnet (not the IP address of the load-balancer). +

Sometimes the first time you run NT Backhand Broadcaster, it will fail to calculate Arriba (a benchmark measuring the power of your server) and just die. You need to manually enter the Arriba value yourself in the registry. Just use the above example value if you aren't sure what to do. +

The load-balancer provides a page to check out the status of all servers in the cluster, typically http://load-balancing-server/backhand/ +

Lastly, if you still cannot get it working, check out the Windows Event Log (Applications), as errors and status messages are logged there.

Bye Bye PHP4

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:22:52 -0400

Matt of WordPress fame gives his opinion on PHP4 and the transition to PHP5. As he says: +

+ None of the most requested features for WordPress would be any easier (or harder) if they were written for PHP 4 or 5 or Python. Theyâd just be different. The hard part usually has little to do with the underlying server-side language. +

+Very true. Most of our code continues to run fine on both PHP 4 and 5, with hardly any checking of PHP_VERSION. Migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 has been relatively painless (each time we port an application, we spend at most half a day fixing warnings that didn't appear in PHP4). +

+Matt asks why the takeup of PHP5 been so low, and is quite disparaging to the PHP internals devs. I don't see it in such black and white terms. PHP5 never had a feature that was must-have or to-die-for. In fact, if you look at PHP's recent changes, most of them are performance improvements, or fixing past mistakes (adding proper date support for example in 5.2.1), or feature tweaks (iterators, etc). Given that most PHP4 developers have found workarounds to things fixed in PHP5, migrating to PHP5 is probably a low priority. +

+Also some fixes in PHP5 can cause serious problems. For example, In PHP 5.2.0, time-zone calculations started to support epochs, which are time-changing events. Now my timezone was +7.30 GMT until 1980, when we got a new Prime Minister who decreed that the country would combine its 2 time-zones to 1, so Malaysia standardised on +8.00 GMT. A timestamp such as "12.10am Nov 12, 1979 MYT" in PHP 5.1 would be displayed as "11.40pm Nov 11, 1979 MYT" in PHP 5.2. +

+On a more optimistic note, as long as the market share of PHP remains strong, I think the take-up rate of PHP6 will probably be higher than PHP5 in the non-English world, simply because managing multi-lingual and sites that don't use ASCII for their native script is much easier in Unicode. Now that's a compelling reason!

A big Pfutt to Windows Vista

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:18:43 -0500

Peter Gutmans, a noted security expert talks about Windows Vista Content Protection. Quite disturbing and saddening. I'm about to buy a notebook for my mum, and all the one's I'm looking at have Vista preinstalled. Pfutt. +

+
Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there's no safe way around this â Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem. +

Stefan Esser ruminates on PHP Security

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:31:09 -0500

Stefan Esser, one of the foremost PHP security gurus in the world is interviewed in Security Focus. He's also well known for disagreeing with the PHP Group (that oversees PHP Core development) about the way PHP security issues are treated. Disturbing in more ways than one.

The Shape of Future Processors?

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:50:25 -0500

I read this article on CPU trends Converging Design Features in CPUs and GPUs. Matthew Papakipos writes: +

+
Where are both CPU and GPU designs converging? +
+
Both processors will be massively multi-core â- think hundreds of cores -- within a five-year period. + +
Both processors will have complex memory hierarchies, with programmer managed core-local memories and core-local hardware-managed cache. (My own belief is that hardware-managed cache will decrease substantially in importance.) + +
Memories will be strongly non-uniform with significant latency and throughput differences between local and non-local memory. + +
Accelerators that can offer substantial speedups for specific tasks, either integrated on-chip or available via a HyperTransport-type interconnect, will be ubiquitous. + +

I'm more interested in modern CPUs trends and their relation to PHP, and not GPUs. Here are some of my thoughts: +

Well PHP running in pre-fork mode on Apache or FastCGI on IIS/Apache should have no problems handling massively multi-core architectures, assuming the cores are uniform in design. +

As to complex memory hierarchies, we already have to handle the different latencies in harddisk -> harddisk cache -> cpu data/instruction caches. We always had the option of caching data on a hard disk or RAM disk, and some PHP Accelerators already give you the option of caching data in shared memory -- I just see it as more of the same for PHP developers. Things get more interesting for PHP compiler and opcode cache designers as they will have more options for caching PHP opcodes and data. +

What is interesting is the possibility of hardware acceleration of PHP. To me, it's not likely that any CPU vendor will come up with a hardware accelerator for PHP, but a CPU accelerator for .NET or java opcodes is a strong possibility. Thus in the long run, .NET or java compilers for PHP (and Python and Perl) could become mainstream. +

My experience moving to PHP5

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:50:47 -0500

+In August of this year, we decided to move from PHP4 to PHP5 for all our future PHP development. The transition was relatively painless, as the core libraries we use (ADOdb, PHPLens, some PEAR modules) are already PHP5 compliant and have been for some time. What's nice about PHP5 is that it caught some errors that have been lingering in our code: PHP5 no longer allows a function to be defined twice, and some basic variable referencing errors that we missed previously. +

+We have ported our key web applications over to run on PHP5, but for some key customers with extremely large PHP4 code bases, we felt it was safer to keep them running on PHP4 for the time being as the cost of migration would be high; and we weren't sure whether it was worth it as the customers seem to be happy with PHP4's current performance. +

+Other things that we have changed is that we have transitioned to using XMLHttpRequest for all our Ajax calls. Formerly we were using the excellent JSRS library, but I can already see most programmers we hire in the future will be more familiar with XMLHttpRequest than JSRS. The nice thing about using XMLHttpRequest is that all XMLHttpRequests can be debugged using the excellent Firebug, a Firefox/Mozilla extension that is extremely useful for Javascript debugging. +

+I admit we are still retrograde when it comes to exploiting PHP5's new functionality. Last month, we had to do a presentation so we moved our PHP5 web application to a notebook. Later I found out that notebook only had PHP4 installed. The web application worked flawlessly. +

In praise of Zend Core

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:53:17 -0500

+Hi I'm back. Been busy. I will try to relate some of my experiences in the last few months in later blogs. +

+I'd like to point out that one of the greatest services to the PHP community that Zend is providing is the free Zend Core for Oracle and Zend Core for DB2. The latest versions install PHP 5.1.6. The little known secret is that these 2 installers are perfect for MySQL as the mysql and mysqli extensions are included in the release. +

+Zend Core is the installer I would recommend to setup PHP in a Windows IIS environment because it has support for FastCGI with IIS. FastCGI is the only scalable and safe way of running PHP on IIS, because not all PHP extensions are thread-safe and there are global locks in multi-threaded mode that hurt PHP performance if don't use FastCGI. +

+The only minuses is that Zend Core currently doesn't include the postgresql extension, and you have to compile in extensions which are not included in the release. +

New Improved Yummy ADOdb Session Handler

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:11 -0400

ADOdb, the database library i maintain, has had support for storing session data in a database for a long time. However there was one limitation that always continued to bug me: the fact that all the PHP servers using database-backed sessions needed to synchronize their times to ensure that the session timers worked properly. +

Well in the latest version of ADOdb (4.91), released a few days ago, we have the new Session2 implementation. This time, we always use the database server clock to keep track of times. We no longer rely on the PHP app servers to set the session timers, so even if the clocks of these app servers are out of synch, sessions are not affected. This change required us to change the database table format used, but that is a small price to pay for the added flexibility. You can read more in the ADOdb session docs. +

+Usage is really simple: +

+include_once("adodb/session/adodb-session2.php");
+ADOdb_Session::config($driver='mysql', $host, $user, $password, $database,$options=false);
+session_start();
+

Partitioned Iteration in Enterprise Frameworks

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:25:20 -0400

Just heard that Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. I guess he's achieved every possible goal he had, and it's downhill from here ;-) +

+I always enjoy reading Roger Sessions work on designing scalable software infrastructure. He's a Java framework expert who has become a .NET advocate. Roger has written a very interesting white paper on A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures. It's a rehash of the KISS principle and small is beautiful, taken from a software designer's perspective. +

+If that sounds pretty dull to you, read the fighter pilot analogy Roger brings up, where he talks about Mig-15 and F-86 dogfights. Stirring stuff.

Perception is 99% of reality

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:53:44 -0500

Jeff Atwood writes: -

-If you've used Windows Vista, you've probably noticed that Vista's file copy performance is noticeably worse than Windows XP. I know it's one of the first things I noticed. Here's the irony-- Vista's file copy is based on an improved algorithm and actually performs better in most cases than XP. So how come it seems so darn slow? -

PS: Jeff adds that Vista SP1 has switched back to XP's algorithm. Duhh!

Octalpussy

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:24:06 -0500

In my previous post I asked what would be the output of of the following numbers: -

-echo 09," => (09) <br>";
-echo 9," => (9) <br>";
-

The answer is: -

-0 => (09)
-9 => (9)
-

-That's because any number preceded by 0 is treated as an octal number, and 9 is an invalid octal number. Octal numbers are base 8, e.g.: -

Octal Value	Decimal Value -
1	1 -
2	2 -
3	3 -
4	4 -
5	5 -
6	6 -
7	7 -
10	8 -
11	9 -

PS: Here's the mistaken ADOdb bug report that started it.

Octopussy numbers in PHP

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 10:59:24 -0500

Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem. Here's a little gotcha you can try: - -

-echo 09," => (09) <br>";
-echo 9," => (9) <br>";
-

- -

If you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken. Try it. Also see the followup.

Code's Worse Enemy

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 04:45:57 -0500

-Steve Yegge talks about choosing the right programming language in the face of Code's Worse Enemy: -

-I'll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code. -

-There's a lot of truth in what he says. You can't fault his taste: He prefers Mozilla Rhino, a Javascript/Ecmascript implementation. -

-When we coded in ASP, we were a JScript shop. When we were looking for something that ran cross-platform, the closest thing that fit the bill was PHP. Javascript with perl-style $variables. Neither language is perfect. But good enough - or as some prefer to put it: worse is better.

Why Should PHP ever be taught in school?

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:04:43 -0500

Happy New Year Folks! Let's keep on blogging. -

Web cluster redundancy with mod_backhand revisited

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:57:40 -0500

But if you think about it carefully, in my opinion, this solution doesn't really work well: -

Round robin DNS systems simply return a list of IP addresses (sorted randomly) that resolve that domain name. Most DNS servers do not perform checks to detect if any of the IP addresses are down. So clients will get the IP addresses of load balancers that are down too. The DNS client normally just picks the first IP address in the list to use - and it could be the IP address of a load balancer that is down. -
Secondly, when a client resolves the domain name, this IP address is cached on the client. So a failure in one of the load balancers would still mean that all web browsers that previously connected to that load balancer successfully because of DNS caching would be unable to access the system for quite a long time (e,g. 10-15 minutes). -

Ahmad Amran Kapi from Melaka, Malaysia, points out that you can use Wackamole: -

-Wackamole is an application that helps with making a cluster highly available. It manages a bunch of virtual IPs, that should be available to the outside world at all times. Wackamole ensures that a single machine within a cluster is listening on each virtual IP address that Wackamole manages. If it discovers that particular machines within the cluster are not alive, it will almost immediately ensure that other machines acquire these public IPs. At no time will more than one machine listen on any virtual IP. Wackamole also works toward achieving a balanced distribution of number IPs on the machine within the cluster it manages. -

Back and Backing Backhand on top of that!

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:22:11 -0500

-Recently, my company implemented our first mod_backhand implementation. Mod_backhand is a load-balancing and clustering solution that runs on Apache. Let's say you have 3 web servers that you need to load balance in a cluster. When a server goes down, it will auto-detect that server is down and route subsequent http requests to other servers. You can buy a load-balancing box such as Cisco Redirector, or roll your own package using Linux, Apache 1.3 and mod_backhand. -

-The mod_backhand load balancer is basically a Linux system with Apache 1.3 (httpds) with the mod_backhand patches installed. The load-balancer also supports redirects and https. Load balancing uses the Apache virtual directory mechanism, so you can configure different load balancing behaviour for different applications on a directory basis. -

-The nice thing about mod_backhand is that it autodetects servers going up and down in the cluster, with no additional configuration required. All web servers in the cluster need to broadcast that they are alive and available on the cluster at regular intervals. So if you want to add another web server to the cluster, you just need to install the backhand broadcasting service and start it on the server, and the load balancer will pick it up. CPU and load information is also broadcast to the load balancer, so the load balancer can make an intelligent guess as to which web server to pass the http request to. -

-There are some issues that you need to be aware of: -

No support of https on the internal network. Communications between the web browser and load-balancer can use https but not between load-balancer and web server. So if you have confidential information and you don't trust your internal network, you need to setup another layer of encryption on top of that (e.g. SSH tunnel). That's what we did for our login system. -
The load balancer, like any other system in the network, becomes another point of failure. If you want total redundancy, one method is to have multiple mod_backhand load balancers, and round-robin DNS the load balancers. -
AFAIK, automatic failover to another server of a http request if the 1st web server goes down is not supported. -
There is Windows support (for the web servers in the cluster, not as a load-balancer) thanks to Rob Butler, but you currently need Visual C++ expertise as the binary "NT Backhand Broadcaster" doesn't work out of the box anymore with mod_backhand. There are patches in CVS but no existing binary download. As a service to the community, I have compiled my own: NT Backhand Broadcaster. -
Keep-Alives reduce the availability of the load balancer, as web clients can lock a mod_backhand process for unreasonable amounts of time. You need to change your Keep-Alives on to a low value (eg. 1 second), and if possible, move your static HTML and images to the load balancer (which is just Apache after all). -
Your web page URLs need to be relative URLs of course. The one exception is https, which needs to use the address of the load-balancer. -

Additional Windows Notes -The Windows Registry settings for Backhand Broadcaster are a bit obscure. Here is a sample config: -

-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft]
-
-[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft\Backhand_Broadcast]
-"Arriba"=dword:28213950
-"numCPU"=dword:00000002
-
-[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CerebraSoft\Backhand_Broadcast\BroadcastParams]
-"HostName"="Windows Server 1 BHB"
-"ContactIP"="192.168.0.121"
-"SendIP"="192.168.0.255"
-"SendPort"=dword:0000115d
-"ContactPort"=dword:00000050
-"SendTTL"=dword:00000001
-

The ContactIP is the IP address of my Windows server running BHB: 192.168.0.121 -The SendIP is the broadcast IP for the subnet (not the IP address of the load-balancer). -

The load-balancer provides a page to check out the status of all servers in the cluster, typically http://load-balancing-server/backhand/ -

Lastly, if you still cannot get it working, check out the Windows Event Log (Applications), as errors and status messages are logged there.

Bye Bye PHP4

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:22:52 -0400

Matt of WordPress fame gives his opinion on PHP4 and the transition to PHP5. As he says: -

- None of the most requested features for WordPress would be any easier (or harder) if they were written for PHP 4 or 5 or Python. Theyâd just be different. The hard part usually has little to do with the underlying server-side language. -

-Very true. Most of our code continues to run fine on both PHP 4 and 5, with hardly any checking of PHP_VERSION. Migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 has been relatively painless (each time we port an application, we spend at most half a day fixing warnings that didn't appear in PHP4). -

-Matt asks why the takeup of PHP5 been so low, and is quite disparaging to the PHP internals devs. I don't see it in such black and white terms. PHP5 never had a feature that was must-have or to-die-for. In fact, if you look at PHP's recent changes, most of them are performance improvements, or fixing past mistakes (adding proper date support for example in 5.2.1), or feature tweaks (iterators, etc). Given that most PHP4 developers have found workarounds to things fixed in PHP5, migrating to PHP5 is probably a low priority. -

-Also some fixes in PHP5 can cause serious problems. For example, In PHP 5.2.0, time-zone calculations started to support epochs, which are time-changing events. Now my timezone was +7.30 GMT until 1980, when we got a new Prime Minister who decreed that the country would combine its 2 time-zones to 1, so Malaysia standardised on +8.00 GMT. A timestamp such as "12.10am Nov 12, 1979 MYT" in PHP 5.1 would be displayed as "11.40pm Nov 11, 1979 MYT" in PHP 5.2. -

-On a more optimistic note, as long as the market share of PHP remains strong, I think the take-up rate of PHP6 will probably be higher than PHP5 in the non-English world, simply because managing multi-lingual and sites that don't use ASCII for their native script is much easier in Unicode. Now that's a compelling reason!

A big Pfutt to Windows Vista

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:18:43 -0500

-
Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there's no safe way around this â Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem. -

Stefan Esser ruminates on PHP Security

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:31:09 -0500

The Shape of Future Processors?

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:50:25 -0500

I read this article on CPU trends Converging Design Features in CPUs and GPUs. Matthew Papakipos writes: -

-
Where are both CPU and GPU designs converging? -
-
Both processors will be massively multi-core â- think hundreds of cores -- within a five-year period. - -
Both processors will have complex memory hierarchies, with programmer managed core-local memories and core-local hardware-managed cache. (My own belief is that hardware-managed cache will decrease substantially in importance.) - -
Memories will be strongly non-uniform with significant latency and throughput differences between local and non-local memory. - -
Accelerators that can offer substantial speedups for specific tasks, either integrated on-chip or available via a HyperTransport-type interconnect, will be ubiquitous. - -

I'm more interested in modern CPUs trends and their relation to PHP, and not GPUs. Here are some of my thoughts: -

Well PHP running in pre-fork mode on Apache or FastCGI on IIS/Apache should have no problems handling massively multi-core architectures, assuming the cores are uniform in design. -

My experience moving to PHP5

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:50:47 -0500

-In August of this year, we decided to move from PHP4 to PHP5 for all our future PHP development. The transition was relatively painless, as the core libraries we use (ADOdb, PHPLens, some PEAR modules) are already PHP5 compliant and have been for some time. What's nice about PHP5 is that it caught some errors that have been lingering in our code: PHP5 no longer allows a function to be defined twice, and some basic variable referencing errors that we missed previously. -

-We have ported our key web applications over to run on PHP5, but for some key customers with extremely large PHP4 code bases, we felt it was safer to keep them running on PHP4 for the time being as the cost of migration would be high; and we weren't sure whether it was worth it as the customers seem to be happy with PHP4's current performance. -

-Other things that we have changed is that we have transitioned to using XMLHttpRequest for all our Ajax calls. Formerly we were using the excellent JSRS library, but I can already see most programmers we hire in the future will be more familiar with XMLHttpRequest than JSRS. The nice thing about using XMLHttpRequest is that all XMLHttpRequests can be debugged using the excellent Firebug, a Firefox/Mozilla extension that is extremely useful for Javascript debugging. -

-I admit we are still retrograde when it comes to exploiting PHP5's new functionality. Last month, we had to do a presentation so we moved our PHP5 web application to a notebook. Later I found out that notebook only had PHP4 installed. The web application worked flawlessly. -

In praise of Zend Core

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:53:17 -0500

-Hi I'm back. Been busy. I will try to relate some of my experiences in the last few months in later blogs. -

-I'd like to point out that one of the greatest services to the PHP community that Zend is providing is the free Zend Core for Oracle and Zend Core for DB2. The latest versions install PHP 5.1.6. The little known secret is that these 2 installers are perfect for MySQL as the mysql and mysqli extensions are included in the release. -

-Zend Core is the installer I would recommend to setup PHP in a Windows IIS environment because it has support for FastCGI with IIS. FastCGI is the only scalable and safe way of running PHP on IIS, because not all PHP extensions are thread-safe and there are global locks in multi-threaded mode that hurt PHP performance if don't use FastCGI. -

-The only minuses is that Zend Core currently doesn't include the postgresql extension, and you have to compile in extensions which are not included in the release. -

New Improved Yummy ADOdb Session Handler

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:11 -0400

-Usage is really simple: -

-include_once("adodb/session/adodb-session2.php");
-ADOdb_Session::config($driver='mysql', $host, $user, $password, $database,$options=false);
-session_start();
-

Partitioned Iteration in Enterprise Frameworks

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:25:20 -0400

Just heard that Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. I guess he's achieved every possible goal he had, and it's downhill from here ;-) -

-I always enjoy reading Roger Sessions work on designing scalable software infrastructure. He's a Java framework expert who has become a .NET advocate. Roger has written a very interesting white paper on A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures. It's a rehash of the KISS principle and small is beautiful, taken from a software designer's perspective. -

-If that sounds pretty dull to you, read the fighter pilot analogy Roger brings up, where he talks about Mig-15 and F-86 dogfights. Stirring stuff.

Really helpful open source guys

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:07:00 +0200

While writing tests for the eZ Components Webdav component I stumbled over an issue with Konqueror 3.5.9. While we have working tests for the PUT request (uploading files) for version 3.5.7, this request type did not work with my recent Konqueror installation. Some debugging and request dumping in Lighttpd later I was quite sure that Konqueror was the issue.

+ +

I'm neither a C(++) guy, nor do I use KDE. Therefore I joined #kde-devel on Freenode to see, if anyone there would be willing to support me in my bug tracking. After a rough description I instandly got feedback on the essential points I needed: Where in the code to look for the issue (it's kdelibs/kioslave/http), what the correct SVN revisions for the 3.5.7 and 3.5.9 tags are and how I can easily try if the issue resides in the supposed code area.

+ +

Some kdelibs compile later I could verify that the issue came from the kioslave http module. While I could not really see the issue in the diff from 3.5.7 to 3.5.9 myself, again some people in the IRC channel instantly helped me and we found the problem together within minutes. A patch was created within minutes and I hope my bug report for Konqueror will be closed soonish.

+ +

In this sense: Thanks KDE people! That was really good support! :)

+ + +

iRefuseToUse aNamingScheme

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:49:00 +0200

I find the recent discussion about good naming schemes quite funny. Namespaces are potentially coming in PHP 5.3 (does anyone believe?) and people start discussion about how they can even shorten their names from Abstract to aSomething and from Interface to iAnotherthing. I'm a fan of short names. As Lars pointed out:

+ +

as short as possible, as verbose as needed
+ +

and

+ +

you must understand the name without studying specific rules before
+ +

I agree with these rules and am of the opinion that class names must all above anything contain a semantic. Interfaces indicate what you can do with an object, while abstract classes model that different classes have a common base and can be used in the same mannor. And indeed you can add these semantics to names without using the terms.

+ +

Good examples are Persistable which indicates that an object implementing this interface can be persisted, Configurable or Connectable. Abstract classes usually model a common base for other classes and define how these are being used Reflector and Configurator are good examples for such semantics. If this does not indicate their abstractness good enough to you, you can still indicate that this is a basis for other classes to be extended before being used: BaseReflector or BaseConfigurator.

+ +

In fact for me, the abstractness of a class does not really matter that much. Most commonly you also provide descendants of this class and it is commonly clear that one should not use DatabaseHandler but either of OracleHandler or MysqlHandler.

+ +

Just my .02.

+ + +

Sending HEAD requests with ext/curl

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:25:00 +0200

ext/curl is the common tool of choice, if one needs to perform more advanced HTTP requests from a PHP script (for simple ones, use a stream!). I recently wanted to perform a HEAD request to a file, after which I wanted to perform some more advanced HTTP interaction, so CURL was also the tool of choice here.

+ +

Trying it out on the shell with a local web server, CURL was operating quite slow, in contrast to a GET request. The -i command line switch makes curl include the headers in the printed output, -X lets you define a custom HTTP request.

+ + +

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -i -X HEAD http://localhost/admin/
+HTTP/1.1 200 OK
+X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
+
+<snip type="more http headers" />
+
+Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
+Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:10:59 GMT
+Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
+
+real    0m6.079s
+user    0m0.004s
+sys    0m0.000s

+ + +

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -i -X GET http://localhost/admin/
+HTTP/1.1 200 OK
+Transfer-Encoding: chunked
+X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
+
+<snip type="more http headers" />
+
+Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
+Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:12:27 GMT
+Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
+
+<snip content="html source" />
+
+real    0m0.180s
+user    0m0.004s
+sys    0m0.000s

+ +

A difference of 6 seconds runtime of a HEAD in contrast to 0.2 seconds for a GET is quite contrary to the original idea of a HEAD request. HEAD is used to just receive the headers of an URI instead of receiving the whole contents, to save bandwidth, memory and execution time.

+ +

ext/curl showed the exact same problem. Fiddling a bit with the command line switches, I found to replace -i with -I which makes curl print only the headers, but not the body of the response.

+ + +

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -I -X HEAD http://localhost/admin/
+HTTP/1.1 200 OK
+X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
+
+<snip type="more http headers" />
+
+Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
+Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:19:05 GMT
+Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
+
+real    0m0.044s
+user    0m0.004s
+sys    0m0.000s

+ +

0.04 seconds is now even faster than the corresponding GET request, with the -I switch, which took me 0.09 seconds. Now I just needed to transfer the command line options to the corresponding ext/curl ones:

+ + +

$c = curl_init();
+curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true ); 
+curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'HEAD' ); 
+curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1 ); 
+curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true ); 
+curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost/admin/' ); 
+
+$res = curl_exec( $c );

+ +

The RETURNTRANSFER makes ext/curl return the HTTP response instead of printing it. Using the CUSTOMREQUEST option you define to send a HEAD request instead of a standard GET or POST request. The HEADER option makes ext/curl include the response headers in the return value of curl_exec() call and NOBODY avoids the inclusion of the body content here. The URL option as usually sets the URL to request and curl_exec() makes ext/curl execute the request.

+ +

The runtime was even a fraction of a second faster here, compared to the command line version, but that can be subjectively. However, the HEAD request works as expected now. Maybe it's useful for someone to know this.

+ + +

Hierarchical caching

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:50:00 +0200

One of the cool new features in the new 2008.1 release of the eZ Components library is hierarchical caching.

+ +

Until now, we supported several types of cache storages. Some of these utilize the file system to store data, others can use APC or Memcache. While file based caches are usually large, since disk space is getting cheaper and cheaper, they are also much slower than memory based caches. RAM caches in contrast are blazingly fast, but memory is still much more limited than disk space. Therefore it is sensible, that the most important data for a website is stored in memory while less important stuff gets cached on the disk.

+ +

The new ezcCacheStack class in the eZ Cache component provides an automatic way of realizing this. You simply stack together an arbitrary number of storages. The stack will store every item into all of the stacked caches. You can configure how many items may reside in a storage. A replacement strategy class takes care about purging a certain number items in case a storage runs full. On restore, the stack will fetch the desired item from the topmost cache it is still stored in.

+ +

Replacement strategies shipped with the eZ Cache component provide you with 2 well-known cache algorithms: Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Frequently Used (LFU). The first one keeps track on when a cache item was last used and discards items that have not been used for the longest time, in case a storage runs full. LFU, in contrast to that, purges items that have been used least frequently. If none of these strategies fits your needs, you can always implement your own strategy, quite easily.

+ +

Using the cache stack with an appropriate replacement strategy allows you to simply ignore which items are stored where and simply use the stack as your only cache storage.

+ +

There are lots of other cool things in the 2008.1 package, which was released last Monday. We have 3 new components: Document, to parse and render different document formats, Feed, for creation and aggregation of XML feeds, and Search, which is a search engine abstraction layer, modelled after the PersistentObject component. Beside that, some other components got major new features. Feedback as usually highly appreciated. Enjoy!

+ + +

eZ Conference: A technical view on eZ Components slides

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:32:00 +0200

I'll be giving a session on the technical aspects of eZ Components in about 20 minutes at the annual eZ Conference here in Skien, Norway. Here are my slides of this presentation for download. It also includes code examples for many new features in our most recent release 2008.1 (hot, just fron Tuesday). I'll write some more about that later.

+ +

Update (2008-06-20, 15:13): I messed up with the download link, which is fixed now.

+ + +

Firefox 3 out now

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:38:00 +0200

Last night the Mozilla developers released Firefox 3.0 to the wild. Congratulations for the new major version!

+ +

I've been using the RCs since some weeks to see what the new version can. My impressions are a bit mixed. On the one hand, I love the new rendering, which seems much faster and smooth. The new bookmark management is quite cool and after some fiddling I also got my foreward/backward button back, which is 1 button instead of 2 now. Luckily, most of my favorid extensions already have adopted Firefox 3 and run smoothly. Web developer toolbar, Flashgot, Adblock plus, Flashblock, Google preview, Download Statusbar, Greasemonkey and the StumbleUpon work nicely. Firebug ist still in beta state for 3.0, but also works fine so far.

+ +

However, there are still some, which did not see new releases for ages and therefore do not seem to be even near to a Firefox 3 version. I needed to switch from All-In-One-Gestures to Firegestures, which was fine, since I mostly use the "back" functionality which works the same in both. Tab Mix Plus does not work at all, but is essential for me. Started from the undo close tab history, which gives you a list of recently closed tabs instead of just restoring the last, over the duplicate tab function to the central close button, I'm missing a good part of my used Firefox functionality.

+ +

I'm a bit sad, that I neither have the time nor the possibility to dig deeper into XUL stuff to fix the issues myself, which would be the open source way to do it. However, I still hope that someone else out there will have or that other people will come up with a different extension which brings the same nice features. So long, I can live quite good with Firefox 3 for now. It still hangs in certain conditions on my system, but that should be fixed in one of the next bug fix releases. I know very well, that X.0 versions are never absolutly stable. Amazing, how stable Firefox 3 already is!

+ +

In that sense, great work, Firefox hackers!

+ +

Everyone out there should download and try out Firefox 3.0 today, to help with building the desired world record. There have already been more than 250,000 downloads from Germany, as I write this article. So, let's see where this leads. :)

+ +

Update (2008-06-18, 19:08): The Search Status extension works, seems I had disactivated it for some reason.

+ +

Update (2008-06-23, 10:36): Thanks to a comment here, I got aware of a recent dev build of Tab Mix Plus. Luckily it seems to work quite fine, so my FF3 is near to be complete now. :)

+ + +

6 essential PHP development tools slides from IPC/DLW

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:41:07 +0200

A little bit belated, but as promised during the session, I just uploaded my slides from the talk 6 essential PHP development tools in 60 minutes. Since there is so much to say I actually managed to get 4,5 tools through and for all of these it felt to be too few time. I think I should provide a workshop for the next conference

+ +

Hope to see you there! 'till next time.

+ + +

eZ Components status slides from IPC/DLW

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:34:31 +0200

You can find my slides from The state of eZ Components online now. The talk was quite crowded and I hope to also have attract some new contributors.

+ + +

Database abstraction slides from IPC

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:14:29 +0200

I just uploaded my slides from the talk Database abstraction with eZ Components. Thanks to the attendees for being so active and even borrowing me a notebook and an USB stick, since the beamer disliked my Thinkpad! :) The slides are CC by (see last slide for details).

+ + +

Girl Geek Dinner right before IPC/DLW next week

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:43:54 +0200

Next week the Dynamic Languages World conference (aka International PHP Conference Spring Edition) will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Nicole organized a Girl Geek Dinner right before the main events start (that means Monday evening). I really like the idea of Girl Geek Dinner, since it's a good attempt to raise the women rate on geek events, which is usually (sadly) extremly low. On the other hand I like to hang around, have some good meal, enjoy a beer and a good technical discussion. Therefore: +1 from my side for Girl Geek Dinner. :)

+ + +

Removed 1100 photos from Flickr

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:01:00 +0200

After some heavy discussions with Kore and others I researched about German law in respect to individual rights on photos yesterday. Thanks to Arne, who gave me a good starting point (German) for my research. In the end, Kore was mostly right with his interpretation, what made me remove about 1100 photos from my Flickr gallery. All of those showing people dedicatedly where I do not feel to have the explicit permission to publish their pictures. I'll try to explain the reasons, my personal issues and possibly solutions in this article.

+ +
Continue reading "Removed 1100 photos from Flickr" +

RoR does not scale?

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:26:40 +0200

It's interessting to see more people abandoning Ruby on Rails. Not that I have something against Ruby itself, but it really seems to me that RoR does not scale. Hope Twitter tries with PHP. ;)

+ + +

Human support and feature requests at Xing

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:01:00 +0200

I like Xing. I actually like some of the social networks, although I think there are far to many of them. However, Xing is useful to me for keeping my address book updated by my business contacts themselves and to be up2date about who is doing what. Nice! I'm also a "premium" (in the sense of paying) user in Xing. On the one hand because that gives me some nice additional features and safes me from advertisement. On the other one because I think paying for a good online service is a good idea.

+ +

What I really wonder is: What happens to the feature requests and support questions I address to Xing? I don't really have the impression anyone takes care in anyway. Therefore I'd like to tell you the story of 2 tiny feature requests I addressed to Xing some months ago and several times since then. I think, I did not request features that are too difficult to realize. Now, I don't have any clue about web applications, so I might be wrong in this impression. ;) I'm also quite sure that many more people out there would love to see the same stuff realized, so it's not even that they consider my questions too useless for a qualified response.

+ +

However, whenever I send them a message via their contact form, I receive an autogenerated message ala "Thanks for your request, we take our users requests serious" a few hours later. Good to hear, that their system at least received my message. Another one, probably also auto-generated, that says "We forwarded your message to the development department." flies to my inbox usually a few days or weeks. Good to see, you take care over there at Xing! Although this is the final message I received about every such request.

+ +

No, to stay seriously and keep sarcasm away, is anyone taking care? I can't believe. I requested one and the same feature 3 times now and another one 2 times already. Without any response that seemed to be written by anything else than a computer. I'm not even sure that any human being ever read my mails. Maybe they have some fancy text recognition tool that generates standard replies automatically? Is it so hard to send a reply like "Sorry, we are not able to realize this, because..." or "Sorry, we don't think that feature Foo Bar is useful to our users, because..."? Is it so hard to give a use the feeling that anyone really takes care? Possibly I just asked the wrong question. If it is that way, please let me know.

+ +

To let you finally know what I want: Xing offers an RSS feeds for a lot of stuff. From the latest visitors of my profile to any ~~pointless~~important status messages, I can see everything right away in my feed reader. Why the hell not the next birthdays of my contacts? Why can I see "Foo Bar likes Xing status messages" in my Torii, but not who has his birthday today? The second ~~tiny~~huge feature I requested could even be more difficult to realize: Xing let's you link additional information about you from your profile. Beside your website you can share links to other social networks there, like Flickr or LastFM and a whole load of others I did not even hear of. Why is Ohloh still missing? Guys, I'm paying for your stuff, did you realize?

+ +

Would be interessting to know if anyone ever had success with a feature request at Xing, or if they just implement what the think is useful for their users?

+ + +

Fighting "personal spam"?

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:54:21 +0200

I've been to the Dortmund post office quite often lately, mostly because I'm never at home when the postman wants to deliver my packages. The largest German post service provider "Deutsche Post AG" also owns a bank, the "Postbank". While they did not bother me with any of that stuff earlier, their advertisement for non-postal and postal products starts getting more and more annoying. But let me start at the beginning...

+ +

While queuing inside the office to get to a counter, you need to stand between shelves that contain other stuff they sell at the post office: Stationery, cellphones, home phones and much more. Since you usually queue between 10 and 30 minutes you get enough time to read all those nice advertisement slogans. Right before you get to a counter, there is a large LCD screen that constantly shows a mixture of recent news and more and more advertisement: Banking stuff, cellphones, postal services and so on. When you finally make it to the counter, the staffer is usually unfriendly and not the fastest one. However, we are used to this for ages now and it's not the point of this article. When you are finally done hand happy to hold the latest DVD from Amazon in your hands, the staffer suddenly gets friendly: "Do you already have an account at Postbank?". A friendly "No thanks" does not work: "A just wanted to make sure you noticed...". "No, thank you!". "But it's about your future! Do you know you can save...". "I am sorry, but I already have a bank account and I do not want to change!".

+ +

After I had this situation for the 3rd time within a week now, I tend to simply lie to those people: I now tell them I'd still work for my old employer which also was a bank. This seems to work perfectly fine and they even reply with "Oh, sorry for disturbing you" and let you go. However, I wonder if there isn't any legal remedy I have against such spam? It is illegal to send me emails about drugs I'm not interessted in, but to spam me personally about banking services I don't want?

+ + +

My new hobby

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:07:00 +0200

As I already mentioned earlier, I recently bought a brand new Nikon D80 and started with a new hobby: Photography. :) With this entry I'd like to share some first experiences in this direction. The D80 seems to be a very good camera, I'm really amazed about its poissibillities. It is the best non-professional Nikon camera, AFAIK, and might be even a bit oversized for a photo beginner like me. Until now I only had experiences with compact cams and the D80 is my first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera. However, I'm very interessted in photography so I'm sure I will grow with this camery quite fast. The source of my interest are inspiring photographers in my surrounding: Derick, Sebastian, Marcus and most recently also Kore and Jakob. In addition, I love great photos and always wanted to be able to take those on my own. The final clincher was the experience with Kores D70s in Berlin.

+ +

To get started with started with the subject, Jakob recommended a great book to me, which I want to recommend to you now. The book is only available in German, AFAIK, so sorry to you English only readers. "Nikon D80 - Das Buch zu Kamera" does not only give a much more valuable overview on the D80 than the instructions manual does. It also gave me some good hints on what to pay attention for in photography and some technical background. Combined with practical use cases and helpful suggestions for custom settings and equipment, I'm still getting started with a great now hobby. If you like to get more info on this book, please take a look at my recension on Amazon (as soon as it is online).

+ +

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

+ + +

Really helpful open source guys

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:07:00 +0200

- -

In this sense: Thanks KDE people! That was really good support! :)

- - -

iRefuseToUse aNamingScheme

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:49:00 +0200

- -

as short as possible, as verbose as needed
- -

and

- -

you must understand the name without studying specific rules before
- -

- -

Just my .02.

- - -

Sending HEAD requests with ext/curl

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:25:00 +0200

- -

- - -

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -i -X HEAD http://localhost/admin/
-HTTP/1.1 200 OK
-X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
-
-<snip type="more http headers" />
-
-Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
-Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:10:59 GMT
-Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
-
-real    0m6.079s
-user    0m0.004s
-sys    0m0.000s

- - -

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -i -X GET http://localhost/admin/
-HTTP/1.1 200 OK
-Transfer-Encoding: chunked
-X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
-
-<snip type="more http headers" />
-
-Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
-Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:12:27 GMT
-Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
-
-<snip content="html source" />
-
-real    0m0.180s
-user    0m0.004s
-sys    0m0.000s

- -

ext/curl showed the exact same problem. Fiddling a bit with the command line switches, I found to replace -i with -I which makes curl print only the headers, but not the body of the response.

- - -

dotxp@tango ~ $ time curl -I -X HEAD http://localhost/admin/
-HTTP/1.1 200 OK
-X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.7-dev
-
-<snip type="more http headers" />
-
-Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
-Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:19:05 GMT
-Server: lighttpd/1.4.19
-
-real    0m0.044s
-user    0m0.004s
-sys    0m0.000s

- -

- - -

$c = curl_init();
-curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true ); 
-curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'HEAD' ); 
-curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1 ); 
-curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true ); 
-curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost/admin/' ); 
-
-$res = curl_exec( $c );

- -

- - -

Hierarchical caching

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:50:00 +0200

One of the cool new features in the new 2008.1 release of the eZ Components library is hierarchical caching.

- -

Using the cache stack with an appropriate replacement strategy allows you to simply ignore which items are stored where and simply use the stack as your only cache storage.

- -

- - -

eZ Conference: A technical view on eZ Components slides

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:32:00 +0200

- -

Update (2008-06-20, 15:13): I messed up with the download link, which is fixed now.

- - -

Firefox 3 out now

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:38:00 +0200

Last night the Mozilla developers released Firefox 3.0 to the wild. Congratulations for the new major version!

- -

In that sense, great work, Firefox hackers!

- -

Update (2008-06-18, 19:08): The Search Status extension works, seems I had disactivated it for some reason.

- -

Update (2008-06-23, 10:36): Thanks to a comment here, I got aware of a recent dev build of Tab Mix Plus. Luckily it seems to work quite fine, so my FF3 is near to be complete now. :)

- - -

6 essential PHP development tools slides from IPC/DLW

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:41:07 +0200

- -

Hope to see you there! 'till next time.

- - -

eZ Components status slides from IPC/DLW

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:34:31 +0200

You can find my slides from The state of eZ Components online now. The talk was quite crowded and I hope to also have attract some new contributors.

- - -

Database abstraction slides from IPC

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:14:29 +0200

- - -

Girl Geek Dinner right before IPC/DLW next week

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:43:54 +0200

- - -

Removed 1100 photos from Flickr

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:01:00 +0200

- -
Continue reading "Removed 1100 photos from Flickr" -

RoR does not scale?

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:26:40 +0200

It's interessting to see more people abandoning Ruby on Rails. Not that I have something against Ruby itself, but it really seems to me that RoR does not scale. Hope Twitter tries with PHP. ;)

- - -

Human support and feature requests at Xing

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:01:00 +0200

- -

Would be interessting to know if anyone ever had success with a feature request at Xing, or if they just implement what the think is useful for their users?

- - -

Fighting "personal spam"?

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:54:21 +0200

- -

- - -

My new hobby

nospam@example.com (Tobias Schlitt) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:07:00 +0200

- -

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

- - -

LQ Linux: a first version of the big menu

jgb_acc@users.sourceforge.net (Jacob Georg Benz) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:27:19 GMT

An easy Linux-System for older people. It has a big menu, an easy and safe installer, etc. It is going to base first on an other Linux(like Gentoo), but later on an own LFS-System +

GetTogether: First development release

jarvatharpo@users.sourceforge.net (Christian Neumann) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:27:03 GMT

Social network application featuring geographical distance calculation, events, locations, message boards and blog. +

OpenSkyNet: Pathfinding API v0.51 released

agn0stic3000@users.sourceforge.net (Dylan Blair) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:26:59 GMT

OpenSkyNet - Moving towards a comprehensive artificial intelligence solution for game developers under the LGPL. The goals are to implement action selection solvers, robust steering behaviors (including pathfinding algorithms), and machine learning. +

phpFotolog: New version - Nueva versiÃÂ³n de phpFotolog

erssystems@users.sourceforge.net (ERS Systems) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:26:54 GMT

A Fotolog.net clone writen in PHP and MySQL. You can upload pictures and it generates thumbnails. Visitors can add comments to your photos. It also supports adding fotolog.net and photoblog.be friends and updating automatically their last uploaded photos. +

ppc-evtd: 1.8

lb-source@users.sourceforge.net (lb-ls) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:24:45 GMT

This a simple and small user space interface daemon to the Linkstation/Kuro AVR micro-controller. It provides macro'd power on/off events and user control over button and fault events. +

XBMC Media Center: Ã¢â¬ËAtlantisÃ¢â¬â¢ Beta 1 released

gamester17@users.sourceforge.net (Gamester17) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:44 GMT

XBMC media center is a free software cross-platform media player jukebox and entertainment hub. XBMC is capable of playing back almost all known video, audio and picture formats from a computers harddrive, DVD-ROM drive, a local-network, and the internet +

PNG reference library: libpng: 1.2.32 released

glennrp@users.sourceforge.net (Glenn Randers-Pehrson) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:12 GMT

Reference library for supporting the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. +

Harbour: 1.0.1 released

vszakats@users.sourceforge.net (Viktor Szakats) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:33 GMT

The Harbour Project is a Free Open Source Software effort to build a multiplatform Clipper language compiler. Harbour consists of the xBase language compiler and the runtime libraries with different terminal plugins and different databases (not just DBF) +

Pantheios: 1.0.1 (beta 157) released

matsys@users.sourceforge.net (Matt Wilson) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:38 GMT

Pantheios is an Open Source C/C++ Logging API library, offering an optimal combination of 100% type-safety, efficiency, genericity and extensibility. It is simple to use and extend, highly-portable (platform and compiler-independent) and, best of all, it upholds the C tradition of you only pay for what you use. +

LiquiBase: 1.8.0 Released

nvoxland@users.sourceforge.net (Nathan Voxland) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:20 GMT

A tool to manage database changes and refactorings. All changes to a database are stored in XML files that are stored in version control with other source code. A graphical IDE is also available +

LQ Linux: a first version of the big menu

jgb_acc@users.sourceforge.net (Jacob Georg Benz) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:27:19 GMT

An easy Linux-System for older people. It has a big menu, an easy and safe installer, etc. It is going to base first on an other Linux(like Gentoo), but later on an own LFS-System -

GetTogether: First development release

jarvatharpo@users.sourceforge.net (Christian Neumann) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:27:03 GMT

Social network application featuring geographical distance calculation, events, locations, message boards and blog. -

OpenSkyNet: Pathfinding API v0.51 released

agn0stic3000@users.sourceforge.net (Dylan Blair) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:26:59 GMT

phpFotolog: New version - Nueva versiÃÂ³n de phpFotolog

erssystems@users.sourceforge.net (ERS Systems) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:26:54 GMT

ppc-evtd: 1.8

lb-source@users.sourceforge.net (lb-ls) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:24:45 GMT

This a simple and small user space interface daemon to the Linkstation/Kuro AVR micro-controller. It provides macro'd power on/off events and user control over button and fault events. -

XBMC Media Center: Ã¢â¬ËAtlantisÃ¢â¬â¢ Beta 1 released

gamester17@users.sourceforge.net (Gamester17) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:44 GMT

PNG reference library: libpng: 1.2.32 released

glennrp@users.sourceforge.net (Glenn Randers-Pehrson) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:12 GMT

Reference library for supporting the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. -

Harbour: 1.0.1 released

vszakats@users.sourceforge.net (Viktor Szakats) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:33 GMT

Pantheios: 1.0.1 (beta 157) released

matsys@users.sourceforge.net (Matt Wilson) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:38 GMT

LiquiBase: 1.8.0 Released

nvoxland@users.sourceforge.net (Nathan Voxland) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:20 GMT

A tool to manage database changes and refactorings. All changes to a database are stored in XML files that are stored in version control with other source code. A graphical IDE is also available -

Photo Contest (not quite PHP related)

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:52:32 -0500

+ Two of my photos are finalists in a local (Israeli) pets+owners photo contest.
+You can find them at http://tinyurl.com/2oodug
+While it's in Hebrew, the photos are pretty universal so you can still appreciate them.
+If you feel like voting for one of mine - one is on the fourth row on the left column (Anya & white dog), and the other is on the last row in the right column (me + kitten). One vote per person (or at least per browser ). Click on the arrow icon on the bottom left once you've made your choice. The pets thank you +

PHP Security

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:31:14 -0500

+ I've just been misquoted on Slashdot, as if I said there are no security problems in PHP itself, and that I instead point my finger only at inexperienced developers.
+
+If you read the original article on Heise Security, you'll see that I have not said anything of the sort. While I hope Slashdot fixes this story, I thought I'd make my stand on this clearer. I believe this is the belief of most others on the security team, but I'm only speaking on behalf of myself and do not represent them.
+
+1. Fact is most security problems that are published that have to do with PHP, have to do with problems at the user level, i.e., bugs in the application written in PHP. There's no point arguing about this one, it can be proven by simply looking at the number of published advisories that had to do with PHP itself, vs. the number of advisories that had to do with applications written in PHP.
+
+2. There are many reasons for the fact there's a large number of security problems in PHP Web apps. First and foremost, it's the fact PHP is by far the most popular platform for building Web apps, and I believe it's also the language with the largest number of opensource ready-to-use Web apps out there. If PHP accounts for, say, 50% of the opensource Web apps deployed on the net (a reasonably conservative assumption), half of the problems in Web apps would have been in PHP apps just from a statistical point of view. Also remember that it's much easier to create a Web app that's exploitable than a desktop/backend app that's exploitable, if only for the fact that Web apps are (almost) by definition remotely accessible, turning even minor glitches to problems with real security implications.
+
+3. Another reason for certain classes of security problems in PHP can be blamed on the language itself. Two such examples are register_globals (handled in PHP 4.2 several years ago) and the default support for URL include()'s (fixed as of PHP 5.2 a couple of months ago). These are not strictly language bugs, but instead, features (or misfeatures) that make it all too easy for novice developers (and sometimes even advanced ones not paying attention) to fall into security pitfalls. While not a language problem from a strict "computer science" point of view, I think everyone on the PHP dev team perceives those as problems that need to be addressed, and contrary to the misquote on slashdot, nobody, or at least not me, is pointing the finger at inexperienced developers. It's their fault, but our responsibility, if you will.
+Yes, we could have handled the remote URL inclusion faster, but saying we don't care about such issues is just false.
+
+4. And now for the scoop. YES, there ARE security problems in PHP. PHP itself, as in the code in C that implements the language. If you didn't get a stroke from reading this scoop and you're still with me, I'd like to point out that I can hardly think of any other project in such a scope and of a similar nature that doesn't have security problems in it, at the same rate (give or take) as PHP. I've never said anything to the contrary in the past, and I don't expect to ever say something else in the future. I do mention, whenever I'm asked about PHP's security, that most of the problems happen at the user level - but it doesn't mean that PHP doesn't have security bugs in it as well.
+
+5. I believe we've had an excellent track record at fixing remotely exploitable problems and coming out with fixes immediately, and there haven't been that many of them either.
+
+Stefan's talk about being considered "persona non grata" because he 'had the guts to stand against us' is completely false, too. I'm not going to get into the details of what brought Stefan to call it quits, but suffice to say that it had nothing to do with the published reason, and more to the interaction between Stefan and other members of the security team, and the dev team in general.
+
+Finally, I'd like to take the opportunity, again, and ask Stefan to come to come back to security@ team, and work with the project and not against it. As any project that has hundreds of people contributing to it, you never find yourself in agreement with everyone at any given time; It doesn't mean that those who don't think exactly like you are your 'enemies', and it certainly doesn't mean you should quit and turn to the 'other side'.
+
+Zeev
+ +

hebrev() and friends

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:47:02 -0500

+ Recently Andrei approached me and asked what I think should be done with hebrev() and hebrevc() in the context of the Unicode-enabled PHP 6. For those of you who don't know, hebrev() (which stands for Hebrew Reverse) and hebrevc() (which stands for Hebrew Reverse & Convert) are remnants from the early days of the Web - where browsers could not handle Right-to-Left langauges properly. For those of you who don't know what Right-to-Left languages are, they're simply enough languages that are written from right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
+
+In those dark ages - if you wanted your text to render properly on a browser that's completely ignorant of the fact your text should be going from right to left - in addition to right alignment, you also had to write your text in reverse. Kind of like, in order to type "Hello World", you had to type "dlroW olleH" (or rather, instead of "שלום עולם" one had to type "םלוע םולש"). This concept was named "Visual displaying", or in short just plain "Visual". Since most other systems (other than browsers) were generally saving their data in the correct first-char-comes-first order (simply enough called "Logical"), and since input coming from users using browsers also came in the correct 'logical' order, there was a gap between the data Web apps were working with, and the data they had to display. hebrev() and hebrevc() were created to bridge that gap, and reverse Visual hebrew into Logical and vice versa. Doing that is probably much more complicated than you think as you have to make sure not to reverse numbers or non-Hebrew text, break lines properly if wrapping was requested, etc.
+
+As time passed by - more and more browsers got the ability to handle Logical text, and automatically display it properly and render it from right to left. My belief is that most of the R2L web today is already using Logical - which brings me back to Andrei's query, where I'd like to ask your feedback.
+
+Do you think we need to update hebrev() to support Unicode, or should we just let it rest in peace? Should we may be expose the more powerful ICU bidirectional conversion API under new names for those who wish to still reverse Unicode text from Visual to Logical and vice versa? I realize this is probably not very interesting to most of the crowd here, but those of you that do have an opinion - your feedback is welcome!
+ +

Stefan Esser quits security@php.net

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 11:54:34 -0500

+ Yesterday, I had a heated debate with Stefan Esser, one of the most active people (if not the most active person) in the field of PHP security. I told him that I, as well as a lot of other contributors to the PHP project, are at odds with the way he's behaving; While at the same time appreciating the highly skilled job he's doing for PHP.
+
+Unfortunately, Stefan decided to call it quits and from a blog post on his web site, it appears he'll now attempt to become even more aggressive, do his best to ignore the best interests of PHP by disclosing unpatched holes, and in general trying to expose as many security holes in PHP. That was not my intention when I truthfully told him what I (and many more) feel about the style of his involvement.
+
+Since Stefan is obviously not listening to me, I think it may help if people who feel his behavior is inappropriate go to his blog and submit their thoughts, or send him emails. Do that in a responsible and appropriate language, though. Maybe if he sees it's not just me he'll reconsider.
+
+
+ +

Zend wins IVA and Red Herring's Best Software Startup award

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:34:57 -0400

+
+
+Yesterday, Zend won Israel Venture Association (IVA) and Red Herring's Best Software Startup award for the year 2006. Those of you who know the Israeli hitech landscape can understand what an amazing feat this is; For those who don't, Zend (and two other startups in other hitech areas) won out of a list of 400 nominees, which in turn are only a small fraction of the startups in the country. Israel has the highest concentration of startups in the world, second only to the Silicon Valley. So, the fact Zend won is pretty amazing and a great honor for all of the team.
+
+I believe that PHP, the opensource movement and its ability to create a 1st class contender in the Web development space played a major role in the judges' decision, so I also see this as a win for the entire PHP community. We've definitely all come a long way...
+
+Great job, Zenders and PHPers!
+
+Links:
+Red Herring
+Ynet (Hebrew)
+Some pictures +

Government-Organized PHP Seminar in France

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:44:58 -0400

+
+
+Yesterday in Paris, I spoke in a one day seminar about PHP, that was organized by DGME, a French governmental agency. It was held in a conference room in one of the Minefi (Ministry of Finance) buildings, no less. Most of the attendees were coming from various governmental agencies and ministries, to learn more about PHP success stories and best practices. Presenters came from Oracle, alapage.com, DGME, Zend and others.
+
+
+The seminar was the first seminar of its kind in France, and to the best of my knowledge - it was the first one of its kind around the world as well. Personally, I found it quite amazing - although I guess we'll have to start getting used to PHP being regularly adopted by an ever-growing number of entities, for which it used to be completely off-limits until not too long ago. At long last, the perception about PHP is finally showing some true signs of changing, and finally synchronizing with reality; People and organizations perceiving PHP for what it is - the best Web development platform out there.
+
+I believe this is just the beginning - and we'll see more events like this in France and elsewhere, and more and more people attending them. +

Guy Harpaz opens a new blog!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 11 May 2006 10:48:13 -0400

+ Guy Harpaz, the product manager for Zend Studio (and its former development team leader), has opened a new blog. His likely topics for blogging would revolve around the Eclipse PHP IDE project, and upcoming versions of Studio, so it should be quite interesting.
+
+Check it out! +

Zend Studio 5.0 Beta available!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 15:41:24 -0400

+ It's been a while since I personally contributed code to this project, but a bunch of my most-wanted features are now in there, most notably multilevel code completion and native web services support.
+
+Multilevel code completion means that almost always you'd get code completion for objects, even if they're return values from functions (as long as you phpdocument them!) or a 10th level indirection, $foo->bar->baz->.... As a code-completion addict, that's great news.
+
+Native web services support means I no longer have to start writing web services by taking an existing WSDL file (a.k.a. scrolls of magic) and change it, but can instead use the WSDL generator now built into the system. Not to mention the code completion for SoapClient objects (did I mention I'm a code completion addict?)
+
+The beta is available for free download on zend.com. Free T-shirts will be given to the most valuable reporters so start smashing it today
+ +

Following up...

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:58:32 -0400

+ Can anybody spot the new sponsor here? You have to admit it wouldn't be the first on your guess list. +

Selling PHP to your boss? A piece of cake.

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:09:52 -0400

+ I'm not sure how many of you have been to the Z/PC&E2005 (*) as of late, but it's definitely an interesting visit. While it's not the first PHP conference to feature some pretty impressive sponsors, I think it would be fair to say that it's the first PHP event that is backed by the leading technology companies in the world today. Including some you'd never suspect would be interested (will update tomorrow, stay tuned).
+
+Needless to say, that reflects greatly on PHP.
+
+It's no secret PHP was (and to a large degree still is) a grassroots phenomenon. Most of the companies using PHP today chose to use it based on a developer's decision, as opposed to a management (CIO/CTO) decision. However, in many companies, especially the larger ones - PHP's penetration ended as soon as the developer(s) tried to sell the concept of using opensource in general, and PHP in particular to their boss, and sometimes to their customers.
+
+"How do I sell PHP to my boss?" was one of the key questions that I had to deal with personally in the past. As a proliferator of PHP, this was one of the key challenges Zend faced as well. It has also been the topic of numerous presentations in various PHP conferences. The answer that was always given was based purely on technological merit - it was clear that nothing we (community, Zend, or both) can do can match the mammoth marketing power that was pushing the commercial or even free (Java based) alternatives. Years and years of relentless work to change the world's perception have finally paid off. Today, the same powers are now beginning to push PHP itself, especially into places where it stood no chance to penetrate in the past. And it's not just marketing either - the OCI8 extension and the new SDO extension are just two initial examples of how this involvement is going to translate into additional 'tangible' benefits for the PHP community.
+
+2005 definitely signifies a turning point in the history of PHP. From an underdog that is technologically superior but lacks industry backing, to an overdog(**) - still technologically superior, but an accepted industry standard as well.
+
+I'll see you all at the conference!
+
+---
+
+(*) Zend PHP Conference & Expo 2005
+(**) Improvements to this word welcome! +

PHP and Oracle

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 08:10:05 -0400

+ As some people may have noticed, Zend Core for Oracle went into a public beta stage a couple of days ago. This free product is excellent news for anybody using PHP and Oracle together, since the OCI8 extension was vastly improved to bring it on par with (and sometimes better than) other database extensions, both in terms of stability and performance.
+
+It's actually good news even for people who won't be using Zend Core - since like with any other fixes made to PHP in the course of the work on Core (and in general), these will be committed to the PHP CVS as soon as they're tested (probably a couple of days' time). +

Scotch is gone

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:00:20 -0400

+ My beloved dog, which was adopted by my parents when I went to the army, has passed away yesterday, when I was on my way to the US. She died of cancer at the age of 13.5. It's amazingly sad that those magnificent creatures live so little. This makes you wonder how just one thing is certain in life. Sad, sad entry for the Life category.
+
+From the PHP angle, in a way, Scotch affected a bunch of parts in PHP - since she was the only one I could consult with when I developed certain parts of the language, in the middle of the night many years ago... She was definitely a PHP dog.
+
+May you rest in peace, Scottie!
+
+Picture Gallery
+ +

PHP 5's SOAP extension and SalesForce

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:29:05 -0400

+ In the last few days I've been working on a piece of code in PHP that had to integrate with SalesForce. During the course of this work I bumped into some minor annoyances (or rather, a minor annoyance) with ext/soap, which I was able to quickly fix thanks to Dmitry's excellently structured code. For those who are interested, you can now set custom SOAP headers using SoapClient::__setSoapHeaders(). This will cause SoapClient to send the headers on every subsequent access to a web service, conducted through the relevant SoapClient object. While you could specify custom SOAP headers before - it required overloading __call() and doing this work in userland, and now it's no longer necessary.
+
+On a slightly related note, I wanted to take this opportunity to ask how many of you have actually used ext/soap, and what's your feedback about it. Is it working well? Is there anything missing? As in the past, success stories are also interesting, they're equally interesting to "it's broken!" responses.
+
+As a special bonus, for those of you who integrate with SalesForce, and are still using the old SOAP APIs (or God forbid, are using a language other than PHP to do it), here's a code snippet that demos how to connect to SalesForce. Note that because it uses the new SoapClient::__setSoapHeaders(), you'd need a fairly recent snapshot/CVS in order for that to work.
+
+---
+

PHP:



+<?php

+// Connect

+$sforce = new SoapClient("sforce.wsdl");  // obtain your own customized sforce.wsdl from sforce.com

+$loginResult = $sforce->login(array("username" => "joe@doe.com", "password" => "xyz"));

+$loginResult= $loginResult->result;

+

+// Set connection data

+$sforce->__setLocation($loginResult->serverUrl);

+$sforce_header = new SoapHeader('urn:enterprise.soap.sforce.com', 'SessionHeader', array('sessionId' => $loginResult->sessionId));

+$sforce->__setSoapHeaders(array($sforce_header));

+

+// Query SalesForce for Leads whose first name is Bill

+try {

+    $result = $sforce->query(array("queryString" => "select Id, FirstName, LastName from Lead where Lead.FirstName='Bill'"));

+    print_r($result);

+} catch (Exception $e) {

+    print_r($e);

+}

+

+// Change a lead

+try {

+    $lead->LastName = "Gates";

+    $lead->Id = "...";  // needs to be a valid id

+    $arg->sObjects = new SoapVar($lead, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, "Lead", "http://soapinterop.org/xsd");

+    print_r($sforce->update($arg));

+    print "SUCCESS!";

+} catch (Exception $e) {

+    print_r($e);

+}

+

+?>

+

+

+---
+
+During the course of writing this blog I came across a blog post from George Schlossnagle which may also be interesting. Even though I didn't bump into the same issue, it may be that I just didn't get far enough - so you may still need the workaround in there.
+
+ +

PHP History Gem found!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Fri, 06 May 2005 19:57:29 -0400

+ While deleting old files to save some space on my homedir, I stumbled upon a PHP history gem - David Axmark's photos of what was the first PHP conference ever - the PHP Developers' Meeting, or PDM, held in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 2000. That's more than 5 years ago, the days where men were men, 2 megapixel digicams were cutting edge, and the entire PHP development team (almost) could easily fit in a fairly small room.
+
+In addition to the conference pics themselves, the galleries also include photos of the trip we took to Jerusalem as well as some random pictures of Tel Aviv.
+
+Enjoy! +

New Zend Studio plugins released

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 03:51:42 -0400

+ Two new plugins were officially released today by Zend.
+
+First, a plugin that allows integration of PHP code snippets from zend.com's code gallery, directly into Adobe GoLive. That replicates a feature that's built into Zend Studio 4.0, and makes it available (for free) in Adobe's HTML WYSIWIG editor, quite a nice addition for advanced PHP-aware designers.
+
+And more interestingly from my point of view - a FireFox plugin that provides full Zend Studio integration with the browser (actually, the plugin is also available separately for Mozilla, so I guess you can count them as three).
+
+The idea of integrating PHP debugging and profiling capabilities directly into the browser was introduced in Zend Studio 3.0, in the form of the Internet Explorer toolbar. Even though I'm far from being objective about the brilliance of this toolbar (...), it was very pleasing to see the tremendous feedback that it generated. Finally, it was possible to debug even the most annoying forms and most complicated pages, at a simple click of a button.
+
+Internally at Zend, where a lot (not to say most) of the developers use Linux, it actually generated some angry "grr, when will it support Mozilla?#!$" feedback, which I silently ignored. Back then, I had very little faith in Mozilla, and I have to admit I dismissed it as a noble effort that will never actually be fruitful. Nonetheless, I wrote a simple XUL version of the toolbar that was used internally for quite some time.
+
+Times have changed. Firefox has become the browser of choice for many users, including myself, and for the first time in years, a challenger is posing some serious competition to the IE monopoly. It was clearly time to take the Firefox userbase more seriously. A recent blog post by Davey Shafik made the need for a good Firefox plugin bluntly clear. Thankfully, by now we already had a rewritten plugin for Firefox, that arguably has more functionality than its IE cousin. Today it was finally officially released to the public.
+
+One final interesting note about these plugins - they're all written as scripts. Is the end of compiled languages for daily use nearing? +

Photo Contest (not quite PHP related)

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:52:32 -0500

- Two of my photos are finalists in a local (Israeli) pets+owners photo contest.
-You can find them at http://tinyurl.com/2oodug
-While it's in Hebrew, the photos are pretty universal so you can still appreciate them.
-If you feel like voting for one of mine - one is on the fourth row on the left column (Anya & white dog), and the other is on the last row in the right column (me + kitten). One vote per person (or at least per browser ). Click on the arrow icon on the bottom left once you've made your choice. The pets thank you -

PHP Security

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:31:14 -0500

- I've just been misquoted on Slashdot, as if I said there are no security problems in PHP itself, and that I instead point my finger only at inexperienced developers.
-
-If you read the original article on Heise Security, you'll see that I have not said anything of the sort. While I hope Slashdot fixes this story, I thought I'd make my stand on this clearer. I believe this is the belief of most others on the security team, but I'm only speaking on behalf of myself and do not represent them.
-
-1. Fact is most security problems that are published that have to do with PHP, have to do with problems at the user level, i.e., bugs in the application written in PHP. There's no point arguing about this one, it can be proven by simply looking at the number of published advisories that had to do with PHP itself, vs. the number of advisories that had to do with applications written in PHP.
-
-2. There are many reasons for the fact there's a large number of security problems in PHP Web apps. First and foremost, it's the fact PHP is by far the most popular platform for building Web apps, and I believe it's also the language with the largest number of opensource ready-to-use Web apps out there. If PHP accounts for, say, 50% of the opensource Web apps deployed on the net (a reasonably conservative assumption), half of the problems in Web apps would have been in PHP apps just from a statistical point of view. Also remember that it's much easier to create a Web app that's exploitable than a desktop/backend app that's exploitable, if only for the fact that Web apps are (almost) by definition remotely accessible, turning even minor glitches to problems with real security implications.
-
-3. Another reason for certain classes of security problems in PHP can be blamed on the language itself. Two such examples are register_globals (handled in PHP 4.2 several years ago) and the default support for URL include()'s (fixed as of PHP 5.2 a couple of months ago). These are not strictly language bugs, but instead, features (or misfeatures) that make it all too easy for novice developers (and sometimes even advanced ones not paying attention) to fall into security pitfalls. While not a language problem from a strict "computer science" point of view, I think everyone on the PHP dev team perceives those as problems that need to be addressed, and contrary to the misquote on slashdot, nobody, or at least not me, is pointing the finger at inexperienced developers. It's their fault, but our responsibility, if you will.
-Yes, we could have handled the remote URL inclusion faster, but saying we don't care about such issues is just false.
-
-4. And now for the scoop. YES, there ARE security problems in PHP. PHP itself, as in the code in C that implements the language. If you didn't get a stroke from reading this scoop and you're still with me, I'd like to point out that I can hardly think of any other project in such a scope and of a similar nature that doesn't have security problems in it, at the same rate (give or take) as PHP. I've never said anything to the contrary in the past, and I don't expect to ever say something else in the future. I do mention, whenever I'm asked about PHP's security, that most of the problems happen at the user level - but it doesn't mean that PHP doesn't have security bugs in it as well.
-
-5. I believe we've had an excellent track record at fixing remotely exploitable problems and coming out with fixes immediately, and there haven't been that many of them either.
-
-Stefan's talk about being considered "persona non grata" because he 'had the guts to stand against us' is completely false, too. I'm not going to get into the details of what brought Stefan to call it quits, but suffice to say that it had nothing to do with the published reason, and more to the interaction between Stefan and other members of the security team, and the dev team in general.
-
-Finally, I'd like to take the opportunity, again, and ask Stefan to come to come back to security@ team, and work with the project and not against it. As any project that has hundreds of people contributing to it, you never find yourself in agreement with everyone at any given time; It doesn't mean that those who don't think exactly like you are your 'enemies', and it certainly doesn't mean you should quit and turn to the 'other side'.
-
-Zeev
- -

hebrev() and friends

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:47:02 -0500

- Recently Andrei approached me and asked what I think should be done with hebrev() and hebrevc() in the context of the Unicode-enabled PHP 6. For those of you who don't know, hebrev() (which stands for Hebrew Reverse) and hebrevc() (which stands for Hebrew Reverse & Convert) are remnants from the early days of the Web - where browsers could not handle Right-to-Left langauges properly. For those of you who don't know what Right-to-Left languages are, they're simply enough languages that are written from right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
-
-In those dark ages - if you wanted your text to render properly on a browser that's completely ignorant of the fact your text should be going from right to left - in addition to right alignment, you also had to write your text in reverse. Kind of like, in order to type "Hello World", you had to type "dlroW olleH" (or rather, instead of "שלום עולם" one had to type "םלוע םולש"). This concept was named "Visual displaying", or in short just plain "Visual". Since most other systems (other than browsers) were generally saving their data in the correct first-char-comes-first order (simply enough called "Logical"), and since input coming from users using browsers also came in the correct 'logical' order, there was a gap between the data Web apps were working with, and the data they had to display. hebrev() and hebrevc() were created to bridge that gap, and reverse Visual hebrew into Logical and vice versa. Doing that is probably much more complicated than you think as you have to make sure not to reverse numbers or non-Hebrew text, break lines properly if wrapping was requested, etc.
-
-As time passed by - more and more browsers got the ability to handle Logical text, and automatically display it properly and render it from right to left. My belief is that most of the R2L web today is already using Logical - which brings me back to Andrei's query, where I'd like to ask your feedback.
-
-Do you think we need to update hebrev() to support Unicode, or should we just let it rest in peace? Should we may be expose the more powerful ICU bidirectional conversion API under new names for those who wish to still reverse Unicode text from Visual to Logical and vice versa? I realize this is probably not very interesting to most of the crowd here, but those of you that do have an opinion - your feedback is welcome!
- -

Stefan Esser quits security@php.net

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 11:54:34 -0500

- Yesterday, I had a heated debate with Stefan Esser, one of the most active people (if not the most active person) in the field of PHP security. I told him that I, as well as a lot of other contributors to the PHP project, are at odds with the way he's behaving; While at the same time appreciating the highly skilled job he's doing for PHP.
-
-Unfortunately, Stefan decided to call it quits and from a blog post on his web site, it appears he'll now attempt to become even more aggressive, do his best to ignore the best interests of PHP by disclosing unpatched holes, and in general trying to expose as many security holes in PHP. That was not my intention when I truthfully told him what I (and many more) feel about the style of his involvement.
-
-Since Stefan is obviously not listening to me, I think it may help if people who feel his behavior is inappropriate go to his blog and submit their thoughts, or send him emails. Do that in a responsible and appropriate language, though. Maybe if he sees it's not just me he'll reconsider.
-
-
- -

Zend wins IVA and Red Herring's Best Software Startup award

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:34:57 -0400

-
-
-Yesterday, Zend won Israel Venture Association (IVA) and Red Herring's Best Software Startup award for the year 2006. Those of you who know the Israeli hitech landscape can understand what an amazing feat this is; For those who don't, Zend (and two other startups in other hitech areas) won out of a list of 400 nominees, which in turn are only a small fraction of the startups in the country. Israel has the highest concentration of startups in the world, second only to the Silicon Valley. So, the fact Zend won is pretty amazing and a great honor for all of the team.
-
-I believe that PHP, the opensource movement and its ability to create a 1st class contender in the Web development space played a major role in the judges' decision, so I also see this as a win for the entire PHP community. We've definitely all come a long way...
-
-Great job, Zenders and PHPers!
-
-Links:
-Red Herring
-Ynet (Hebrew)
-Some pictures -

Government-Organized PHP Seminar in France

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:44:58 -0400

-
-
-Yesterday in Paris, I spoke in a one day seminar about PHP, that was organized by DGME, a French governmental agency. It was held in a conference room in one of the Minefi (Ministry of Finance) buildings, no less. Most of the attendees were coming from various governmental agencies and ministries, to learn more about PHP success stories and best practices. Presenters came from Oracle, alapage.com, DGME, Zend and others.
-
-
-The seminar was the first seminar of its kind in France, and to the best of my knowledge - it was the first one of its kind around the world as well. Personally, I found it quite amazing - although I guess we'll have to start getting used to PHP being regularly adopted by an ever-growing number of entities, for which it used to be completely off-limits until not too long ago. At long last, the perception about PHP is finally showing some true signs of changing, and finally synchronizing with reality; People and organizations perceiving PHP for what it is - the best Web development platform out there.
-
-I believe this is just the beginning - and we'll see more events like this in France and elsewhere, and more and more people attending them. -

Guy Harpaz opens a new blog!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 11 May 2006 10:48:13 -0400

- Guy Harpaz, the product manager for Zend Studio (and its former development team leader), has opened a new blog. His likely topics for blogging would revolve around the Eclipse PHP IDE project, and upcoming versions of Studio, so it should be quite interesting.
-
-Check it out! -

Zend Studio 5.0 Beta available!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 15:41:24 -0400

- It's been a while since I personally contributed code to this project, but a bunch of my most-wanted features are now in there, most notably multilevel code completion and native web services support.
-
-Multilevel code completion means that almost always you'd get code completion for objects, even if they're return values from functions (as long as you phpdocument them!) or a 10th level indirection, $foo->bar->baz->.... As a code-completion addict, that's great news.
-
-Native web services support means I no longer have to start writing web services by taking an existing WSDL file (a.k.a. scrolls of magic) and change it, but can instead use the WSDL generator now built into the system. Not to mention the code completion for SoapClient objects (did I mention I'm a code completion addict?)
-
-The beta is available for free download on zend.com. Free T-shirts will be given to the most valuable reporters so start smashing it today
- -

Following up...

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:58:32 -0400

- Can anybody spot the new sponsor here? You have to admit it wouldn't be the first on your guess list. -

Selling PHP to your boss? A piece of cake.

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:09:52 -0400

- I'm not sure how many of you have been to the Z/PC&E2005 (*) as of late, but it's definitely an interesting visit. While it's not the first PHP conference to feature some pretty impressive sponsors, I think it would be fair to say that it's the first PHP event that is backed by the leading technology companies in the world today. Including some you'd never suspect would be interested (will update tomorrow, stay tuned).
-
-Needless to say, that reflects greatly on PHP.
-
-It's no secret PHP was (and to a large degree still is) a grassroots phenomenon. Most of the companies using PHP today chose to use it based on a developer's decision, as opposed to a management (CIO/CTO) decision. However, in many companies, especially the larger ones - PHP's penetration ended as soon as the developer(s) tried to sell the concept of using opensource in general, and PHP in particular to their boss, and sometimes to their customers.
-
-"How do I sell PHP to my boss?" was one of the key questions that I had to deal with personally in the past. As a proliferator of PHP, this was one of the key challenges Zend faced as well. It has also been the topic of numerous presentations in various PHP conferences. The answer that was always given was based purely on technological merit - it was clear that nothing we (community, Zend, or both) can do can match the mammoth marketing power that was pushing the commercial or even free (Java based) alternatives. Years and years of relentless work to change the world's perception have finally paid off. Today, the same powers are now beginning to push PHP itself, especially into places where it stood no chance to penetrate in the past. And it's not just marketing either - the OCI8 extension and the new SDO extension are just two initial examples of how this involvement is going to translate into additional 'tangible' benefits for the PHP community.
-
-2005 definitely signifies a turning point in the history of PHP. From an underdog that is technologically superior but lacks industry backing, to an overdog(**) - still technologically superior, but an accepted industry standard as well.
-
-I'll see you all at the conference!
-
----
-
-(*) Zend PHP Conference & Expo 2005
-(**) Improvements to this word welcome! -

PHP and Oracle

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 08:10:05 -0400

- As some people may have noticed, Zend Core for Oracle went into a public beta stage a couple of days ago. This free product is excellent news for anybody using PHP and Oracle together, since the OCI8 extension was vastly improved to bring it on par with (and sometimes better than) other database extensions, both in terms of stability and performance.
-
-It's actually good news even for people who won't be using Zend Core - since like with any other fixes made to PHP in the course of the work on Core (and in general), these will be committed to the PHP CVS as soon as they're tested (probably a couple of days' time). -

Scotch is gone

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:00:20 -0400

- My beloved dog, which was adopted by my parents when I went to the army, has passed away yesterday, when I was on my way to the US. She died of cancer at the age of 13.5. It's amazingly sad that those magnificent creatures live so little. This makes you wonder how just one thing is certain in life. Sad, sad entry for the Life category.
-
-From the PHP angle, in a way, Scotch affected a bunch of parts in PHP - since she was the only one I could consult with when I developed certain parts of the language, in the middle of the night many years ago... She was definitely a PHP dog.
-
-May you rest in peace, Scottie!
-
-Picture Gallery
- -

PHP 5's SOAP extension and SalesForce

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:29:05 -0400

- In the last few days I've been working on a piece of code in PHP that had to integrate with SalesForce. During the course of this work I bumped into some minor annoyances (or rather, a minor annoyance) with ext/soap, which I was able to quickly fix thanks to Dmitry's excellently structured code. For those who are interested, you can now set custom SOAP headers using SoapClient::__setSoapHeaders(). This will cause SoapClient to send the headers on every subsequent access to a web service, conducted through the relevant SoapClient object. While you could specify custom SOAP headers before - it required overloading __call() and doing this work in userland, and now it's no longer necessary.
-
-On a slightly related note, I wanted to take this opportunity to ask how many of you have actually used ext/soap, and what's your feedback about it. Is it working well? Is there anything missing? As in the past, success stories are also interesting, they're equally interesting to "it's broken!" responses.
-
-As a special bonus, for those of you who integrate with SalesForce, and are still using the old SOAP APIs (or God forbid, are using a language other than PHP to do it), here's a code snippet that demos how to connect to SalesForce. Note that because it uses the new SoapClient::__setSoapHeaders(), you'd need a fairly recent snapshot/CVS in order for that to work.
-
----
-

PHP:



-<?php

-// Connect

-$sforce = new SoapClient("sforce.wsdl");  // obtain your own customized sforce.wsdl from sforce.com

-$loginResult = $sforce->login(array("username" => "joe@doe.com", "password" => "xyz"));

-$loginResult= $loginResult->result;

-

-// Set connection data

-$sforce->__setLocation($loginResult->serverUrl);

-$sforce_header = new SoapHeader('urn:enterprise.soap.sforce.com', 'SessionHeader', array('sessionId' => $loginResult->sessionId));

-$sforce->__setSoapHeaders(array($sforce_header));

-

-// Query SalesForce for Leads whose first name is Bill

-try {

-    $result = $sforce->query(array("queryString" => "select Id, FirstName, LastName from Lead where Lead.FirstName='Bill'"));

-    print_r($result);

-} catch (Exception $e) {

-    print_r($e);

-}

-

-// Change a lead

-try {

-    $lead->LastName = "Gates";

-    $lead->Id = "...";  // needs to be a valid id

-    $arg->sObjects = new SoapVar($lead, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, "Lead", "http://soapinterop.org/xsd");

-    print_r($sforce->update($arg));

-    print "SUCCESS!";

-} catch (Exception $e) {

-    print_r($e);

-}

-

-?>

-

-

----
-
-During the course of writing this blog I came across a blog post from George Schlossnagle which may also be interesting. Even though I didn't bump into the same issue, it may be that I just didn't get far enough - so you may still need the workaround in there.
-
- -

PHP History Gem found!

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Fri, 06 May 2005 19:57:29 -0400

- While deleting old files to save some space on my homedir, I stumbled upon a PHP history gem - David Axmark's photos of what was the first PHP conference ever - the PHP Developers' Meeting, or PDM, held in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 2000. That's more than 5 years ago, the days where men were men, 2 megapixel digicams were cutting edge, and the entire PHP development team (almost) could easily fit in a fairly small room.
-
-In addition to the conference pics themselves, the galleries also include photos of the trip we took to Jerusalem as well as some random pictures of Tel Aviv.
-
-Enjoy! -

New Zend Studio plugins released

zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski) — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 03:51:42 -0400

- Two new plugins were officially released today by Zend.
-
-First, a plugin that allows integration of PHP code snippets from zend.com's code gallery, directly into Adobe GoLive. That replicates a feature that's built into Zend Studio 4.0, and makes it available (for free) in Adobe's HTML WYSIWIG editor, quite a nice addition for advanced PHP-aware designers.
-
-And more interestingly from my point of view - a FireFox plugin that provides full Zend Studio integration with the browser (actually, the plugin is also available separately for Mozilla, so I guess you can count them as three).
-
-The idea of integrating PHP debugging and profiling capabilities directly into the browser was introduced in Zend Studio 3.0, in the form of the Internet Explorer toolbar. Even though I'm far from being objective about the brilliance of this toolbar (...), it was very pleasing to see the tremendous feedback that it generated. Finally, it was possible to debug even the most annoying forms and most complicated pages, at a simple click of a button.
-
-Internally at Zend, where a lot (not to say most) of the developers use Linux, it actually generated some angry "grr, when will it support Mozilla?#!$" feedback, which I silently ignored. Back then, I had very little faith in Mozilla, and I have to admit I dismissed it as a noble effort that will never actually be fruitful. Nonetheless, I wrote a simple XUL version of the toolbar that was used internally for quite some time.
-
-Times have changed. Firefox has become the browser of choice for many users, including myself, and for the first time in years, a challenger is posing some serious competition to the IE monopoly. It was clearly time to take the Firefox userbase more seriously. A recent blog post by Davey Shafik made the need for a good Firefox plugin bluntly clear. Thankfully, by now we already had a rewritten plugin for Firefox, that arguably has more functionality than its IE cousin. Today it was finally officially released to the public.
-
-One final interesting note about these plugins - they're all written as scripts. Is the end of compiled languages for daily use nearing? -

mmm, rabbits

2005-10-15T00:23:50Z

this story has one of the most brilliant quotes iâve ever seen in a news article: âIt didnât happen overnight. You donât take a drug and go âMmm, rabbitsâ.â

announcing scraped.us

2005-03-26T16:13:03Z

i finally got around to moving the feeds for the few sites i am still scraping to a dedicated domain, over at scraped.us. i also added atom versions of the feeds. the old feeds are redirected to the new ones.

thereâs no special reason for this, other than it was annoying to process stats for this site because of all the noise from those feeds. now i can more easily isolate that traffic.

mmm, rabbits

2005-10-15T00:23:50Z

this story has one of the most brilliant quotes iâve ever seen in a news article: âIt didnât happen overnight. You donât take a drug and go âMmm, rabbitsâ.â

announcing scraped.us

2005-03-26T16:13:03Z

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:31:17 +0200

+ ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1 is available on CodePlex for download. Features include:
+

Client-side template rendering
Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls
DataView control
Markup extensions
Bindings

+The release notes also mention that the next preview release will be available in September (maybe another one coming at October's PDC08—I am speculating here) and that "Ajax Futures" features will be moved to CodePlex in August. Interesting times for ASP.NET developers for sure, and I am looking foward to what's to come.
+ +

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Update

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:55:51 +0200

+ It's been a few week since Silverlight 2 beta 2 has been released. Yesterday, Microsoft released a critical update for Silverlight 2 beta 2 which is also distributed via Microsoft Update. The update promises to improve Firefox 3 compatibility, and also mentions streaming and stability. However the most interesting aspect is that the auto-update component has been worked on. The release notes do not state exactly what that means, but I think I know what it is: After installing the update, AutoUpdate can actually be enabled; the original version of Silverlight 2 beta 2 had this option greyed out. This suggests that new versions should be expected in the forseeable future
+
+ +

openSUSE 11.0 and Virtual PC

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:14:03 +0200

+ openSUSE 11 has been released, and as usual I had to try it using virtualization first. And as with some other recent distros, VPC crashes during installation. However, as with some other recent distros, these startup options help:
+
+noreplace-paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit
+
+So if you have issues getting the new openSUSE version installed, these options might do the trick. At least they worked for me. +

Silverlight crashing Firefox 3?

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:40:46 +0200

+ Right after yesterday's Firefox 3 release, some readers wrote me that the browser would immediately crash (a really bad crash, without error reporting kicking in, the browser just vanishes) when they visited a Silverlight powered site. I could reproduce that on one of my machines and was investigating this further, when I stumbled upon Tim Heuer's excellent post on the long history of Silverlight/Firefox 3 hubbub. He concludes that Silverlight 2 beta 2 has solved the issue, but what's about the only Silverlight version marked as stable, 1.0? In my case a simple uninstallation of Silverlight, followed by reinstalling the plugin did the trick. Unfortunately I did not write down my previous plugin version number, but I now have version 1.0.30401.0. If you have an older version, you may want to update.
+Of course that doesn't help web master too much, but maybe this post can help some users to keep their new shiny browser alive when consuming Silverlight content. +

Firefox 3 and Firebug

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:13:48 +0200

+ Firefox 3 has been released a few hours ago (congratulations!), and I already got two mails with complaints that Firebug (v1.05) is not compatible with this version. That's actually true, but versions 1.1+ are. Just don't mind that the version numbers sound like beta, but I wouldn't be too surprised if version 1.2 would be put on Firebug's homepage soon.
+Update (Jun 18): Updated download link; addons.mozilla.org seems to have the most recent releases. +

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Released

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Sat, 7 Jun 2008 10:15:12 +0200

+ Just a quick note that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been released. It includes a commercial go-live license, if you are brave enough and forget what happened to Atlas' go-live license Microsoft published the Beta 2 runtime and VS 2008 tools downloads, including a new Blend 2 preview release. There is also a list of breaking changes between beta 1 and beta 2. As you would expect, news on Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date will follow shortly.
+
+ +

First Moonlight Release (Source Code Only)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:20:31 +0200

+ Just a quick note that the Mono project has unveiled their first (source code only) release of Moonlight, their Silverlight clone. More in the announcement. +

Renesis Player 1.0 Released

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Fri, 2 May 2008 20:00:25 +0200

+ As I wrote ten months ago:
+

Some say SVG is dead, but it has found some niches where it is quite successful. I don't currently do as much SVG as I did some time ago, but I still follow along the current discussions and events. One project I find quite interesting is the Renesis, a feature-rich SVG player that is desparately needed now that Adobe abandoned their SVG browser plugin.
+

+And finally, version 1.0 of the Renesis Player has been released! You can find more information on the product page. As it says there, "[t]he Player runs on all platforms and supports the open stantards CSS 2, XML, DOM 3 and SVG 1.1." Note that "all platforms" might be a bit misleading, as the download page only provides software for Windows XP and Vista. +

Two Silverlight 2 for Mac OS X Gotchas

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:30:43 +0100

+ Two things I recently found out. They may be old news, but hopefully they are useful for some people anyway:
+

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 for OS X only works if you have an Intel processor. The system requirements do mention that (if you click on the correct link — no direct link thanks to JavaScript), but who reads them anyways?!
+Personal opinion: No PowerPC support? WTF?!
+

Uninstalling Silverlight (always a good idea before installing new bits) requires these steps performed in a terminal window:

rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin

+rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg

+rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight

Thanks to "Bridgette [MSFT]".

Essential Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Downloads

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:36:29 +0100

+ [Note: Repost of this entry on InsideRIA.com]
+
+At MIX08 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced and released a couple of new products, including Beta 1 of Silverlight (and O'Reilly announced and released Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date). Silverlight, however, comes in several downloads, and it is a bit difficult to keep track of all of them, so we'll have a look at what you can and what you should download.
+

From a developer's point of view, you will want to use Visual Studio 2008 to create Silverlight content. Visual Studio 2008 is not free (the free Express Editions do not suffice here), so there is no download link, however if you have an MSDN subscription you have access to the IDE at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/. Then, the best option is to install the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 package. It integrates into Visual Studio 2008 and installes the following software, most of which would also be available in a separate package:
+

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 (the browser plugin)
Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1 (documentation, tools)
KB949325 for Visual Studio 2008 (an update/hotfix for Visual Studio 2008)
Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 (project templates and add-ins for Visual Studio 2008)

+
+
+After installation, you will have a new Start menu entry for the SDK, Visual Studio 2008 will provide project and web site templates for Silverlights, and your installed web browsers (currently Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported) will be able to display Silverlight content.

+
+
+
+A bit hidden, but nevertheless very useful, is a CHM (Compiled HTML Help) file with loads of documentation. It is about 40MB in size, so you will find a wealth of information there. So download the Microsoft Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit Beta 1 Documentation and place the CHM file inside the ZIP archive to a place where it is easily accessibly for you.
+
+
+
+Finally, if you are curious how Microsoft implemented the various controls that come with Silverlight, have a look at the source code and unit tests available for them.
+
+If you are designer, you might be interested in the visual tools provided for Silverlight. You may already know Microsoft Expression Blend, the tool to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications. A beta version of Expression Blend 2 allows to create Silverlight 1 content. An upcoming version of Blend will also support Silverlight 2. If you want to have a sneak peak of that, have a look at the Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview. There, you will find two project templates related to Silverlight: one for version 1, and one for version 2.

+
+ +

Announcing Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 09:54:50 +0100

+ Yesterday at MIX '08, Microsoft announced a couple of new products, including Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Expression Blend 2 Beta, and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
+Shorly before that, O'Reilly hosted a VIP meeting and announced Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date. Here's the official blurb:
+

Design rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web using Silverlight 2, the latest version of Microsoft's hot new runtime application -- without waiting for the official release. With this unique new book, you not only get a concise, easy-to-understand introduction to Silverlight 2, but thorough coverage of the CTPs, betas, and RTM releases as they become available. Once you buy the book, you'll receive printed pages on all the revisions to Silverlight that you can insert right into the book's unique binder format.

+In other words: Although Silverlight 2 might drastically change prior to its final release, the book will stay up-to-date. The edition published (and available) at MIX covers the current Beta 1 release and will be updated soon. We plan to release updates whenever a new interim release comes up. Once Silverlight 2 goes final, we update the book one more time. Then, it will also be available as a regular paperback book.
+I am very excited to be part of this project. Getting the book done by MIX was an extreme challenge, and would not have been possible without the support of the O'Reilly staff (especially Laurel Ruma and John Osborn), and supportive people inside Microsoft (especially Scott Guthrie, Brian Goldfarb, and Chung Webster). Also thanks to Arrabiata Solutions's beta customers that were brave enough to invest in a pre-release technology.
+
+So if you are at MIX, come by the O'Reilly booth and have a look at the book; if is of course also available via the O'Reilly store and also at traditional booksellers. +

Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 Released (and Zend Studio 5.5.1, too)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 14:19:01 +0100

+ I am probably not the first to notice that, but thought it would be worth mentioning anyway. Zend have released version 6.0 of Zend Studio for Eclipse. Actually, this version 6.0 is the first final version of the Eclipse edition of Zend Studio.
+According to Zend,
+

[they] will provide customers that are currently under maintenance for Zend Studio 5.5 a free upgrade to Zend Studio for Eclipse. If you wish to continue to use Zend Studio 5.5 simply renew as you would normally and licenses will be provided for both products. Any Zend Studio purchase will entitle customers to use both products.

+I have to say that I am rather in the "I can achieve better results without Eclipse" camp, but will try the new version nevertheless. So far, the IDE looks very good. The only minur issue I found is that it ships with a quite old version of JRE (1.5.0_08_b03, which translates to 5.0 update 8; the latest version as of today is 5.0 update 15 or, even better, 6.0 update 5). Oh, and the PHP 4 version that comes with it is 4.4.7.
+
+
+
+While downloading the Eclipse version, I also found out that "classic" Zend Studio 5.5.1 has been released about a month ago. New features include Leopard and Vista support (finally!); the versions of PHP and Zend Framework have been bumped to 5.2.5 and 1.0.3.
+When using the "check for updates" feature of my 5.5.0a installation, it neither showed me the 5.0.0b update nor the 5.5.1 version. When installing 5.5.1, it refused to use my 5.5.0 license key, though. I contacted support and will update this entry when this has been resolved.
+
+Update: The Zend support staff regenerated my license, Zend Studio 5.5.1 now works seamless. And make sure to read the comments: Obviously, the Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 release is from January — but it's still not clear why one local Zend subsidiary sent me an email on the "new" release yesterday +

ASP.NET 3.5 mit Visual Basic 2008 Programmer's Choice (Addison-Wesley) erschienen!

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:18:00 +0100

+ In eigener Sache: Gerade habe ich anlÃ¤sslich der BASTA-Konferenz die ersten Exemplare des ASP.NET 3.5 Programmer's Choice, erschienen bei Addison-Wesley, in den HÃ¤nden. Zusammen mit Karsten Samaschke, JÃ¼rgen Kotz, Andreas Kordwig und Christian Trennhaus haben Tobias und ich ca. 1184 Seiten rund um das Thema ASP.NET 3.5 zusammengetragen. Hier der Beschreibungstext des Verlags:
+
+

Mit ASP.NET 3.5 ist Microsofts Technologie zur Programmierung dynamischer Webseiten noch leistungsfÃ¤higer geworden. GegenÃ¼ber ASP.NET 2.0 gibt es zahlreiche Verbesserungen, unter anderem die die integrierte Ajax-UnterstÃ¼tzung und verbesserte DatenbankfunktionalitÃ¤t mit LINQ.
+
+Die Autoren gehen auf alle wesentlichen Bestandteile von ASP.NET 3.5 ein und bieten ausfÃ¼hrliche Beschreibungen zur Verarbeitung von Formulareingaben, zum Umgang mit Cookies und Dateien bis hin zum Zugriff auf Datenbanken und XML-Datenquellen sowie Web Services. AuÃerdem erfahren Sie alles zu den wichtigen Neuerungen wie ASP.NET Ajax, LINQ und der Entwicklungsumgebung Visual Studio 2008. Im Vordergrund stehen die konkreten Anforderungen des Webentwickler-Alltags. Unterhaltsam und anschaulich aufbereitet fÃ¼hrt Sie dieses Buch auch zu fortgeschrittenen Themen wie der dynamischen Generierung von Grafiken, den Web Parts und der Performancesteigerung durch Caching. Ein eigenes Kapitel widmet sich der Erstellung von Rich Internet Applications (RIA) mit Silverlight.
+
+Aus dem Inhalt
+
+ - .NET: Grundlagen, Architektur und Installation
+ - HTML Controls, Web Controls und Web Parts
+ - Masterseiten, Themes und Skins
+ - Security: Benutzer- und Rollenverwaltung
+ - ASP.NET AJAX und Silverlight
+ - LINQ und Datenbankzugriff mit ADO.NET
+ - XML und Web Services
+ - Lokalisierung und Inhalte fÃ¼r mobile EndgerÃ¤te
+ - Debugging
+ - Caching
+ - Web-Hacking (und Gegenmittel)
+ - SpracheinfÃ¼hrung in Visual Basic 2008
+
+Auf DVD:
+Alle Listings und Beispiele aus dem Buch, .NET Framework 3.5 plus Editor Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition von Microsoft.
+

+
+Ich kan mich zwar immer noch nicht an das "Visual Basic 2008" gewÃ¶hnen (korrekter wÃ¤re "Visual Basic 9", aber anscheinend haben sich alle Verlage heimlich abgesprochen, auf das besser zuordenbare 2008 zu setzen), aber ansonsten freue ich mich sehr Ã¼ber die neue Auflage -- das Buch ist aus unseren ASP.NET Kompendien hervorgegangen.
+
+Ich bin noch bis Freitag auf der BASTA, vielleicht sehen wir uns ja?
+ +

Pimpin' the Market Share

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:41:13 +0100

+ Seems that Silverlight got its own category on Microsoft Update. Currently, the Silverlight runtime is listed as an optional update. Interesting ...
+
+

click for a larger image

Visual Studio 2008 auf Deutsch (inklusive Express Editions)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:47:15 +0100

+ Wer ein MSDN-Abonnement hat, weiÃ es sicher schon: Visual Studio 2008 Team System ist seit dem Wochenende auch auf Deutsch verfÃ¼gbar, die anderen Editionen folgen sukzessive. Seit heute Mittag gibt es auch die Express Editions (inklusive dem Visual Web Developer), und wie mich Uwe Baumann gerade informiert hat, sind die deutschen Microsoft-Seiten bereits aktualisiert. Viel SpaÃ bei der Installation +

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:31:17 +0200

- ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1 is available on CodePlex for download. Features include:
-

Client-side template rendering
Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls
DataView control
Markup extensions
Bindings

-The release notes also mention that the next preview release will be available in September (maybe another one coming at October's PDC08—I am speculating here) and that "Ajax Futures" features will be moved to CodePlex in August. Interesting times for ASP.NET developers for sure, and I am looking foward to what's to come.
- -

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Update

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:55:51 +0200

- It's been a few week since Silverlight 2 beta 2 has been released. Yesterday, Microsoft released a critical update for Silverlight 2 beta 2 which is also distributed via Microsoft Update. The update promises to improve Firefox 3 compatibility, and also mentions streaming and stability. However the most interesting aspect is that the auto-update component has been worked on. The release notes do not state exactly what that means, but I think I know what it is: After installing the update, AutoUpdate can actually be enabled; the original version of Silverlight 2 beta 2 had this option greyed out. This suggests that new versions should be expected in the forseeable future
-
- -

openSUSE 11.0 and Virtual PC

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:14:03 +0200

- openSUSE 11 has been released, and as usual I had to try it using virtualization first. And as with some other recent distros, VPC crashes during installation. However, as with some other recent distros, these startup options help:
-
-noreplace-paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit
-
-So if you have issues getting the new openSUSE version installed, these options might do the trick. At least they worked for me. -

Silverlight crashing Firefox 3?

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:40:46 +0200

- Right after yesterday's Firefox 3 release, some readers wrote me that the browser would immediately crash (a really bad crash, without error reporting kicking in, the browser just vanishes) when they visited a Silverlight powered site. I could reproduce that on one of my machines and was investigating this further, when I stumbled upon Tim Heuer's excellent post on the long history of Silverlight/Firefox 3 hubbub. He concludes that Silverlight 2 beta 2 has solved the issue, but what's about the only Silverlight version marked as stable, 1.0? In my case a simple uninstallation of Silverlight, followed by reinstalling the plugin did the trick. Unfortunately I did not write down my previous plugin version number, but I now have version 1.0.30401.0. If you have an older version, you may want to update.
-Of course that doesn't help web master too much, but maybe this post can help some users to keep their new shiny browser alive when consuming Silverlight content. -

Firefox 3 and Firebug

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:13:48 +0200

- Firefox 3 has been released a few hours ago (congratulations!), and I already got two mails with complaints that Firebug (v1.05) is not compatible with this version. That's actually true, but versions 1.1+ are. Just don't mind that the version numbers sound like beta, but I wouldn't be too surprised if version 1.2 would be put on Firebug's homepage soon.
-Update (Jun 18): Updated download link; addons.mozilla.org seems to have the most recent releases. -

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Released

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Sat, 7 Jun 2008 10:15:12 +0200

- Just a quick note that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been released. It includes a commercial go-live license, if you are brave enough and forget what happened to Atlas' go-live license Microsoft published the Beta 2 runtime and VS 2008 tools downloads, including a new Blend 2 preview release. There is also a list of breaking changes between beta 1 and beta 2. As you would expect, news on Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date will follow shortly.
-
- -

First Moonlight Release (Source Code Only)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:20:31 +0200

- Just a quick note that the Mono project has unveiled their first (source code only) release of Moonlight, their Silverlight clone. More in the announcement. -

Renesis Player 1.0 Released

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Fri, 2 May 2008 20:00:25 +0200

- As I wrote ten months ago:
-

Some say SVG is dead, but it has found some niches where it is quite successful. I don't currently do as much SVG as I did some time ago, but I still follow along the current discussions and events. One project I find quite interesting is the Renesis, a feature-rich SVG player that is desparately needed now that Adobe abandoned their SVG browser plugin.
-

-And finally, version 1.0 of the Renesis Player has been released! You can find more information on the product page. As it says there, "[t]he Player runs on all platforms and supports the open stantards CSS 2, XML, DOM 3 and SVG 1.1." Note that "all platforms" might be a bit misleading, as the download page only provides software for Windows XP and Vista. -

Two Silverlight 2 for Mac OS X Gotchas

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:30:43 +0100

- Two things I recently found out. They may be old news, but hopefully they are useful for some people anyway:
-

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 for OS X only works if you have an Intel processor. The system requirements do mention that (if you click on the correct link — no direct link thanks to JavaScript), but who reads them anyways?!
-Personal opinion: No PowerPC support? WTF?!
-

Uninstalling Silverlight (always a good idea before installing new bits) requires these steps performed in a terminal window:

rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin

-rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg

-rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight

Thanks to "Bridgette [MSFT]".

Essential Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Downloads

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:36:29 +0100

- [Note: Repost of this entry on InsideRIA.com]
-
-At MIX08 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced and released a couple of new products, including Beta 1 of Silverlight (and O'Reilly announced and released Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date). Silverlight, however, comes in several downloads, and it is a bit difficult to keep track of all of them, so we'll have a look at what you can and what you should download.
-

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 (the browser plugin)
Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1 (documentation, tools)
KB949325 for Visual Studio 2008 (an update/hotfix for Visual Studio 2008)
Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 (project templates and add-ins for Visual Studio 2008)

-
-
-After installation, you will have a new Start menu entry for the SDK, Visual Studio 2008 will provide project and web site templates for Silverlights, and your installed web browsers (currently Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported) will be able to display Silverlight content.

-
-
-
-A bit hidden, but nevertheless very useful, is a CHM (Compiled HTML Help) file with loads of documentation. It is about 40MB in size, so you will find a wealth of information there. So download the Microsoft Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit Beta 1 Documentation and place the CHM file inside the ZIP archive to a place where it is easily accessibly for you.
-
-
-
-Finally, if you are curious how Microsoft implemented the various controls that come with Silverlight, have a look at the source code and unit tests available for them.
-
-If you are designer, you might be interested in the visual tools provided for Silverlight. You may already know Microsoft Expression Blend, the tool to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications. A beta version of Expression Blend 2 allows to create Silverlight 1 content. An upcoming version of Blend will also support Silverlight 2. If you want to have a sneak peak of that, have a look at the Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview. There, you will find two project templates related to Silverlight: one for version 1, and one for version 2.

-
- -

Announcing Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 09:54:50 +0100

- Yesterday at MIX '08, Microsoft announced a couple of new products, including Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Expression Blend 2 Beta, and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
-Shorly before that, O'Reilly hosted a VIP meeting and announced Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date. Here's the official blurb:
-

Design rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web using Silverlight 2, the latest version of Microsoft's hot new runtime application -- without waiting for the official release. With this unique new book, you not only get a concise, easy-to-understand introduction to Silverlight 2, but thorough coverage of the CTPs, betas, and RTM releases as they become available. Once you buy the book, you'll receive printed pages on all the revisions to Silverlight that you can insert right into the book's unique binder format.

-In other words: Although Silverlight 2 might drastically change prior to its final release, the book will stay up-to-date. The edition published (and available) at MIX covers the current Beta 1 release and will be updated soon. We plan to release updates whenever a new interim release comes up. Once Silverlight 2 goes final, we update the book one more time. Then, it will also be available as a regular paperback book.
-I am very excited to be part of this project. Getting the book done by MIX was an extreme challenge, and would not have been possible without the support of the O'Reilly staff (especially Laurel Ruma and John Osborn), and supportive people inside Microsoft (especially Scott Guthrie, Brian Goldfarb, and Chung Webster). Also thanks to Arrabiata Solutions's beta customers that were brave enough to invest in a pre-release technology.
-
-So if you are at MIX, come by the O'Reilly booth and have a look at the book; if is of course also available via the O'Reilly store and also at traditional booksellers. -

Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 Released (and Zend Studio 5.5.1, too)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 14:19:01 +0100

- I am probably not the first to notice that, but thought it would be worth mentioning anyway. Zend have released version 6.0 of Zend Studio for Eclipse. Actually, this version 6.0 is the first final version of the Eclipse edition of Zend Studio.
-According to Zend,
-

[they] will provide customers that are currently under maintenance for Zend Studio 5.5 a free upgrade to Zend Studio for Eclipse. If you wish to continue to use Zend Studio 5.5 simply renew as you would normally and licenses will be provided for both products. Any Zend Studio purchase will entitle customers to use both products.

-I have to say that I am rather in the "I can achieve better results without Eclipse" camp, but will try the new version nevertheless. So far, the IDE looks very good. The only minur issue I found is that it ships with a quite old version of JRE (1.5.0_08_b03, which translates to 5.0 update 8; the latest version as of today is 5.0 update 15 or, even better, 6.0 update 5). Oh, and the PHP 4 version that comes with it is 4.4.7.
-
-
-
-While downloading the Eclipse version, I also found out that "classic" Zend Studio 5.5.1 has been released about a month ago. New features include Leopard and Vista support (finally!); the versions of PHP and Zend Framework have been bumped to 5.2.5 and 1.0.3.
-When using the "check for updates" feature of my 5.5.0a installation, it neither showed me the 5.0.0b update nor the 5.5.1 version. When installing 5.5.1, it refused to use my 5.5.0 license key, though. I contacted support and will update this entry when this has been resolved.
-
-Update: The Zend support staff regenerated my license, Zend Studio 5.5.1 now works seamless. And make sure to read the comments: Obviously, the Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 release is from January — but it's still not clear why one local Zend subsidiary sent me an email on the "new" release yesterday -

ASP.NET 3.5 mit Visual Basic 2008 Programmer's Choice (Addison-Wesley) erschienen!

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:18:00 +0100

- In eigener Sache: Gerade habe ich anlÃ¤sslich der BASTA-Konferenz die ersten Exemplare des ASP.NET 3.5 Programmer's Choice, erschienen bei Addison-Wesley, in den HÃ¤nden. Zusammen mit Karsten Samaschke, JÃ¼rgen Kotz, Andreas Kordwig und Christian Trennhaus haben Tobias und ich ca. 1184 Seiten rund um das Thema ASP.NET 3.5 zusammengetragen. Hier der Beschreibungstext des Verlags:
-
-

Mit ASP.NET 3.5 ist Microsofts Technologie zur Programmierung dynamischer Webseiten noch leistungsfÃ¤higer geworden. GegenÃ¼ber ASP.NET 2.0 gibt es zahlreiche Verbesserungen, unter anderem die die integrierte Ajax-UnterstÃ¼tzung und verbesserte DatenbankfunktionalitÃ¤t mit LINQ.
-
-Die Autoren gehen auf alle wesentlichen Bestandteile von ASP.NET 3.5 ein und bieten ausfÃ¼hrliche Beschreibungen zur Verarbeitung von Formulareingaben, zum Umgang mit Cookies und Dateien bis hin zum Zugriff auf Datenbanken und XML-Datenquellen sowie Web Services. AuÃerdem erfahren Sie alles zu den wichtigen Neuerungen wie ASP.NET Ajax, LINQ und der Entwicklungsumgebung Visual Studio 2008. Im Vordergrund stehen die konkreten Anforderungen des Webentwickler-Alltags. Unterhaltsam und anschaulich aufbereitet fÃ¼hrt Sie dieses Buch auch zu fortgeschrittenen Themen wie der dynamischen Generierung von Grafiken, den Web Parts und der Performancesteigerung durch Caching. Ein eigenes Kapitel widmet sich der Erstellung von Rich Internet Applications (RIA) mit Silverlight.
-
-Aus dem Inhalt
-
- - .NET: Grundlagen, Architektur und Installation
- - HTML Controls, Web Controls und Web Parts
- - Masterseiten, Themes und Skins
- - Security: Benutzer- und Rollenverwaltung
- - ASP.NET AJAX und Silverlight
- - LINQ und Datenbankzugriff mit ADO.NET
- - XML und Web Services
- - Lokalisierung und Inhalte fÃ¼r mobile EndgerÃ¤te
- - Debugging
- - Caching
- - Web-Hacking (und Gegenmittel)
- - SpracheinfÃ¼hrung in Visual Basic 2008
-
-Auf DVD:
-Alle Listings und Beispiele aus dem Buch, .NET Framework 3.5 plus Editor Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition von Microsoft.
-

-
-Ich kan mich zwar immer noch nicht an das "Visual Basic 2008" gewÃ¶hnen (korrekter wÃ¤re "Visual Basic 9", aber anscheinend haben sich alle Verlage heimlich abgesprochen, auf das besser zuordenbare 2008 zu setzen), aber ansonsten freue ich mich sehr Ã¼ber die neue Auflage -- das Buch ist aus unseren ASP.NET Kompendien hervorgegangen.
-
-Ich bin noch bis Freitag auf der BASTA, vielleicht sehen wir uns ja?
- -

Pimpin' the Market Share

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:41:13 +0100

- Seems that Silverlight got its own category on Microsoft Update. Currently, the Silverlight runtime is listed as an optional update. Interesting ...
-
-

click for a larger image

Visual Studio 2008 auf Deutsch (inklusive Express Editions)

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:47:15 +0100

- Wer ein MSDN-Abonnement hat, weiÃ es sicher schon: Visual Studio 2008 Team System ist seit dem Wochenende auch auf Deutsch verfÃ¼gbar, die anderen Editionen folgen sukzessive. Seit heute Mittag gibt es auch die Express Editions (inklusive dem Visual Web Developer), und wie mich Uwe Baumann gerade informiert hat, sind die deutschen Microsoft-Seiten bereits aktualisiert. Viel SpaÃ bei der Installation -

Promise for High Growth Technology in Tennessee

Marcus — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:31:32 +0000

Today I had lunch with Christine McDonnell, Vice President of Existing Business & Entrepreneurship - Economic Development at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, and Eric Cromwell, President and CEO of the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation at Bricktops to discuss PodCamp, BarCamp and how all of these organizations (or un-organizations in BarCamp’s case) could come together to improve the situation for technology entrepreneurs in Tennessee. They were both very passionate and enthusiastic about what is being done at BarCamp, and they both have some great ideas of there own on how we could utilize our strengths to really make a difference here.

I understand this plight all too well, as I was launching my fledgling company “Remarkable Wit” (which is now holding its own), I found it very hard to convey the essence of my company to potential funders. Now, I’m kind of happy it worked out the way it did because it forced me to get some real revenue and prove my model in order to survive, but I have a lot more credence in town than many other aspiring hackers/entrepreneurs and I can see why so many start-ups never start up. There really does need to be more communication between those of us in the know, and those who have the means to enable those in the know. I know of a few startups right now that should be off the ground, but they just haven’t gotten their funding secured yet. It’s a bit to frustrating to watch, honestly.

Having lunch with them really made me proud of the work that the BarCamp Nashville Crew has done thus far to promote and celebrate Internet focused communities and companies in Middle Tennessee. I think there may be very good things that come from this meeting, and I applaud the Chamber and TTDC for reaching out to us to seek a way to work together. I’m predicting more great events and forums in the future, held in our beautiful city of Nashville.
+

purchase viagra

+barcamp nashville, entrepreneur, Investing, nashville, nashville chamber, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, Tennessee, ttdc barcamp nashville, entrepreneur, Investing, nashville, nashville chamber, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, Tennessee, ttdc

Iâm really loving 2008.

Marcus — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:33:26 +0000

I just want to thank everyone who believed that I could do this. 2008 is looking like an incredible year for business, and for every “good luck” and “we know you can do it” that I received I humbly offer a single “Thank You” in return.

I’m doing a few things in the next few weeks that I want to highlight:

- Making my first full time job offer to a great guy for the position of Senior Developer at Remarkable Wit. (Fingers Crossed!!!)
+- Interviewing Andi Gutmans from Zend, again This time for a podcast Remarkable Wit is going to launch on all web technologies.
+- Kicking off two incredibly cool projects with Remarkable Wit, and I’ll launch an official site for RW.
+- Attending, Hosting and Enjoying “PodCamp Nashville”
+- Visiting my new favorite place on Earth, Santa Monica, for the fourth time in five months.

I’ve also nearly doubled my Facebook friends with old high school friends that I am so happy to be reconnected with. Facebook really is fresh.

It’s just such a great time. 2008 is bringing the love. +

+2008, andi gutmans, entrepreneur, PHP, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, santa monica, zend 2008, andi gutmans, entrepreneur, PHP, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, santa monica, zend

BarCamp Nashville Recap Video

Marcus — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:11:46 +0000

Finally, I can put this baby to bed for a bit. It was fun everyone. Enjoy… BarCamp Nashville, The Movie:
+
+
+

+BarCamp, barcampnashville, studio now, Video BarCamp, barcampnashville, studio now, Video

BarCamp Nashville and Remarkable Wit profiled on BigSight.org

Marcus — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:09:46 +0000

The fine folks at BigSight.org did a short front page profile on BarCamp Nashville, and outed my new venture. Very cool stuff. We’re also about to close on our first large “Plan, Build, Share” project today, which is fantastic. More on that in the near future. +

+barcamp nashville, bigsight.org, entrepreneur, nashville, plan build share barcamp nashville, bigsight.org, entrepreneur, nashville, plan build share

Remarkable Wit - Plan, Build, Share

Marcus — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:15:20 +0000

Warning - This is a blog post, not a press release. Please forgive the run-ons or the soapbox.
+“Plan, Build and Share” are the service pillars of my new business venture. When I decided to start my own business I knew that no matter what I did, certain things were going to be an absolute requirement. Effective and reliable support, outstanding customer service, and a trustworthy brand are basics that ought to be present in any venture you do. Service pillars of your business are something different. They are the reason people come to you. It is the service you provide, not the level at which you do it.

I thought about why I can’t leave my current profession and do one of the other 30 things I’m interested in. My answer: I’m passionate beyond reason about user experience, revolutionary products, and community dynamics. I would love to execute these things on a mass scale like some of the companies I so admire, but at the moment that would be biting off more than I can chew. I can, however, support the current players involved in these same service pillars and grow from inside the industry. Having said that, I am going to take that approach with MyPossible Inc.’s first business venture, “Remarkable Wit” (RW).

Remarkable Wit is a firm dedicated to internet projects ranging from consumer web properties to industrial applications. We serve as silent partners in projects as well as headliners on a few products of our own. As consultants we help customers find the real value in their idea and create a realistic and attainable goal. As contractors we design and develop very powerful, user focused applications for every market that the internet influences. Finally, we keep the loop open between the creators and the consumers to ensure that the product continues to meet the needs of the consumer.

Let me briefly share just a bit on Plan, Build, Share:

Plan - (experience strategy)
+If you want to enjoy outrageous success in business, always consider how the customer feels when engaged with the company. Whether it is through the advertising, the sales process, or the use and support of the product or service. Many companies fail in the most basic categories of adequate support, respectful customer service and appropriate pricing. Those are just the basics of good business, and it’s a shame that some entrepreneurs can rightfully claim them as a unique characteristic of their company.

You simply should not be offering a service that you cannot properly support. You should not sell anything if you don’t plan on carrying the ’sales charm’ through into customer service. You should definitely not engage in a business where ripping off customers with price gouging is necessary to stay in business. You should provide a great product, great service, great support and price it all appropriately. Experience strategy says that the primary focus is on creating a mind-blowing experience for the customer. This perspective helps you take your vision and scope it properly for maximum effectiveness and minimum risk.

Build - (product architecture and development)
+Most products, especially technology products, are about luxury and quality. Beyond food, clothing and shelter, people really don’t *need* anything you are selling. However, people want lots of things that they don’t need. Therefore, the successful product must meet a strong want of a well defined market. That product should also be crafted to the highest quality that you can reasonably provide. There is no longevity in a product with crappy quality. Product architecture ensures that someone vision actually resembles the picture that they have in their head, rather than becoming a nightmare.

After architecture, personnel, workflow and interaction are key. You must have the best people doing the best work in the most efficient way in constant communication to avoid getting confused. Creating this environment as well as succeeding are very difficult tasks, but they are tasks that I am quite obsessed with and look forward to completing with RW.

Share - (community farming)
+Today’s successful company is thinking less about making a profit from their customers, and more about building a long term relationship with their customer that has continued benefits for both parties. Successful communities are the result of a fine tuned ear. You have to listen well, read trends and predict the wants of well defined groups of people. Growing a strong community is much more about listening and implementing than it is about leading. In short, growing a community is about constantly serving the community. Community farming is a philosophy that we put in action through constantly evolving methods of communication between creators and consumers. The goal is that these roles switch between customer and company often throughout the life of the relationship.

Creating the forum and being it’s caretaker is the work of the community farmer. Communities are always looking to be grown, but they need the fertile soil and nourishment to grow. This is an area that I have succeeded in several times over the last few years, and I look forward to growing more communities through RW.

That in a nutshell is what I will be doing. Of course, this is very conceptual and even slightly abstract. This is just done for those who have been interested in what I’m doing and might stumble upon this post. +

+marcus whitney, plan build share, remarkable wit marcus whitney, plan build share, remarkable wit

Passing Through Limitation

Marcus — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:49:05 +0000

Jessica and our friend Marc had meditation and yoga practice in our mini studio this morning. It was the third day in a row that Jessica and I have gotten up around 6AM and meditated for 15 minutes and then done some yoga. This morning, I made friends with my body’s resistance and had huge breakthroughs in both meditation and yoga. I just thought I’d share some, because I feel incredibly empowered by today’s lesson.
+This morning I remembered that a goal which in the present seems near impossible, becomes very possible with constant focus and practice towards achieving it. Early frustration, lack of patience and self doubt are the pillars of limitation. To pass through the limitations and achieve your desires, one only needs to focus on the benefit being received during the journey. In every moment you have the power to melt away the frustration, realize ongoing instant gratification and find countless reasons to love yourself. Today, I’m one practice closer to realizing a full lotus, and I don’t care how many more practices I have to do, I really enjoyed getting closer today. +

+jessica whitney, journey, limitation, meditation, yoga jessica whitney, journey, limitation, meditation, yoga

Getting Very Excited About BarCamp Nashville

Marcus — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:59:55 +0000

When Dave and I set out to start BarCamp Nashville, I was completely skeptical about the type of support we would receive. I thought we would need to bring in big name speakers from around the country to generate a decent turn out. Instead, I found tech entrepreneurs, developers, designers, podcasters, musicians, bloggers and just regular people are pumped as hell to get together and geek out. It’s a pretty interesting phenomena how the digerati circle has expanded through MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Can’t wait to announce our speakers on July 31st. +

+barcamp nashville, Dave Delaney barcamp nashville, Dave Delaney

Blogging Again.

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:20:40 +0000

Yup, back at it. I have a lot to get off my chest, and I also need a redesign. Let’s see what we can whip up in the upcoming weeks. +

+blogging again blogging again

Oh Boyâ¦

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:50:19 +0000

I’ve got a lot of code to write. +

+startup startup

A Group Of People That Inspire Me Beyond Words

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:20:51 +0000

Clint Smith, Will Weaver, Annie Kinnaird, Kathleen Southall, Allison Davis, Bo Spessard, Sara McManigal, Jairo Ruiz, Kim Hatcher, Jesse Worstell, Suzanne Norman, Rachael Kahne, Gina LaMar, Greg Thornton, Grey Garner, Erik Jones, Jessica Saling, Jake Cable, Jim Hitch, Christina Griffith, Dean Shortland, Steve Turney, Patrick Copeland, Taylor Schena, Matt Thackston, Alex Ezell, Kris Wetzel, Jenn Ross, Kendrick Watts, Leigh Bernstein, David Weintraub, Laura Key, Erin Shea, Cliff Corr, Hilary Smith, Dave Delaney, and Jason DuMars. +

+emma, inspire, Life emma, inspire, Life

links for 2007-05-29

Marcus — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:22:45 +0000

+
Brett Terpstra on Virb.com
+
Badass Verb layout
+
(tags: verb circle_six_design)
+

+No TagsNo Tags

links for 2007-05-28

Marcus — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:21:16 +0000

+
Apple Mail plug-in roundup - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
+
Apple Mail Plug-Ins. We all need em.
+
(tags: apple mail mail.app osx)
+
+
Amyloo: Friday, May 25, 2007
+
AmyLoo correctly notes that Facebook is an inside out approach that once again takes away the web’s core purpose, to offer a set of standards for all to interoperate on. Facebook wins, we lose.
+
(tags: facebook platform API)
+

+No TagsNo Tags

Crop Circles in Tennessee?!?!

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 23:16:14 +0000

Crop circles in Tennessee? Thanks for the heads up Cry. +

+crop circles, Tennessee, ufo crop circles, Tennessee, ufo

Torontoâ¦ I miss you.

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 22:10:38 +0000

+ The Netherlands Boys

Originally uploaded by marcuswhitney
+ +

I was trying to do some housecleaning today, both literal and digital. Been uploading some old pics to Flickr, and I came across this pic from our Toronto trip in 2004. We met these boys in the hallway in a hotel, I think a Sheraton, and ended up hanging with them all night.

Don’t even remember their names, but isn’t it interesting how people you’ve met once can hold such a special place in your heart. I think one of them was named Gunthar… or something. One was a CS whiz, one was a military boy, and I don’t remember about the rest. They were cool as hell though. Anyway, just missing Toronto today, hoping Dave will get me back there one day +

+netherlands, toronto netherlands, toronto

links for 2007-05-27

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 08:21:06 +0000

+
bigsight - a directory of people doing good work
+
a neat directory of good people doing good things started in Nashville by Dan Birdwhistell
+
(tags: nashville technology startup good tech social)
+
+
Who Can Compete with Facebook?
+
Josh Catone brings up the likely competition for Facebook platform.
+
(tags: facebook pageflakes platform myspace)
+
+
Ignition Web Studios : Dream . Develop . Ignite .
+
Nashville Ruby Shop
+
(tags: nashville technology startup ruby rails)
+

+No TagsNo Tags

Thereâs a Lot of Good Stuff Going Onâ¦

Marcus — Sat, 26 May 2007 14:13:51 +0000

But I need to get myself in order. Thank goodness we have a three-day weekend. I’ve got a lot of organization to do. +

+GTD, order, self GTD, order, self

One Week Until Generation TN Conference

Marcus — Sat, 26 May 2007 14:12:21 +0000

Hello all, really quickly… Just wanted to remind anyone who reads this that next Friday and Saturday is IN3, the Generation TN conference. I’m getting more excited everyday looking at the list of attendees. If you are interested in learning about how you can make a difference in TN through education, economic development, healthcare or general legislation, this is the place to be. +

+civic, conference, gentn, Tennessee civic, conference, gentn, Tennessee

My Baby Graduated From KinderGarten

Marcus — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:17:09 +0000

And I got really emotional about it. He was so big on stage, playing the piano. He’s on his way, and I’m so proud of him. Congratulations Ciaran. +

+kindergarten kindergarten

Envisioning a Mission

Marcus — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:01:01 +0000

Sometimes an idea just unfolds before you. My spiritual adviser Dr. Mitch Johnson refers to it as a “noble purpose.” Something you are here to do, that makes you feel a satisfaction that is hard to rival with other activities in your life. Last night, I sat down and watched to the new 50 Cent video “Straight To The Bank“, and finally wrote a song.Â I’m really happy with the song.Â It has no cursing, a hip yet positive message, and it’s just some of my better work. I then proceeded to write another complete song to “Hustler’s Ambition.” I’m not sure if I like that song as much, but its definitely also a keeper.

I then went to sleep watching “Get Rich Or Die Tryin’”, 50 Cent’s somewhat autobiographical movie. What I got from it was a reminder of how dismal the situation in the ‘hood’ can be, and why something needs to be done about it. The movie also had a very clear message: regardless of what you think about hip-hop music, for many children of the ghetto, hip-hop seems to be the only way out. This means that hip-hop is a ‘language’ they are listening to, and the beats are extremely important.

All this got me thinking, would it not be possible to create an entire education and economic system based on hip-hop?Â I’m not talking about the usual “revolutionary” hip-hop that does nothing but rant about injustice, but offers no solution.Â I’m talking about a system that enlightens the children to true hiphop culture, economics, health, wellness, and self-awareness.
+Indeed this is a subset of the mission of the Temple of HipHop. I enquired this morning on how to become a member. When I arrived at the website, I was surprised to see that this week is Hip Hop Appreciation Week. I think I’m getting signals on my noble purpose. +

+50 cent, edutainment, HipHop, krs one, purpose 50 cent, edutainment, HipHop, krs one, purpose

My Most Popular Post

Marcus — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:00:30 +0000

Is a post about Embarq.Â Where I was making fun of Sprint.Â That post has attracted bitter customers of the company as a place to air out their feelings about the substandard service they receive as Embarq customers.Â Looks like Embarq has been a dumping ground for Sprint and Earthlinks unwanted business.Â The message from marcuswhitney.com is clear, Embarq apparently sucks. +

+earthlink, embarq, sprint earthlink, embarq, sprint

Long Time No Post

Marcus — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:04:33 +0000

Yeah, it comes in waves.Â Figured I’d just get a post out there as an update:

Ciaran’s pink eye is over.Â Whew.Â Working at home is just not my thing.
Jessica and I are going to make music.Â Together.Â Happy times.
Message Systems is an amazing company with an amazing product.
Things are good in general.Â I’m gonna get some spiritual food today.
Tomorrow I will see Lara Duncan for a Nutritional Consultation.Â Very excited about that.
I hope this doesn’t show up on planet-php, but if it does, it’s not my fault.Â I asked them to remove me.
Oh, and I’m going to Gnomedex.Â Nice.

+Blogging, gnomedex, jessica whitney, message systems, nutrition Blogging, gnomedex, jessica whitney, message systems, nutrition

Back to fighting weight

Marcus — Sun, 06 May 2007 19:16:22 +0000

When I was in High School, I wrestled at 181 and Heavyweight.Â But I could always wrestle at 181 without an issue.Â I think I now weigh somewhere around 208.Â I’m pretty sure I’m at least 20 pounds overweight, even though most people wouldn’t think so.Â I guess my big question is, could I safely drop back down to 181 to compete.Â I’m working on setting some actual competition goals for Brazillian Ju-Jitsu.Â I want to get a fitness and nutrition discipline that will take me back to my proper weight.Â I’m just wondering if 181 is actually still a healthy weight for me right now. +

+bjj, competition, fitness, nutrition bjj, competition, fitness, nutrition

Checking In, Hope All Is Well

Marcus — Tue, 01 May 2007 04:39:29 +0000

Just posting to keep the habit.Â All is well on my side, hope the same for you.Â My parents will be coming down by August and my kids had a great day today.Â I made some big steps in my life organization phase.Â My house is still looking good.Â Jessica learned this dance to MIMS “This is why I’m hot” at hip hop class tonight, and she looks like she should be in a video.Â She also had a big audition today, so hopefully she’ll get the part and be busy all day Wednesday

Me, I’m really just embracing all the good around me.Â So, from me to you, take a minute and smell the Cognac (hat tip Phil Leotardo). +

+content, growing, happy, Life, reflection content, growing, happy, Life, reflection

Strong Urge To Organize and Simplify part 2.5

Marcus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:50:55 +0000

Midnight Blue’s Inbox doesn’t even stay open long enough for me to create a task. It crashes non stop for any action. But, it does remind me that I am using a trial version and that I REALLY should go ahead and buy a license. This product is dead in the water. So, I reverted to Kinkless, and I actually like it a great deal. Especially since I love outliners,and it’s just some AppleScripts that add onto Omni Outliner Pro. I’ve been looking at OmniPlan recently as well, just as a compliment to Kinkless for my management of projects beyond the resource of me. I really hope OmniFocus turns out well.
+I’m realizing more time is passing since the last time I’ve written production code, and I am spending a ton of time focused on project, action and productivity management. Things change. +

+GTD, Inbox, kinkless, omnifocus, omnioutliner, productivity GTD, Inbox, kinkless, omnifocus, omnioutliner, productivity

Vote For Trees

Marcus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:29:21 +0000

Today, dear friends, is Arbor Day.Â I think we all agree that the world needs to do all it can to work towards a more sustainable human existence with a serious effort to be better stewards of the environment.Â With that, I invite you to join me in the one day campaign for Trees.Â Today, make your vote heard and plant a tree on Emma.Â Do it now.Â It takes two clicks.Â Can’t make treehugging any easier than that. +

+arbor day, emma, green, tree, treehugging, vote for trees arbor day, emma, green, tree, treehugging, vote for trees

Strong Urge To Organize and Simplify part 2

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:30:38 +0000

After my first post on trying to get more organized and have things simplified, I got some input from Dave Delaney, which was helpful. I did begin to use Gmail to sync my iCal and that did help my wife stay more in touch with what I was doing. However it didn’t help much with my own simplification. I am more and more interested in managing my life in project form, so things at work and home have a very similar process and I don’t lose traction switching gears. I started on a hunt for tools and after some searching came across DayLite by seeing MarketCircle on an email from Apple on WWDC.

Daylite was pretty nice in terms of it’s approach to project management, however it seems to have ran out of gas on Sync Services integration. I don’t want to spend time exporting and importing between applications, that adds work and annoys the crap out of me. Plus, they kind of wanted you to use them as a replacement for iCal. Can’t do that. iCal is too slick.

So, I went back on the hunt, originally to find a third party Daylite sync. In all that searching, and disappointment, I found a link to Merlin Mann’s website, 43 Folders. He was referring to a project called Kinkless GTD. That started a whole two hour interweb black hole where I learned about Kinkless GTD, bought OmniOutliner Pro just so I could install the free AppleScripts and then realized I had no idea what I was doing. What the hell was GTD? In fact, who the hell is this Merlin Mann guy who is talking so much about GTD. Many of you probably already know about David Allen and his “Getting Things Done” methodology. Pretty amazing stuff. (Sidenote: I didn’t realize my online friend Robert Peake worked for David Allen, or rather I didn’t know David Allen was quite as important until now)

If you dont know anything about it, I would suggest starting with the Wikipedia entry and maybe spring for the book before digging too deep at 43Folders.com. The core methodology is promoted by many people with slight slants on it, especially concerning computers. The book is non tech, and really practical for anyone looking to get a better handle on their workload, goals and life in general.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve tried three or four apps so far and I think I’m going with Midnight Beep’s Inbox. Hat tip to Alex for the heads up here. The thing is, Inbox doesn’t let me skip steps. It feels incredibly wrong to use this application without having done an initial collection of issues, data etc. That’s what I want. I want to grind through the initial phase, and breeze through the rest of my life once things are in a manageable state. At any rate, it’s forcing me to think about what actually goes in iCal as a todo now. Since I will be managing all projects in well defined actions, it will be a clusterfark to try and keep 100+ todos in iCal. So, iCal may start just storing my errands as todos. Seems more appropriate anyway.

So, now I’m going to give GTD a shot for a month and I’ll let you know how it goes. Along with updates when I hit snags, which I’m sure I will. +

+43Folders, Alex Ezell, Dave Delaney, David Allen, Daylite, GTD, Inbox, Merlin Mann, Midnight Beep 43Folders, Alex Ezell, Dave Delaney, David Allen, Daylite, GTD, Inbox, Merlin Mann, Midnight Beep

Gen TN: Inform, Interact, Inspire

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:20:17 +0000

The Generation Tennessee conference for 2007, IN3, is happening June 1st and 2nd at the Downtown Public Library.Â The entire team at GenTN has worked very hard to bring together the Great State’s leaders in a forum where the future leaders of Tennessee can meet with them to discuss education, business, city planning and yes… politics.Â If you know someone who would be a valuable contributor to this conversation, please nominate them at: http://gentn.org/nominate +

+gentn, Tennessee gentn, Tennessee

American Idol Is Awesome

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:10:32 +0000

And I don’t give a crap if you disagree. The Idol Gives Back special tonight was amazing. Sometimes the only thing I know to say is “God Bless Us All”. I’m not a religious person, but my upbringing (which was in the church) brings me to the feeling that there has to be something that links us all and makes us feel so deeply when we are presented with human suffering. Yes, some are more attuned to the constant need to give of themselves and help those less fortunate… but anytime that I can connect with that place of empathy, sympathy and unconditional love I consider myself blessed and driven to act. I can only hope that it happens more tomorrow than it did today.

The state of malaria in Africa and the poverty right here in America is a greater tragedy than the War in Iraq… if we must compare. Honestly, I think it really doesn’t make a difference. The killing in Blacksburg and the lack of aid for children around the world is all the same. A call for us to give more of ourselves.
+The beauty of suffering is that it presents an opportunity to receive or give love.

I gave $200 tonight. It’s not much, but I sure as hell feel better. And I hope that action can save a life. +

+american idol, charity, idol gives back, iraq, poverty american idol, charity, idol gives back, iraq, poverty

Have Mercy.

Marcus — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:41:12 +0000

I had a great weekend, including the birth of a new nephew on the same day as my son and mother.Â But this VA Tech shit instantly depressed me.Â My deepest sympathies go to the families.Â I have a feeling we’ll be a nation in mourning for some time. +

+mourning, va tech mourning, va tech

Valleywag on Podcasters, Harsh.

Marcus — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:00:36 +0000

Wow. It’s a rag, given. But damn… pretty harsh words.

I do think they are right to a degree. Until the technology dudes learn how to infuse entertainment, kinda like DiggNation, there is no chance for mainstream penetration. +

+diggnation, imus, podcasting, scoble, valleywag diggnation, imus, podcasting, scoble, valleywag

Promise for High Growth Technology in Tennessee

Marcus — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:31:32 +0000

purchase viagra

-barcamp nashville, entrepreneur, Investing, nashville, nashville chamber, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, Tennessee, ttdc barcamp nashville, entrepreneur, Investing, nashville, nashville chamber, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, Tennessee, ttdc

Iâm really loving 2008.

Marcus — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:33:26 +0000

I’m doing a few things in the next few weeks that I want to highlight:

- Making my first full time job offer to a great guy for the position of Senior Developer at Remarkable Wit. (Fingers Crossed!!!)
-- Interviewing Andi Gutmans from Zend, again This time for a podcast Remarkable Wit is going to launch on all web technologies.
-- Kicking off two incredibly cool projects with Remarkable Wit, and I’ll launch an official site for RW.
-- Attending, Hosting and Enjoying “PodCamp Nashville”
-- Visiting my new favorite place on Earth, Santa Monica, for the fourth time in five months.

I’ve also nearly doubled my Facebook friends with old high school friends that I am so happy to be reconnected with. Facebook really is fresh.

It’s just such a great time. 2008 is bringing the love. -

-2008, andi gutmans, entrepreneur, PHP, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, santa monica, zend 2008, andi gutmans, entrepreneur, PHP, podcamp nashville, remarkable wit, santa monica, zend

BarCamp Nashville Recap Video

Marcus — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:11:46 +0000

Finally, I can put this baby to bed for a bit. It was fun everyone. Enjoy… BarCamp Nashville, The Movie:
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-BarCamp, barcampnashville, studio now, Video BarCamp, barcampnashville, studio now, Video

BarCamp Nashville and Remarkable Wit profiled on BigSight.org

Marcus — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:09:46 +0000

-barcamp nashville, bigsight.org, entrepreneur, nashville, plan build share barcamp nashville, bigsight.org, entrepreneur, nashville, plan build share

Remarkable Wit - Plan, Build, Share

Marcus — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:15:20 +0000

Warning - This is a blog post, not a press release. Please forgive the run-ons or the soapbox.
-“Plan, Build and Share” are the service pillars of my new business venture. When I decided to start my own business I knew that no matter what I did, certain things were going to be an absolute requirement. Effective and reliable support, outstanding customer service, and a trustworthy brand are basics that ought to be present in any venture you do. Service pillars of your business are something different. They are the reason people come to you. It is the service you provide, not the level at which you do it.

Let me briefly share just a bit on Plan, Build, Share:

Plan - (experience strategy)
-If you want to enjoy outrageous success in business, always consider how the customer feels when engaged with the company. Whether it is through the advertising, the sales process, or the use and support of the product or service. Many companies fail in the most basic categories of adequate support, respectful customer service and appropriate pricing. Those are just the basics of good business, and it’s a shame that some entrepreneurs can rightfully claim them as a unique characteristic of their company.

Build - (product architecture and development)
-Most products, especially technology products, are about luxury and quality. Beyond food, clothing and shelter, people really don’t *need* anything you are selling. However, people want lots of things that they don’t need. Therefore, the successful product must meet a strong want of a well defined market. That product should also be crafted to the highest quality that you can reasonably provide. There is no longevity in a product with crappy quality. Product architecture ensures that someone vision actually resembles the picture that they have in their head, rather than becoming a nightmare.

Share - (community farming)
-Today’s successful company is thinking less about making a profit from their customers, and more about building a long term relationship with their customer that has continued benefits for both parties. Successful communities are the result of a fine tuned ear. You have to listen well, read trends and predict the wants of well defined groups of people. Growing a strong community is much more about listening and implementing than it is about leading. In short, growing a community is about constantly serving the community. Community farming is a philosophy that we put in action through constantly evolving methods of communication between creators and consumers. The goal is that these roles switch between customer and company often throughout the life of the relationship.

-marcus whitney, plan build share, remarkable wit marcus whitney, plan build share, remarkable wit

Passing Through Limitation

Marcus — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:49:05 +0000

Jessica and our friend Marc had meditation and yoga practice in our mini studio this morning. It was the third day in a row that Jessica and I have gotten up around 6AM and meditated for 15 minutes and then done some yoga. This morning, I made friends with my body’s resistance and had huge breakthroughs in both meditation and yoga. I just thought I’d share some, because I feel incredibly empowered by today’s lesson.
-This morning I remembered that a goal which in the present seems near impossible, becomes very possible with constant focus and practice towards achieving it. Early frustration, lack of patience and self doubt are the pillars of limitation. To pass through the limitations and achieve your desires, one only needs to focus on the benefit being received during the journey. In every moment you have the power to melt away the frustration, realize ongoing instant gratification and find countless reasons to love yourself. Today, I’m one practice closer to realizing a full lotus, and I don’t care how many more practices I have to do, I really enjoyed getting closer today. -

-jessica whitney, journey, limitation, meditation, yoga jessica whitney, journey, limitation, meditation, yoga

Getting Very Excited About BarCamp Nashville

Marcus — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:59:55 +0000

-barcamp nashville, Dave Delaney barcamp nashville, Dave Delaney

Blogging Again.

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:20:40 +0000

Yup, back at it. I have a lot to get off my chest, and I also need a redesign. Let’s see what we can whip up in the upcoming weeks. -

-blogging again blogging again

Oh Boyâ¦

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:50:19 +0000

I’ve got a lot of code to write. -

-startup startup

A Group Of People That Inspire Me Beyond Words

Marcus — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:20:51 +0000

-emma, inspire, Life emma, inspire, Life

links for 2007-05-29

Marcus — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:22:45 +0000

-
Brett Terpstra on Virb.com
-
Badass Verb layout
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(tags: verb circle_six_design)
-

-No TagsNo Tags

links for 2007-05-28

Marcus — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:21:16 +0000

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Apple Mail plug-in roundup - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
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Apple Mail Plug-Ins. We all need em.
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(tags: apple mail mail.app osx)
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Amyloo: Friday, May 25, 2007
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AmyLoo correctly notes that Facebook is an inside out approach that once again takes away the web’s core purpose, to offer a set of standards for all to interoperate on. Facebook wins, we lose.
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(tags: facebook platform API)
-

-No TagsNo Tags

Crop Circles in Tennessee?!?!

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 23:16:14 +0000

Crop circles in Tennessee? Thanks for the heads up Cry. -

-crop circles, Tennessee, ufo crop circles, Tennessee, ufo

Torontoâ¦ I miss you.

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 22:10:38 +0000

- The Netherlands Boys

Originally uploaded by marcuswhitney
- -

-netherlands, toronto netherlands, toronto

links for 2007-05-27

Marcus — Sun, 27 May 2007 08:21:06 +0000

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bigsight - a directory of people doing good work
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a neat directory of good people doing good things started in Nashville by Dan Birdwhistell
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(tags: nashville technology startup good tech social)
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Who Can Compete with Facebook?
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Josh Catone brings up the likely competition for Facebook platform.
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(tags: facebook pageflakes platform myspace)
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Ignition Web Studios : Dream . Develop . Ignite .
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Nashville Ruby Shop
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(tags: nashville technology startup ruby rails)
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-No TagsNo Tags

Thereâs a Lot of Good Stuff Going Onâ¦

Marcus — Sat, 26 May 2007 14:13:51 +0000

But I need to get myself in order. Thank goodness we have a three-day weekend. I’ve got a lot of organization to do. -

-GTD, order, self GTD, order, self

One Week Until Generation TN Conference

Marcus — Sat, 26 May 2007 14:12:21 +0000

-civic, conference, gentn, Tennessee civic, conference, gentn, Tennessee

My Baby Graduated From KinderGarten

Marcus — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:17:09 +0000

And I got really emotional about it. He was so big on stage, playing the piano. He’s on his way, and I’m so proud of him. Congratulations Ciaran. -

-kindergarten kindergarten

Envisioning a Mission

Marcus — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:01:01 +0000

All this got me thinking, would it not be possible to create an entire education and economic system based on hip-hop?Â I’m not talking about the usual “revolutionary” hip-hop that does nothing but rant about injustice, but offers no solution.Â I’m talking about a system that enlightens the children to true hiphop culture, economics, health, wellness, and self-awareness.
-Indeed this is a subset of the mission of the Temple of HipHop. I enquired this morning on how to become a member. When I arrived at the website, I was surprised to see that this week is Hip Hop Appreciation Week. I think I’m getting signals on my noble purpose. -

-50 cent, edutainment, HipHop, krs one, purpose 50 cent, edutainment, HipHop, krs one, purpose

My Most Popular Post

Marcus — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:00:30 +0000

-earthlink, embarq, sprint earthlink, embarq, sprint

Long Time No Post

Marcus — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:04:33 +0000

Yeah, it comes in waves.Â Figured I’d just get a post out there as an update:

Ciaran’s pink eye is over.Â Whew.Â Working at home is just not my thing.
Jessica and I are going to make music.Â Together.Â Happy times.
Message Systems is an amazing company with an amazing product.
Things are good in general.Â I’m gonna get some spiritual food today.
Tomorrow I will see Lara Duncan for a Nutritional Consultation.Â Very excited about that.
I hope this doesn’t show up on planet-php, but if it does, it’s not my fault.Â I asked them to remove me.
Oh, and I’m going to Gnomedex.Â Nice.

-Blogging, gnomedex, jessica whitney, message systems, nutrition Blogging, gnomedex, jessica whitney, message systems, nutrition

Back to fighting weight

Marcus — Sun, 06 May 2007 19:16:22 +0000

-bjj, competition, fitness, nutrition bjj, competition, fitness, nutrition

Checking In, Hope All Is Well

Marcus — Tue, 01 May 2007 04:39:29 +0000

Me, I’m really just embracing all the good around me.Â So, from me to you, take a minute and smell the Cognac (hat tip Phil Leotardo). -

-content, growing, happy, Life, reflection content, growing, happy, Life, reflection

Strong Urge To Organize and Simplify part 2.5

Marcus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:50:55 +0000

Midnight Blue’s Inbox doesn’t even stay open long enough for me to create a task. It crashes non stop for any action. But, it does remind me that I am using a trial version and that I REALLY should go ahead and buy a license. This product is dead in the water. So, I reverted to Kinkless, and I actually like it a great deal. Especially since I love outliners,and it’s just some AppleScripts that add onto Omni Outliner Pro. I’ve been looking at OmniPlan recently as well, just as a compliment to Kinkless for my management of projects beyond the resource of me. I really hope OmniFocus turns out well.
-I’m realizing more time is passing since the last time I’ve written production code, and I am spending a ton of time focused on project, action and productivity management. Things change. -

-GTD, Inbox, kinkless, omnifocus, omnioutliner, productivity GTD, Inbox, kinkless, omnifocus, omnioutliner, productivity

Vote For Trees

Marcus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:29:21 +0000

-arbor day, emma, green, tree, treehugging, vote for trees arbor day, emma, green, tree, treehugging, vote for trees

Strong Urge To Organize and Simplify part 2

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:30:38 +0000

So, now I’m going to give GTD a shot for a month and I’ll let you know how it goes. Along with updates when I hit snags, which I’m sure I will. -

-43Folders, Alex Ezell, Dave Delaney, David Allen, Daylite, GTD, Inbox, Merlin Mann, Midnight Beep 43Folders, Alex Ezell, Dave Delaney, David Allen, Daylite, GTD, Inbox, Merlin Mann, Midnight Beep

Gen TN: Inform, Interact, Inspire

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:20:17 +0000

-gentn, Tennessee gentn, Tennessee

American Idol Is Awesome

Marcus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:10:32 +0000

The state of malaria in Africa and the poverty right here in America is a greater tragedy than the War in Iraq… if we must compare. Honestly, I think it really doesn’t make a difference. The killing in Blacksburg and the lack of aid for children around the world is all the same. A call for us to give more of ourselves.
-The beauty of suffering is that it presents an opportunity to receive or give love.

I gave $200 tonight. It’s not much, but I sure as hell feel better. And I hope that action can save a life. -

-american idol, charity, idol gives back, iraq, poverty american idol, charity, idol gives back, iraq, poverty

Have Mercy.

Marcus — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:41:12 +0000

-mourning, va tech mourning, va tech

Valleywag on Podcasters, Harsh.

Marcus — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:00:36 +0000

Wow. It’s a rag, given. But damn… pretty harsh words.

I do think they are right to a degree. Until the technology dudes learn how to infuse entertainment, kinda like DiggNation, there is no chance for mainstream penetration. -

-diggnation, imus, podcasting, scoble, valleywag diggnation, imus, podcasting, scoble, valleywag

Climbing

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:37:01 -0400

+ I climbed recently at Val-David, and had a rather interesting time. The climbs weren't particularly hard, just... different. Most of them were "slab" I think. Where the rock isn't straight up, but actually leans in, which makes it easier, which is cool. The problem was a near complete lack of handholds.
+
+I think the climbs were really good for me from a technical prospective. I (and apparently most men) use a lot of upper body strength when climbing. Now while I'm actually not that strong, it's not uncommon to see me hanging off one or both hands while my feet do something rather silly that generally works out in the end. Another favourite is pulling with a hand and pushing with my feet to jump up and grab something higher. This works, but it can only get me so far.
+
+Rock climbing shoes are curiously good at gripping things, putting all your weight on a small rock sticking out less than a centimeter is pretty common. So once I actually started trusting my feet to carry all my weight, things went pretty well. I'd like to try a few slabs at allez-up next time, and restrict myself from using any hand holds while I'm on them.
+
+
+I've also discovered my new favorite formation, the crack. Easier than stairs!
+
+
+
+Note to my PHP friends: I had zero posts for a long time, so I've gone with some personal posts to get back in the swing of things, I should get back into PHP posts soon. +

Cycling

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:38:58 -0400

+ So I've been biking for a while, and I'm really starting to enjoy it. As I mentioned before I aim to rock climb, cycle, or hit the weights at the gym every day so I generally bike about three times a week. I went biking with a friend earlier this week and he contrasted our cycling styles.
+
+Apparently, I bike like I'm a car, while he cycles like he's a pedestrian (apparently my methodology requires a bit more guts). While when biking down the road I'll stick to the right, but I'm more than willing to take the left lane when I'm turning (there's something empowering about towering over almost every car on the road), even on some of Montreal's busier roads. I also signal my turns, and stop for red lights. My friend on the other hand relentlessly sticks to the right, crosses roads with pedestrian lights rather than the big turn, and runs lights like any true Montreal pedestrian would.
+
+As a small disclaimer, I also wear a helmet, have a blinking LED tail light, appropriate headlight and all required reflectors.
+
+On a side note, I found a bigger hill. 54.8km/h, I could have gone much faster but there's always a street light at the bottom of these things, and the roads here are horrible. I find I actually peak well after the bottom of the hill (after I've passed the street light). +

Getting in Shape

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:55:09 -0400

+ So, I've decided this is the summer that I finally get into shape. Apart from not being happy with my current weight, getting out will also allow me to meet more people in Montreal which can only be a good thing.
+
+I've come up with three key activities, and my goal is to do one every day. I don't always make it, but I've had some good stretches. The activities are: rock climbing, cycling (currently 12k, planning on upping this a bit once I find a better half way point), and weights at the gym.
+
+Rock Climbing: A friend introduced me to this a few months ago, and apart from a rather difficult first experience I quite enjoy it. There's a couple local climbing gyms, as well as a great group of people who go out doors every week or two. Thanks to some great help and instruction I'm now gaining confidence on 5.7s (Yosemite Decimal System). I usually climb at Allez Up but tried Horizen Roc this past weekend. I can't wait until I'm good enough to take a lead climbing class. Also, there's a trapeze class at Horizen Roc .
+
+Cycling: I've loved riding a bike forever, and it seems to satisfy a need to spend time doing something thoughtless while being outdoors that's been left empty since I didn't have a dog to take for a walk. I bought a bike a while back, and have started biking to a distant grocery store for a bottle of water and an apple, then back. I've already had several minor repairs to my bike as a result of Montreal's crappy roads. I average 24Km/h, and my max speed so far is 47Km/h.
+
+Gym: I joined the YMCA a while back with a friend. The downtown YMCA here has two gyms, the regular one on the third floor (that's huge, and quite busy), and a "technogym" on the second floor that's small, doesn't have the nice big windows, and is usually almost dead. They've got this great program where included in your membership every 6 weeks you can have a meeting (~1hr) with a personal trainer to work on setting up a program, your goals etc. They will also teach you how to use the machines (critical for me). In the techno-gym, it goes one step further where your work out program is encoded into a smart key, all the machines take the key, they then: set the appropriate weight/resistance, #repetitions, #sets, seat height and other adjustments, plus it records your work out. I like this option, as it basically lets me shut my brain down for an hour while I work out. Thanks to the computerized machines, I get handy little reports, so for example: during my first workout I lifted a total of 7,945Kg (that total could be obtained by lifting a 1Kg weight 7954 times, or some more sensible combination of more weight on different muscles), I'm now past 10,500Kg.
+
+
+I'm pretty sure I've got some new muscles where there was none before, though you'd have to be quite familiar with my body in order to notice... So if you've noticed please stop stalking me.
+ +

Selling stuff to the pawn shop

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:56:25 -0400

+ Well, my apartment is a mess. I'm single, and don't have a roommate, so there's been little incentive to clean. However, I'd rather not live in a pig sty forever, so it was time to clean. I like fancy new technology, so I've got a bunch kicking around that I don't use anymore. Parting with junk is tough, but it's way easier if you can get money for it, it seems easier. Plus, you get money. So I took my aforementioned (but unplayed for the past year) PSP to the pawn shop to sell it (once I did one last game for memories sake).
+
+Running a pawn shop has to suck, apart from needing to take down details on everyone they buy from, they need to hold onto everything they buy for 30 days before they can sell it again. So they pay first, then can sell again after a month. This is reverse of a lot of retailers who manage to get products, then pay for them later! +

Open Web Vancouver

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:40:21 -0400

+ I (despite Air Canada's best efforts) have arrived safely in Vancouver in preperation for Open Web Vancouver. I'll be doing a new talk on State and History in Ajax. I'll be leveraging the YUI throughout the talk. Registration is still open for the conference so if you're in the area come on by, tickets are a steal at only $150!
+
+I'd also like to thank php|architect for sponsoring my attendance once again this year. +

PDO Week!

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:25:00 -0500

+ So we're half way into PDO week at funcaday. I've wanted to do theme weeks since the beginning, a few emails prompted me to take a look at PDO for this first theme week, and now that i've gotten i started I'm quite enjoying it. If you've got any suggestions for future weeks let me know.
+ +

I miss Zend Studio

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:20:19 -0500

+ So I dual develop, I flip back and forth between Active State's Komodo, and Zend's Zend Studio (the first generation). One of my favourite features of Zend Studio is the Code Analyzer, it basically reads through your code and tells you about all your bugs. No, I'm not talking about syntax errors, I'm talking about using variables before they were defined, an assignment in condition, variables only being used once, functions returning something sometimes and nothing other times. It helps you find those tiny annoying bugs that take you hours to find normally in less than a second. Anyways, it's great, it's something I flip over for.
+
+I miss it because it wont register... +

Contest

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:14:19 -0500

+ Hey all, if you like PHP and are looking for some fun stuff to just experiment with, why not try one of our contests? php|architect is launching regular PHP Programming contests, so take a look at our first running, a link parser
+
+Also, take a look at some of our new free great articles up at C7Y. +

Happy Valentines Day - The funcaday way

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:01:00 -0500

+ I trust you've seen today's funcaday, if not head over and look now. Want a custom one to share with someone you care about. Fill out the form here. It's a subtle effect though, they'll need to read it.
+
+Valid characters for names are just alphabetics and the underscore, sorry.
+
+You could also buy advertising, I'd like to eat this month.
+ +

Today's Funcaday

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:21:00 -0500

+ I'm really restricted on space, so I wanted to present a counter point on today's funcaday: Performance.
+
+The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. Under the approach I reccomend the post will be escaped with mysql_real_escape_string() once, and with htmlentiteis() 2,000 times. If you had escaped it twice in the first place those functions would have been called once each, saving you 1,999 calls to htmlentities.
+
+You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.
+
+
+Note: This blog post was written well in advance, I'm on vacation, don't have my laptop or internet, and it's likely that my cell phone won't even turn on. So replies may be a bit tardy.
+
+Note^2: But I'm not dumb, someone's looking after my server
+
+ +

Merry Christmas

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:08:11 -0500

+
+
+Talk to you in the new year. +

Photoshop - Working with different pixel ratios

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:46:51 -0500

+ My grandparents are getting a digital photo frame for Christmas, they don't own a computer so the cat's not out of the bag. This digital frame has a stated resolution that's way off what you're looking at, the frame is like 16:9, but the pixel is... something else. I had a hard time working in Photoshop trying to prep the images for the system, since the pixels aren't square, they're rectangles, what looked good here looked like crap over there, etc. Then I found the pixel aspect ratio option under Image, created my own aspect ratio (using a ruler, and the pixel counts) and voila, I could now draw squares in photoshop that were square within the frame.
+
+I still had a problem, when I converted existing images over to the new ratio, they got squished, it showed me a preview (which is all it really does), but didn't resample the image to look right under the new ratio. The solution is pretty easy, open up image size, turn off constrain properties then divide the width by the pixel aspect ratio and apply. Your image is now stretched. Then apply the pixel aspect ratio, and it should look normal. +

Get it Right or Get it Up.

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:55:58 -0500

+ When working on any web development project, you have two central choices, Get it Right, or Get it Up. While the same choices dominate development as a whole, the low cost, high speed, and largely transparent nature of updates on the web make getting it up more tempting.
+
+Getting it Right is what most developers strive for: clean code, easy to read, easy to use, easy to refractor. It's great, but it's not fast. I would even go as far to say that it's relatively easy to estimate how long it will take to develop something, but very difficult to estimate how long it will take to develop something "right".
+
+Getting it Up (pun unintentional) is when you release just as soon as things work (mostly). You get the code working in some manner that vaguely represents what you're actually hoping for, push it live, then fix things as they break, add new features as they're required. It's faster, but you don't get to have that grand release party as soon as the application goes live, as you're probably madly mashing the keyboard trying to fix all the bugs that your users are finding.
+
+(more after the jump)
Continue reading "Get it Right or Get it Up." +

Resources are "special"

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:08:52 -0500

+ Working on funcaday I've spent a lot of time dealing with variables of the type resource in the past few weeks, after all GD images are held in variables of that type. I ran into some "functionality" of resources late last night that I initially chalked up to a bug, a variable of type resource went from being a resource of type GD to unknown while merely getting returned back a few steps. After some experimentation (and the inevitable epiphany while brushing my teeth) I've figured it out, and there's no bug.
+
+Here's a longish snippet explaining what I was encountering:
+

class imageTest {
+ private $image;
+ public function __construct() {
+ $this->image = imagecreatetruecolor(2,2);
+ }
+ public function getImage() {
+ var_dump($this->image);
+ return array($this->image);
+ }
+ public function __destruct() {
+ imagedestroy($this->image);
+ }
+}
+function test() {
+ $x = new imageTest();
+ $image = $x->getImage();
+ var_dump($image);
+ return $image;
+}
+
+$image = test();
+var_dump($image);
+

+
+Which returns something like:
+

resource(3, gd)
+resource(3, gd)
+resource(3, Unknown)
+

+(more after the jump)
+
Continue reading "Resources are "special"" +

funcaday

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:03:59 -0500

+ Sorry to everyone for the issues this evening, non-feed based users of the site should have seen everything up and working perfectly by 12:05am EST, while feed users needed to wait until almost 1:00am EST
+1) Today's post posed a few issues, namely, it's the first weekend based post we've had so it's running through a different image creation path.
+2) Since there's only one image for two days over the weekend, there's a whole bunch of code in various places to handle that.
+
+The Real Issue:
+I think I've found a bug in PHP. I didn't have time to develop a base case to prove it this evening (while the clock struck down towards midnight) but it seems as though resources can get mangled when being returned a few levels.
+

+Generating Weekday!
+resource(532) of type (gd)
+resource(532) of type (Unknown)
+

+
+
+If you're interested in presenting funcaday to anyone through a project of your own, I'd reccomend taking a look at the json feed. Either json.xml, or funcaday.json. The information is identical in those two files, the difference is really just the extension, Technically if you're using JS the XHR object wants a text/html content type, so I provide the .xml version to get Apache to give you that header, if you're using anything else, go for the .json. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see in there.
+
+One question for the mindful readers, in the RSS code I have:
+

+ file_put_contents('/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml.temp', $rss);
+ rename('/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml.temp', '/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml');
+

+Can anyone tell me why I would add the extra step? Do I actually need to do this, or is this just me following outdated practices?
+
+
+P.S.
+There's aparently a video version of funcaday by an anonymous... fan? +

Climbing

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:37:01 -0400

- I climbed recently at Val-David, and had a rather interesting time. The climbs weren't particularly hard, just... different. Most of them were "slab" I think. Where the rock isn't straight up, but actually leans in, which makes it easier, which is cool. The problem was a near complete lack of handholds.
-
-I think the climbs were really good for me from a technical prospective. I (and apparently most men) use a lot of upper body strength when climbing. Now while I'm actually not that strong, it's not uncommon to see me hanging off one or both hands while my feet do something rather silly that generally works out in the end. Another favourite is pulling with a hand and pushing with my feet to jump up and grab something higher. This works, but it can only get me so far.
-
-Rock climbing shoes are curiously good at gripping things, putting all your weight on a small rock sticking out less than a centimeter is pretty common. So once I actually started trusting my feet to carry all my weight, things went pretty well. I'd like to try a few slabs at allez-up next time, and restrict myself from using any hand holds while I'm on them.
-
-
-I've also discovered my new favorite formation, the crack. Easier than stairs!
-
-
-
-Note to my PHP friends: I had zero posts for a long time, so I've gone with some personal posts to get back in the swing of things, I should get back into PHP posts soon. -

Cycling

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:38:58 -0400

- So I've been biking for a while, and I'm really starting to enjoy it. As I mentioned before I aim to rock climb, cycle, or hit the weights at the gym every day so I generally bike about three times a week. I went biking with a friend earlier this week and he contrasted our cycling styles.
-
-Apparently, I bike like I'm a car, while he cycles like he's a pedestrian (apparently my methodology requires a bit more guts). While when biking down the road I'll stick to the right, but I'm more than willing to take the left lane when I'm turning (there's something empowering about towering over almost every car on the road), even on some of Montreal's busier roads. I also signal my turns, and stop for red lights. My friend on the other hand relentlessly sticks to the right, crosses roads with pedestrian lights rather than the big turn, and runs lights like any true Montreal pedestrian would.
-
-As a small disclaimer, I also wear a helmet, have a blinking LED tail light, appropriate headlight and all required reflectors.
-
-On a side note, I found a bigger hill. 54.8km/h, I could have gone much faster but there's always a street light at the bottom of these things, and the roads here are horrible. I find I actually peak well after the bottom of the hill (after I've passed the street light). -

Getting in Shape

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:55:09 -0400

- So, I've decided this is the summer that I finally get into shape. Apart from not being happy with my current weight, getting out will also allow me to meet more people in Montreal which can only be a good thing.
-
-I've come up with three key activities, and my goal is to do one every day. I don't always make it, but I've had some good stretches. The activities are: rock climbing, cycling (currently 12k, planning on upping this a bit once I find a better half way point), and weights at the gym.
-
-Rock Climbing: A friend introduced me to this a few months ago, and apart from a rather difficult first experience I quite enjoy it. There's a couple local climbing gyms, as well as a great group of people who go out doors every week or two. Thanks to some great help and instruction I'm now gaining confidence on 5.7s (Yosemite Decimal System). I usually climb at Allez Up but tried Horizen Roc this past weekend. I can't wait until I'm good enough to take a lead climbing class. Also, there's a trapeze class at Horizen Roc .
-
-Cycling: I've loved riding a bike forever, and it seems to satisfy a need to spend time doing something thoughtless while being outdoors that's been left empty since I didn't have a dog to take for a walk. I bought a bike a while back, and have started biking to a distant grocery store for a bottle of water and an apple, then back. I've already had several minor repairs to my bike as a result of Montreal's crappy roads. I average 24Km/h, and my max speed so far is 47Km/h.
-
-Gym: I joined the YMCA a while back with a friend. The downtown YMCA here has two gyms, the regular one on the third floor (that's huge, and quite busy), and a "technogym" on the second floor that's small, doesn't have the nice big windows, and is usually almost dead. They've got this great program where included in your membership every 6 weeks you can have a meeting (~1hr) with a personal trainer to work on setting up a program, your goals etc. They will also teach you how to use the machines (critical for me). In the techno-gym, it goes one step further where your work out program is encoded into a smart key, all the machines take the key, they then: set the appropriate weight/resistance, #repetitions, #sets, seat height and other adjustments, plus it records your work out. I like this option, as it basically lets me shut my brain down for an hour while I work out. Thanks to the computerized machines, I get handy little reports, so for example: during my first workout I lifted a total of 7,945Kg (that total could be obtained by lifting a 1Kg weight 7954 times, or some more sensible combination of more weight on different muscles), I'm now past 10,500Kg.
-
-
-I'm pretty sure I've got some new muscles where there was none before, though you'd have to be quite familiar with my body in order to notice... So if you've noticed please stop stalking me.
- -

Selling stuff to the pawn shop

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:56:25 -0400

- Well, my apartment is a mess. I'm single, and don't have a roommate, so there's been little incentive to clean. However, I'd rather not live in a pig sty forever, so it was time to clean. I like fancy new technology, so I've got a bunch kicking around that I don't use anymore. Parting with junk is tough, but it's way easier if you can get money for it, it seems easier. Plus, you get money. So I took my aforementioned (but unplayed for the past year) PSP to the pawn shop to sell it (once I did one last game for memories sake).
-
-Running a pawn shop has to suck, apart from needing to take down details on everyone they buy from, they need to hold onto everything they buy for 30 days before they can sell it again. So they pay first, then can sell again after a month. This is reverse of a lot of retailers who manage to get products, then pay for them later! -

Open Web Vancouver

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:40:21 -0400

- I (despite Air Canada's best efforts) have arrived safely in Vancouver in preperation for Open Web Vancouver. I'll be doing a new talk on State and History in Ajax. I'll be leveraging the YUI throughout the talk. Registration is still open for the conference so if you're in the area come on by, tickets are a steal at only $150!
-
-I'd also like to thank php|architect for sponsoring my attendance once again this year. -

PDO Week!

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:25:00 -0500

- So we're half way into PDO week at funcaday. I've wanted to do theme weeks since the beginning, a few emails prompted me to take a look at PDO for this first theme week, and now that i've gotten i started I'm quite enjoying it. If you've got any suggestions for future weeks let me know.
- -

I miss Zend Studio

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:20:19 -0500

- So I dual develop, I flip back and forth between Active State's Komodo, and Zend's Zend Studio (the first generation). One of my favourite features of Zend Studio is the Code Analyzer, it basically reads through your code and tells you about all your bugs. No, I'm not talking about syntax errors, I'm talking about using variables before they were defined, an assignment in condition, variables only being used once, functions returning something sometimes and nothing other times. It helps you find those tiny annoying bugs that take you hours to find normally in less than a second. Anyways, it's great, it's something I flip over for.
-
-I miss it because it wont register... -

Contest

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:14:19 -0500

- Hey all, if you like PHP and are looking for some fun stuff to just experiment with, why not try one of our contests? php|architect is launching regular PHP Programming contests, so take a look at our first running, a link parser
-
-Also, take a look at some of our new free great articles up at C7Y. -

Happy Valentines Day - The funcaday way

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:01:00 -0500

- I trust you've seen today's funcaday, if not head over and look now. Want a custom one to share with someone you care about. Fill out the form here. It's a subtle effect though, they'll need to read it.
-
-Valid characters for names are just alphabetics and the underscore, sorry.
-
-You could also buy advertising, I'd like to eat this month.
- -

Today's Funcaday

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:21:00 -0500

- I'm really restricted on space, so I wanted to present a counter point on today's funcaday: Performance.
-
-The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. Under the approach I reccomend the post will be escaped with mysql_real_escape_string() once, and with htmlentiteis() 2,000 times. If you had escaped it twice in the first place those functions would have been called once each, saving you 1,999 calls to htmlentities.
-
-You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.
-
-
-Note: This blog post was written well in advance, I'm on vacation, don't have my laptop or internet, and it's likely that my cell phone won't even turn on. So replies may be a bit tardy.
-
-Note^2: But I'm not dumb, someone's looking after my server
-
- -

Merry Christmas

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:08:11 -0500

-
-
-Talk to you in the new year. -

Photoshop - Working with different pixel ratios

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:46:51 -0500

- My grandparents are getting a digital photo frame for Christmas, they don't own a computer so the cat's not out of the bag. This digital frame has a stated resolution that's way off what you're looking at, the frame is like 16:9, but the pixel is... something else. I had a hard time working in Photoshop trying to prep the images for the system, since the pixels aren't square, they're rectangles, what looked good here looked like crap over there, etc. Then I found the pixel aspect ratio option under Image, created my own aspect ratio (using a ruler, and the pixel counts) and voila, I could now draw squares in photoshop that were square within the frame.
-
-I still had a problem, when I converted existing images over to the new ratio, they got squished, it showed me a preview (which is all it really does), but didn't resample the image to look right under the new ratio. The solution is pretty easy, open up image size, turn off constrain properties then divide the width by the pixel aspect ratio and apply. Your image is now stretched. Then apply the pixel aspect ratio, and it should look normal. -

Get it Right or Get it Up.

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:55:58 -0500

- When working on any web development project, you have two central choices, Get it Right, or Get it Up. While the same choices dominate development as a whole, the low cost, high speed, and largely transparent nature of updates on the web make getting it up more tempting.
-
-Getting it Right is what most developers strive for: clean code, easy to read, easy to use, easy to refractor. It's great, but it's not fast. I would even go as far to say that it's relatively easy to estimate how long it will take to develop something, but very difficult to estimate how long it will take to develop something "right".
-
-Getting it Up (pun unintentional) is when you release just as soon as things work (mostly). You get the code working in some manner that vaguely represents what you're actually hoping for, push it live, then fix things as they break, add new features as they're required. It's faster, but you don't get to have that grand release party as soon as the application goes live, as you're probably madly mashing the keyboard trying to fix all the bugs that your users are finding.
-
-(more after the jump)
Continue reading "Get it Right or Get it Up." -

Resources are "special"

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:08:52 -0500

- Working on funcaday I've spent a lot of time dealing with variables of the type resource in the past few weeks, after all GD images are held in variables of that type. I ran into some "functionality" of resources late last night that I initially chalked up to a bug, a variable of type resource went from being a resource of type GD to unknown while merely getting returned back a few steps. After some experimentation (and the inevitable epiphany while brushing my teeth) I've figured it out, and there's no bug.
-
-Here's a longish snippet explaining what I was encountering:
-

class imageTest {
- private $image;
- public function __construct() {
- $this->image = imagecreatetruecolor(2,2);
- }
- public function getImage() {
- var_dump($this->image);
- return array($this->image);
- }
- public function __destruct() {
- imagedestroy($this->image);
- }
-}
-function test() {
- $x = new imageTest();
- $image = $x->getImage();
- var_dump($image);
- return $image;
-}
-
-$image = test();
-var_dump($image);
-

-
-Which returns something like:
-

resource(3, gd)
-resource(3, gd)
-resource(3, Unknown)
-

-(more after the jump)
-
Continue reading "Resources are "special"" -

funcaday

nospam@example.com (Paul Reinheimer) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:03:59 -0500

- Sorry to everyone for the issues this evening, non-feed based users of the site should have seen everything up and working perfectly by 12:05am EST, while feed users needed to wait until almost 1:00am EST
-1) Today's post posed a few issues, namely, it's the first weekend based post we've had so it's running through a different image creation path.
-2) Since there's only one image for two days over the weekend, there's a whole bunch of code in various places to handle that.
-
-The Real Issue:
-I think I've found a bug in PHP. I didn't have time to develop a base case to prove it this evening (while the clock struck down towards midnight) but it seems as though resources can get mangled when being returned a few levels.
-

-Generating Weekday!
-resource(532) of type (gd)
-resource(532) of type (Unknown)
-

-
-
-If you're interested in presenting funcaday to anyone through a project of your own, I'd reccomend taking a look at the json feed. Either json.xml, or funcaday.json. The information is identical in those two files, the difference is really just the extension, Technically if you're using JS the XHR object wants a text/html content type, so I provide the .xml version to get Apache to give you that header, if you're using anything else, go for the .json. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see in there.
-
-One question for the mindful readers, in the RSS code I have:
-

- file_put_contents('/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml.temp', $rss);
- rename('/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml.temp', '/path/funcaday.com/rss.xml');
-

-Can anyone tell me why I would add the extra step? Do I actually need to do this, or is this just me following outdated practices?
-
-
-P.S.
-There's aparently a video version of funcaday by an anonymous... fan? -

Extensibility

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:35:58 GMT

+ As Don said, + the first CTP of the Managed Extensibility + Framework is available. We use this code a bunch on my team and are building lots + of stuff on top of it. It's great. Simple extensibility. I hope that it only gets + simpler as we get feedback from customers. +

+ Please, be sure to share with the team what they can cut to make it even simpler! + :) +

Insulting in everyway

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:39:31 GMT

+ Some ignorant TV producers decided to have a "Best Mom" competition where they commited + a major faux pas. They classified mothers of adopted children as a "Non-Mom". +

+ It is amazing to me that in this day and age that anyone would be so blatantly insulting. + As someone who has been going down the path to adopt, I must say that this is the + first major incident I have encountered where I felt so much in a minority. +

+ I generally don't participate in letter writing campaigns or anything like this, but + I feel compelled to at least send an email to this company and let them know that + this is not acceptable. +

+ I'm not asking anyone else to participate in this, but if you are looking for contact + information, here it is: +

+ AFM TV LLC. 11444
+ West Olympic blvd, 10th Floor +
+ Los Angeles, CA 90064 +

+ info@americasfavoritemom.com +

+ 800-225-7435 +

+ And, for those of you that want to see the original post: +

+ This is insulting + in everyway +

Yep, still hiring

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:35:46 GMT

+ Doug wrote up posts about a bunch of our new jobs - both in the languages space + and our text editor project. + Of course, he neglected to mention a bunch of our UX projects, but that may be because + we don't have an external link yet. +

+ The key thing; if you want to work on incredibly cool technology with a great team + (I'm just happy they keep me around) you should think about coming on board. +

Blog

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:32:28 GMT

+ Blog software is broken (permalinks don't work anymore, etc.) +

+ I'm months behind posting the source code for my book +

+ Sorry. +

Growing

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:58:06 GMT

+ My team is growing again... this time we are looking for people to work on a new + tool. Want to come help? +

Happy Windows Day!

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:02:49 GMT

+ In keeping with tradition, another really + bad job of singing. +

+ + +

Microsoft Company Store has Essential WPF in stock!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:06:03 GMT

+ Pretty cool, the Microsoft Company Store has started stocking 3rd party books, which + fortunately includes my book. Wahoo! +

+ So, if you are a Microsoft employee, swing on by the co-store and pickup a copy today + (or two)! +

Chapter 1 of Essential WPF code posted

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:19:50 GMT

+ I've posted the Chapter 1 code + samples. I'll also get this posted up to the "official" site soon.

Want to change the world?

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:43:08 GMT

+ Doug has opened + the flood gates for our team... As Don + said, we have a small team with 1 month milestones, no traditional roles (everyone + codes, writes specs, tests, talks with customers - everything)... We have to be a + little vague on what we are working on, but I can say that I'm having a lot of fun... +

Just to sure you noticed...

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:13:09 GMT

+ In case you missed the significance of the last + snippet of code... +

+ VB supports "relaxed delegates" - so you can drop the "sender As Object, e As EventArgs" + from simple delegates
+ VB's Handles syntax makes wiring events much simpler (they don't get mixed up in your + markup) 'OK, this is an old feature, but I still love it
+ XML literal syntax is pretty amazing. I find a few frustrations with it (I which that + nested literals inherited the namespaces), but it lends itself to some very nice code

+ I'm spending a lot more time with VB lately, the new VB features are awesome. Of course, + I've started to see some rumblings of future features, and it's only getting better. +

Congrats to VB

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:07:33 GMT

+ Looks like Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Basic 9 (and lots of other fun stuff) are + going to RTM + soon. +

+ Very cool... I'm starting to see a lot of possibilities with VB given code like this: +

+ Imports System.Windows.Markup +

+ Class Window1
+ Sub OnLoaded() Handles Me.Loaded
+ Dim n As Integer() = {1, 2, 3, 4} +

+         Content = _
+             Parse( _
+                 + <StackPanel xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>
+                     + <%= _
+                         + From i _
+                         + In n Select _
+                         + <Button xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>
+                             + Button #<%= i %>
+                         + </Button> _
+                     + %>
+                 + </StackPanel>)
+     End Sub +

+     Function Parse(ByVal x As XElement) As Object
+         Return XamlReader.Load(x.CreateReader())
+     End Function
+ End Class
+

Finally, it starts to tip

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:26:45 GMT

+ I've been frustrated over the lack of convergence of prerecorded high definition video + in a portable and broadly distributable format - otherwise known as HD DVD + vs. BluRay. +

+ Looks like there has been a big shift in the market, Kmart + is no longer carrying BluRay. +

+ [fixed type, it was Kmart mentioned in the article] +

Extensibility

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:35:58 GMT

- As Don said, - the first CTP of the Managed Extensibility - Framework is available. We use this code a bunch on my team and are building lots - of stuff on top of it. It's great. Simple extensibility. I hope that it only gets - simpler as we get feedback from customers. -

- Please, be sure to share with the team what they can cut to make it even simpler! - :) -

Insulting in everyway

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:39:31 GMT

- Some ignorant TV producers decided to have a "Best Mom" competition where they commited - a major faux pas. They classified mothers of adopted children as a "Non-Mom". -

- It is amazing to me that in this day and age that anyone would be so blatantly insulting. - As someone who has been going down the path to adopt, I must say that this is the - first major incident I have encountered where I felt so much in a minority. -

- I generally don't participate in letter writing campaigns or anything like this, but - I feel compelled to at least send an email to this company and let them know that - this is not acceptable. -

- I'm not asking anyone else to participate in this, but if you are looking for contact - information, here it is: -

- AFM TV LLC. 11444
- West Olympic blvd, 10th Floor -
- Los Angeles, CA 90064 -

- info@americasfavoritemom.com -

- 800-225-7435 -

- And, for those of you that want to see the original post: -

- This is insulting - in everyway -

Yep, still hiring

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:35:46 GMT

- Doug wrote up posts about a bunch of our new jobs - both in the languages space - and our text editor project. - Of course, he neglected to mention a bunch of our UX projects, but that may be because - we don't have an external link yet. -

- The key thing; if you want to work on incredibly cool technology with a great team - (I'm just happy they keep me around) you should think about coming on board. -

Blog

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:32:28 GMT

- Blog software is broken (permalinks don't work anymore, etc.) -

- I'm months behind posting the source code for my book -

- Sorry. -

Growing

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:58:06 GMT

- My team is growing again... this time we are looking for people to work on a new - tool. Want to come help? -

Happy Windows Day!

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:02:49 GMT

- In keeping with tradition, another really - bad job of singing. -

- - -

Microsoft Company Store has Essential WPF in stock!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:06:03 GMT

- Pretty cool, the Microsoft Company Store has started stocking 3rd party books, which - fortunately includes my book. Wahoo! -

- So, if you are a Microsoft employee, swing on by the co-store and pickup a copy today - (or two)! -

Chapter 1 of Essential WPF code posted

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:19:50 GMT

- I've posted the Chapter 1 code - samples. I'll also get this posted up to the "official" site soon.

Want to change the world?

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:43:08 GMT

- Doug has opened - the flood gates for our team... As Don - said, we have a small team with 1 month milestones, no traditional roles (everyone - codes, writes specs, tests, talks with customers - everything)... We have to be a - little vague on what we are working on, but I can say that I'm having a lot of fun... -

Just to sure you noticed...

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:13:09 GMT

- In case you missed the significance of the last - snippet of code... -

- VB supports "relaxed delegates" - so you can drop the "sender As Object, e As EventArgs" - from simple delegates
- VB's Handles syntax makes wiring events much simpler (they don't get mixed up in your - markup) 'OK, this is an old feature, but I still love it
- XML literal syntax is pretty amazing. I find a few frustrations with it (I which that - nested literals inherited the namespaces), but it lends itself to some very nice code

- I'm spending a lot more time with VB lately, the new VB features are awesome. Of course, - I've started to see some rumblings of future features, and it's only getting better. -

Congrats to VB

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:07:33 GMT

- Looks like Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Basic 9 (and lots of other fun stuff) are - going to RTM - soon. -

- Very cool... I'm starting to see a lot of possibilities with VB given code like this: -

- Imports System.Windows.Markup -

- Class Window1
- Sub OnLoaded() Handles Me.Loaded
- Dim n As Integer() = {1, 2, 3, 4} -

-         Content = _
-             Parse( _
-                 - <StackPanel xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>
-                     - <%= _
-                         - From i _
-                         - In n Select _
-                         - <Button xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation'>
-                             - Button #<%= i %>
-                         - </Button> _
-                     - %>
-                 - </StackPanel>)
-     End Sub -

-     Function Parse(ByVal x As XElement) As Object
-         Return XamlReader.Load(x.CreateReader())
-     End Function
- End Class
-

Finally, it starts to tip

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:26:45 GMT

- I've been frustrated over the lack of convergence of prerecorded high definition video - in a portable and broadly distributable format - otherwise known as HD DVD - vs. BluRay. -

- Looks like there has been a big shift in the market, Kmart - is no longer carrying BluRay. -

- [fixed type, it was Kmart mentioned in the article] -

[c2k8]:Hackathon Summary Part 10

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:35:59 GMT

+ + + + + + +

+c2k8 General Hackathon (Part 10) - June 7-15, 2008, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada +

+I would like to diverge a little from past articles and give a little background on how these stories evolve and eventually get published; a little behind the scenes perspective, if you will. The output of these stories has slowed since the c2k8 hackathon. At the rate I'm going, c2k9 will be just around the corner after I'm done. +

+ + + + +

+ +

Read on to get the scoop and more from the c2k8 developers:

+ +Read more... + +

New Ports of the Week #36 (September 7)

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:08:41 GMT

There are 20 new ports for the week of September 1 to September 7:

+ +

+ + + +

devel: +p5-POE-Component-Pluggable +
graphics: +liblqr +
graphics/gimp: +liquid-rescale +
net: +ruby-snmp +
mail: +pyzor +
www: +cherokee +
x11/gnustep: +gworkspace +
devel: +p5-Directory-Scratch +
devel: +p5-Test-HTML-Tidy +
devel: +p5-Devel-Cover +
devel: +p5-Test-Strict +
devel: +p5-Catalyst-Plugin-C3 +
www: +p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Cache +
www: +p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Cache-Store-FastMmap +
www: +p5-Catalyst-Plugin-ConfigLoader-Environment +
www: +p5-Catalyst-Plugin-LogWarnings +
www: +p5-Catalyst-Component-ACCEPT_CONTEXT +
www: +p5-HTML-SBC +
www: +p5-XML-Atom-SimpleFeed +
textproc: +p5-Template-Plugin-Markdown +

+ +

Some ports had +updates +that users should be aware of.

+ +Read more... + +

How OpenBSD is made

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:38:34 GMT

+Mitja Muenič submitted a nice story about the OpenBSD release cycle, here it is... + +

+ +
With every new release more and more new users are attracted to Puffy and invariably there are questions regarding the OpenBSD release cycle and process. Although this is already well documented in the FAQ, let's take a look at what it takes to bring a new release to life.
+ + +

+ +

Please read on for the rest of Mitja's story:

+Read more... + +

European pre-orders for 4.4 are open!

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:52:08 GMT

A recent commit by Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) reveals that the European store is now open for OpenBSD 4.4 pre-orders.

+ +

In order to make the project able to hold conferences such as the annual Hackathons and other events please help support it.

+ +If you haven't already, or you've been waiting to place your EU order, now is the time! + +

[c2k8]:Hackathon Summary Part 10

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:35:59 GMT

- - - - - - -

-c2k8 General Hackathon (Part 10) - June 7-15, 2008, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada -

-I would like to diverge a little from past articles and give a little background on how these stories evolve and eventually get published; a little behind the scenes perspective, if you will. The output of these stories has slowed since the c2k8 hackathon. At the rate I'm going, c2k9 will be just around the corner after I'm done. -

- - - - -

- -

Read on to get the scoop and more from the c2k8 developers:

- -Read more... - -

New Ports of the Week #36 (September 7)

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:08:41 GMT

There are 20 new ports for the week of September 1 to September 7:

- -

- - - -

devel: -p5-POE-Component-Pluggable -
graphics: -liblqr -
graphics/gimp: -liquid-rescale -
net: -ruby-snmp -
mail: -pyzor -
www: -cherokee -
x11/gnustep: -gworkspace -
devel: -p5-Directory-Scratch -
devel: -p5-Test-HTML-Tidy -
devel: -p5-Devel-Cover -
devel: -p5-Test-Strict -
devel: -p5-Catalyst-Plugin-C3 -
www: -p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Cache -
www: -p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Cache-Store-FastMmap -
www: -p5-Catalyst-Plugin-ConfigLoader-Environment -
www: -p5-Catalyst-Plugin-LogWarnings -
www: -p5-Catalyst-Component-ACCEPT_CONTEXT -
www: -p5-HTML-SBC -
www: -p5-XML-Atom-SimpleFeed -
textproc: -p5-Template-Plugin-Markdown -

- -

Some ports had -updates -that users should be aware of.

- -Read more... - -

How OpenBSD is made

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:38:34 GMT

-Mitja Muenič submitted a nice story about the OpenBSD release cycle, here it is... - -

- -
With every new release more and more new users are attracted to Puffy and invariably there are questions regarding the OpenBSD release cycle and process. Although this is already well documented in the FAQ, let's take a look at what it takes to bring a new release to life.
- - -

- -

Please read on for the rest of Mitja's story:

-Read more... - -

European pre-orders for 4.4 are open!

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:52:08 GMT

A recent commit by Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) reveals that the European store is now open for OpenBSD 4.4 pre-orders.

- -

In order to make the project able to hold conferences such as the annual Hackathons and other events please help support it.

- -If you haven't already, or you've been waiting to place your EU order, now is the time! - -