A Day in Paradise

Cross posting this nice article from Mike Kruckenberg into my PHP section, since it has some great things to keep in mind.

I recently went through this on a platform I was maintaining. The thing that bit me in the ass was some very silly ways previous programmers were parsing timestamp fields. Lesson: do it the right way the first time. The MySQL date/time functions are able to do whatever you need done, there is no need to do date parsing in PHP.

The other issues are mostly minor, and if you do need to change them are relatively easy todo with a global search and replace, or configuration option. Those hours of digging through code looking for timestamp parsing code taught me to RESPECT THE TIMESTAMP!

It’s the beginning of (Un)Conference season, PHP Appalachia is in full swing, and PHPWeekender.

PHP Weekender is an event organized by the PHP Dortmund crew. The event will take place on the 7th and 8th of October in the University of Dortmund. All the information is here.

Unfortunately, due to a very demanding month (relatives visiting, followed by trip to the US, Zend Con and then IPC2k6) I won’t be able to make it. When looking at the schedule I saw that Tobias Struckmeier was giving a talk on Shell Scripting with PHP I thought it would be a good idea to see if I could get an article I wrote on the same topic republished online. And PHP Magazine was happy to oblige me. Even though the article itself was written in the months after the initial release of PHP5, the CLI SAPI hasn’t changed that much and (as far as I can remember) the article is still relevant I’ll post a link when it gets released.

PCWorld Author Dan Tynan, starts off his “25 Worst Website” list, with what I imagine he thinks is an insightful comment: “When it comes to the Web, hindsight is more like X-ray vision”. I’m not sure if Dan is ignorant, elitist or just suffering from radiation poisoning from over-exposure to X-ray vision, but this article suffers from a severe disconnect from how the real world views and uses the internet.

The technical world is quickly heading into another bubble, call it web2.0 if you like. Articles like these show that we haven’t learned our lessons. The question that I have to ask, is after the boom bursts, who will be left standing, MySpace or YouTube?

The rest is a rant.
(more…)

I’m currently working on deploying two eZ publish projects, they are simple projects as the specs are clear, the designs are already complete so it’s just implementation/deployment project. As with any new system there is always a lot to learn and with a system as full-featured as eZ publish, a lot to remember.

I’ve found that the best way to “remember” things is to blog about them. So I’ll be blogging about anything that I find which isn’t immediately apparent (if I have to ask or look in the manual). These posts will probably come in short bursts, depending on the stage of the projects, and will probably stop without warning. To spare all the good readers of planet-php I’ll tag these eZ Publish posts with “ezpublish” so if you aren’t interested in reading all the other crap on my blog, just subscribe to that feed here.

Before ending, I’ve got to give some credit to Balazs Halasy and the work that he’s done on his eZpublish Basics book. It’s been very helpful in getting up to speed with the system, and acting as good reference material, the only information hole is the ini file documentation… there is some information on the online manual (which shares a lot of material with the book), and I guess most people just use the backend

One of the Zend conference sessions that I’m pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe’s “Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP”.

WSO2 was recently listed as one of the top 10 Open Source companies to watch. Among their open source products is Tungsten which is an “Application Server for Web Services.” Essentially a stack of open source packages which offers web service middleware which can either run as a stand-alone application or on top of Tomcat or a J2EE server. It would be great to see how PHP can work together with platforms like Tungsten.

I’ll be presenting a session on “Moving to PHP5 with Style.” This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.

Lig on IRC pointed me to the phpcommunity site on ning.

It’s been a while since I’ve bothered to look at ning, but this time around I was VERY impressed. The interface is slick! Kudos to Elizabeth and Ben for setting this up, and of course all the people at ning for the cool platform.

I’m running way behind on a pile of stuff, so have decided to do a quick linkdump of some things that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while now.

• I just listened to the latest pro-php newscast (I didn’t listen to the old ones, but love the new format). Haven’t listened in a while and was happy to hear my blog entry discussed. I am planning on writing a follow-up to that. You guys need better show notes, some links maybe?
• I’m giving a workshop at PHP Conference
• I experimented with Chorizo Scanner at our UG meeting, since then I’ve run some other tests and have some comments (blog entry pending).
• I am LOVING YUI. I suck at CSS and Javascript, so the grids and comprehensive js library gives me more incentive to embrace the web2.0 hype. Carousel rocks! I’m planning on blogging about the “controversy” surrounding Yahoo’s design choice in the Grids CSS.
• My Router sucks, so I apologise for the connecting and disconnecting on irc (need to use a proxy). In the last 2 weeks a 300gb hard drive failed, as did my TV tuner

So there are a couple of things that I need to catch up on. Will keep you updated.

Our favorite BDFL talks about PHP on the most recent issue of FLOSS Weekly. Nice easy-going discussion about the genesis of PHP as well as other related technologies.

A couple of interesting tidbits:

• PHP/FI was a joke on TCP/IP
• Rasmus doesn’t like PHP as an acronym, “PHP is just PHP”. They joke about People Hate Perl and Pretty Handy Preprocessor
• The “First version of PHP was in PERL” is incorrect, the idea was explored but quickly dumped.
• We should see a preview release of PHP6 this year
• Two cool apps rasmus likes are Moodle and Sahana
• Rasmus: If all the applications were written by CS majors it would be a boring web. Education Majors should write Education management systems, PHP lets them do that.
• Leo owes Rasmus a carwash.

During the show Leo decides to upgrade twit.tv to PHP5… drupal based site has no trouble running.

Disclaimer: I didn’t attend Theo’s talk, so the only information that I got was from the blog entries and slides. I realize that this short presentation was humorous, but it still brings up some points that have been nagging at the back of my head for a while now.

The comment in question is part of the Six Reasons PHP Sucks lightning talk:

PEAR
Allows PHP to exposé what are perhaps the
worst most dysfunctional and retarded code…
in an easily downloadable/installable form.

These kind of statements are nothing new. Regardless of the group of developers who work on developing and improving PEAR, the community project continues to be the object of contempt by people who prefer to write the project as something “that sucks” rather than making any contributions to bringing the project up to whatever their standard of “not sucking” is.

The core of the issue, I believe, is that people simply do not understand PEAR. To address this, I’ve written an article which will be released in the September edition of the PHP Architect magazine which aims to give better understanding of the project as well as the community infrastructure.

I would like to dedicate this blog entry to people who think that PEAR does suck, and open up the discussion to what it is exactly that sucks. PEAR has issues, but I truly believe that most of the trash talking that is done is mainly due to the ignorance. So please, if you have issues, whether technical or package specific feel free to vent here.

I’ll start the fun.

Issue: PEAR is PHP4
Resolution: All PEAR packages work in PHP5 without E_STRICT. To maintain backwards compatibility there is nothing that stable packages can do about this. However all packages moving forward will be required to run under E_STRICT PHP5.

Issue: PHP Releases were delayed or screwed up by the bundled PEAR release.
Resolution: This was fixed with PHAR archives.

Issue: The PEAR community is slow and bureaucratic
Resolution: Create your own PEAR repository

Issue: PEAR (more specifically the Date class) hinders PHP’s ability to use the class names it wants in future versions
Resolution: This is a problem. However, the popularity of the PEAR::Date class is more of a symtopm of the lack of PHP namespaces. PEAR is working to resolve this, but a simple change of the Date class name won’t help anything.

Packt has $10,000 up for a “Best Open Source CMS” contest. The details are a bit vague on what the prizes will be awarded on, but I’m going to put my picks up here in no specific order.

eZpublish: Best Commercial/Enterprise support
Drupal: Best Community support, also best community CMS.
Joomla: Not one of my favorites but has a ton of modules, and good community developer support.

There are a ton of CMSs out there, but in the PHP world these three are the only ones that I’ve evaluated that stand up to my interpretation of a useful CMS. I’m also talking purely about “consumer” content management here, not development frameworks or other complex systems.

Note: I didn’t want to say this, but I think it’ll go to drupal. The CMS isn’t talked about a whole lot, but it is used by a Lot of great sites, such as the new twit.tv site. I’ve also talked to a couple big companies who are looking through PHP’s CMS offerings, and I’ve been surprised how many times drupal has come up. Good stuff there.

Are you finding yourself sleeping too much at night? Are you making all of your deadlines and have time to spare? Are you spending a lot of time with your girlfriend but don’t have the cash to buy her that awesome Swarovski accessory. Do you do a lot of window shopping at thinkgeek? Are you wondering how you’re going to afford the next generation iPod? Did you participate in the recent “lets-make-slashdot-look-like-digg” contest, and are mourning the hours of CSS code that you wasted twiddling pixels and writing CSS only to be superceeded by the ugly ass css that is slashdot now? Do you spend hours tweaking the CSS on your beautiful blog, and then ruin your work of art by dropping in adsense ads to make some cash? Are you working in a boring day job and were just diagnosed with a terminal brain cloud?

If you answered yes to any of these questions and can handle some good old fashion no-nonsense CSS work (purely design implementation) email me at aaron-at-wormus.com.

A couple other important requirements:

• basic PHP knowledge required
• basic Smarty Templating knowledge required
• able to use subversion (it ain’t rocket science)
• strong CSS knowledge
• knowledge of YUI library a plus
• and dependable

Finally, we’re a small team and not in the position to pay “industry standard” prices, but the compensation is negotiable.

I put together a couple scripts to test out chorizo scanner during our PHP UG meeting tonight.

Now I’m not saying that I always write 100% secure scripts, but intentionally writing vulnerable scripts which demonstrate vulnerabilties which aren’t entirely stupidly obvious is REALLY difficult.

Anyway, we’re having a security talk by Tom Klingenberg followed by some examples by me. Hopefully I’ll be able to hack together some move vulnerable scripts during his talk

My recording of music with which the recent eZconference opened, was requested by several people. I just found my USB cable and was able to get download the files and process them.

Image by Sebastian Bergmann

This was recorded with my iRiver H340 into raw WAV files thanks to the rockbox firmware. The microphone was the standard (noisy) compressor mic that comes with the iRiver. I amplified the volume using Audacity, but other than that no other effects or cleaning up work has been done. If anyone wants the 45mb wav file let me know.

I also don’t know the artists name, so if one of the organizers would comment here, then I’ll add it to the id3 tags of the mp3 file.

Enjoy.

Adam Curry and his team at Podshow.com have been working around the clock to launch the new and improved version of the podshow system.

Slated for a July 4th “Liberate your Entertainment” release, the site has been replaced with several humorous “Please be Patient” flash videos.

I’m currently working on relaunching a major site, which has been in an “almost-ready” state for the last 3 months, so I totally understand the painful process of relaunching a site, and making sure all your bases are covered before you flip the switch. However, two days of downtime is a sign that you are nowhere near ready to launch and a lot of hacking is being done in the background which may get the site up, but will not benefit the product in the long run.

I was part of the beta testing team and ran some audits of the code (much of which is available as an opensource project on sourceforge), so I have no doubt that when podshow plus has made it through these growth pains it will rock big time.

Good luck with getting it up guys!

In other “is it up yet” news, I noticed that Ookles.com was up at Ookles.net, and is looking pretty slick, good luck with that launch as well!

I’m taking off on 7am flight to norway in 3 hours. Looking forward to seeing all the eZ folks at the conf as well as all the geeks coming up for PHPVikinger!

See you there!