The Pimp

Usefull read, better twice than never

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:00:00 +0200

From time to time, for some random reasons or none at all, you end in the radar of what is commonly called “poisonous people”. It is this time of the year again. As I can still sleep well, it is getting to a point where I may loose my coolness. I’m trying hard to do not get there.

Possible solutions or good advices are listed in these two chapters/sections, time to read them again:

You are what you write

The ‘Noisy Minority’ Effect

Getting some fresh air, continue the good work as well as enjoying the fantastic teams we settled in the last few months will help me to quickly forget (and ignore) the noises.

Interbase, fbsql, sybase, smnp, do you need it?

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:17:00 +0200

While working on the windows ports and updates of the libraries required by php (more on that later), I met a couple of extensions without maintainers, without commits or simply inactive.

As an attempt to either moved them out of core or to give them the love they need, I made a post on internals.

There is one extension that we are going to remove without affecting any code, mhash. Thanks to ext/hash and Scott (he ported the missing algorithms and is adding the mhash API to keep the compatibility). That will drop one PHP dependency (libmhash).

Other “affected” extensions are not so lucky:

ncurses
fpdf
snmp
interbase (aka firebird)
frontbase
sybase
sybase_ct

In this list one is definitively dead, sybase. There is a little hope for some of them. ncurses and fpdf will be maintained and released in PECL (Thanks Hartmut).

interbase / firebird may remain as we found someone able to test the extensions whenever needed and to valid any windows builds (Thanks Lester). That will help to keep firebird/interbase support in php but not to continue its development (unicode support, firebird 2.1 new features, etc.). See below if you are interested to work on it or if your company is interested.

Just lilke firebird, we found a Sybase_ct lover able to provide not only help by testing but also a server to run the test suites using a decent sybase server (Thanks Timm at 1und1). The details on how it will work are still being discussed but there is a good chance that sybase_ct will be kept in core.

SNMP will remain in 5.3 but its days are counted as there is no developers. I can help someone else to maintain but I can definitively not take the hand on it. It is not a widely used extension but it works well and actually helpful and handy. I’m sure someone out there must be interested enough to stand up and help us to keep this extension in core (see below)

Frontbase has less chance, I’ve mailed Frontbase to inform them about the situation. I have no idea about their interest in PHP (more about webobjects .

Interested in any of these extensions and willing to help? Know someone in the companies behind sybase or frontbase and could help to get them interested in PHP? Drop me a mail (see the contact form) or introduce yourself on the internals mailing lists

PHP Test Fest Munich

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 +0200

Yet another PHP TestFest call, this time for the Munich area (and even for all Southern Germany).

Johannes and I are trying to organize one or more TestFest days. No PHP internal knowledge is required (like C knowledges), all you need is willing to help to improve PHP and a good mood

So if you’re interested in meeting core devs and participating in the TestFest and possibly win a few nice prizes please take a look at the TestFest page to get more information and drop a mail to me (pierre at php dot net or use the contact form here) or Johannes (johannes on php.net) so we can plan this month.

Please note that we can also organize a TestFest day for an enterprise. It could be a good opportunity for a company to give something back to PHP, get contacts in the core teams as well as teaching their developers how to test PHP codes using phpt.

See the PHP QA page for more info about the Test Fest.

Happy testing!

Google summer of code, last day to apply!

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:26:49 +0200

You may have been in holidays in the past two weeks and have missed that PHP is again part of the Google Summer of Code . Check out our wiki, the PHP ideas page contains some good ideas. If you are a student, we’d welcome your application!

(You can join us on #php.pecl on EFNet, on our Internals mailing lists or in Freenode’s #gsoc for more general question about the eligibility, application, etc.)

A new male in da house

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:35:46 +0100

bogus!

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:12:00 +0100

If you ever reported a bug in bugs.php.net, you know what bogus is

But now we found the evil Mr. Bogus (Jani?!?)!

Check it out!

Continue reading "bogus!"

Amazon patent on custom 404 handler

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:47:00 +0100

If any of you has any doubts about the sanity of the US patents office and more generally the US systems, I hope these doubts are now gone.

Error processing methods for providing responsive content to a user when a page load error occurs

There is days where I love to live in Europe. Even if such things affect many of my projects team mates…

via lemondeinformatique.fr

Say NO to CLA in PHP, say NO to PDO2

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:46:00 +0100

SAY NO TO CLA in php.net! say NO to PDO2

I have nothing else to say that the decisions, done unilaterally, to use a CLA for what many consider a core part of PHP5+ is the worst thing they ever did.

Saying that

having such a mechanism and process will allow the highest level of expertise to be available both to planning and developing the next generation of PDO.

is an insult to the history of PHP and its development. (see the full post here)

The recent events in the LAMP world only confirms my thoughts about why we must fight to keep PHP as independent as possible from any commercial entities (Zend included). It is the only guaranty for the long term success of PHP in the open source (and free) community.

SAY NO TO CLA in php.net! say NO to PDO2

ps: Yes, I’m über pissed off.

Debugging symfony (or any php script) with vim and Xdebug

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0100

Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source . The only problem is its lack of dedicated client (there is some work being done for a client but it targets only windows for now), however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.

The vim plugin I will use here has been originally written by Seung Woo Shin and modified/improved by Sam Ghods. I find Sam’s version less noisy and seems to work better. As far as I rembember it is also included in Andrei’s vim script (I don’t have it at hand, but check the Andrei’s talk about php and vim, the url should be in there)

Xdebug setup

The first step is to install Xdebug, this procedure is well described in the Xdebug documentation. Check it out here. Don’t forget to enable the extension in your php.ini (the one used by your webserver, fcgi or cli) using

[Bash] zend_extension=/path/to/lib/php/extensions/xdebug.so

or if you use a debug build of php:

[Bash] zend_extension_debug=/path/to/lib/php/extensions/xdebug.so

Vim Setup

To run this plugin you will need the python interpreter in Vim, you can verify whether vim has it enabled or not using the following command in Vim:

[Bash] :version

Be sure to see "+python and +signs" in the list. If you miss them, recompile Vim with "—enable-pythoninterp" or install it using your favourite package manager. For Ubuntu, this command should give you all you need (ubuntu does not install a full vim per default):

[Bash] apt-get install vim-full python2.5

Fetch the plugin archive here

Extract the archive in your plugin directory, usually ~/.vim/ or /usr/share/vim/addon/. It should look like:

[Bash] /home/johndoe/.vim/plugin/ |-- debugger.py `-- debugger.vim

Begin a debug session

To tell Xdebug to initialize a debug session, you can pass an extra GET parameter called XDEBUG_SESSION_START:

[Bash] http://testsym.local/frontend_dev.php/home?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1

The debugger will not start magiclly You have to ask the plugin to wait for Xdebug to send him a signal and the debugging data. Do it by pressing "F5" while being in vim and quickly switch to your browser to reload your page. If vim does nothing but idle after you pressed F5, double check the plugin install, it is not working.

And a little screenshot to show how fantastic are Vim and xDebug:

ps: how to make a pookey happy

A good analysis of the Sun-Mysql deal

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:51:00 +0100

While still being voiceless about this deal, John C. Dvorak wrote a pretty good analysis about this deal as well as some predictions. My two favorite quotes:

The only good news is that since MySQL is an open-source initiative, an immediate development fork will occur with a new open-source relational database appearing within a year or two, based on aspects of the original code.

I’m close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn’t pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job

You can find the full story here ("The Sun-MySQL deal stinks")

My favourite commit msg for January '08

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:08:00 +0100

" fix newly added segfault"

It is by no way badly meant (we all add all possible segfaults in our codes:), only a funny commit message

Wind of change? sure but maybe not where we think

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:16:00 +0100

I was really surprised while reading the last post from Jonathan Schwartz.

wind of change

As I was not really happy with the way MySql dealt with a couple of things in the past two years, this last event does not really bring my trust in how MySql works with the PHP development team or more generally the direction than some companies try to give to PHP and their related products. It may change nothing to how many users see in MySql but I’m pretty sure it will change a lot the MySql strategy. I hope I’m wrong. But no matter what will happen, there is now a bigger room from true open source (by all means) databases like Postgresql.

I don’t have the time right now to comment furhter this news but… good thing, I may be more objective in a couple of days

short version: A coffee producer bought a dolphin

how a low traffic list can be too noisy?

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:45:00 +0100

talking about php.internals :

if you canâ€™t take the heat, leave the kitchen

Please note that I’m not asking anyone to leave (the list) but only to think twice a post before posting (me included ). And no, you don’t have to reply to each "single" posts. Some answers don’t need reply, period (rule #1 to kill a troll).

/me back to code.

King thief

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:11:00 +0100

These guys rock:

I discover them while checking a nice little package on freshmeat. If you are in the St-Louis area and have the chance to see them live, go!

About the little php package, it is a nice antialiased circular arc implementation, if you ever need rounded corners

ps: yes, that’s coming in the extension as well, s…ooon

GD 2.0.36RC1 is out

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:48:00 +0100

The first release candidate for 2.0.36 has been released! Please test it and report any issue