Three days ago I received my copy of Inc magazine. I was scanning through it and low and behold there is a 1/4 page blurb about Pancake App! Phil is a leader within the CodeIgniter community and a member of the Reactor Team so I was very excited to see this. After doing some research I found that we have never done a showcase on Pancake App so this entry is to make that right. Congratulations to Phil, Lee, Bruno and Adam! You guys deserve the recognition that Inc. Magazine is bringing you. Tell us a little about Phil and Lee. Lee Tengum is a PHP developer with a keen eye for design. I am a…
PHP
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Most Topular Stories
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Pancake App
CI News25 Jan 2012 | 10:56 am -
Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 12) - Fabien Potencier
Planet PHP25 Jan 2012 | 12:39 amThis article is part of a series of articles that explains how to create a framework with the Symfony2 Components: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. In the last installment of this series, we have emptied the Simplex\\Framework class by extending the HttpKernel class from Symfony. Seeing this empty class, you might be tempted to move some code from the front controller to it: <?php // example.com/src/Simplex/Framework.php namespace Simplex; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel; use Symfony\Component\Routing; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel; use… -
PHPUnit aborted fix
@TheKeyboard16 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pmA while back I ran into a problem on a server where PHPUnit kept reporting “aborted” no matter what tests were run. That was a pretty annoying bug. I never did find out what the problem was as I moved onto other problems and chalked that error up to some undiagnosed weirdness on that particular server. From time to time I would get asked on Twitter if I had ever solved the problem. My answer was always “no, and if you do solve it please let met know how you fixed it.” Today, my friends, was the day. Kudos to Damian Katz for coming up with a solution. Without digging… -
Year of the Meetup
WordPress News27 Jan 2012 | 2:17 pmWe hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action. meet·up \mēt-əp\ noun A meeting, especially a regular meeting of people who share a particular interest and have connected with each other through a social-networking Web site: a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users.1 So what is a WordPress Meetup? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be… -
Joomla! 2.5 Released with Extra Features and Easy Updates
Joomla Announcements24 Jan 2012 | 8:21 amJoomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announces the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5. Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases. “Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than…
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CI News
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Pancake App
25 Jan 2012 | 10:56 amThree days ago I received my copy of Inc magazine. I was scanning through it and low and behold there is a 1/4 page blurb about Pancake App! Phil is a leader within the CodeIgniter community and a member of the Reactor Team so I was very excited to see this. After doing some research I found that we have never done a showcase on Pancake App so this entry is to make that right. Congratulations to Phil, Lee, Bruno and Adam! You guys deserve the recognition that Inc. Magazine is bringing you. Tell us a little about Phil and Lee. Lee Tengum is a PHP developer with a keen eye for design. I am a… -
ZoomShift
20 Jan 2012 | 2:47 pmWhat can you tell us about the team that built ZoomShift? Zoomshift is a rather young 4-person team composed of 2 developers, a designer, and a sales and content person. Our team is very tight knit and incredibly passionate about entrepreneurship and technology. We are strong believers in lean methodology and are constantly searching for new technologies to set our product apart. We all agree that we can’t see ourselves doing anything else. We love what we do and have a strong passion for entrepreneurship. What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site… -
CPA Site Solutions touts CI
20 Dec 2011 | 7:00 amCPA Site Solutions just put out this Press Release that touts CodeIgniter. They used it to create their new email marketing system. And I quote: “We evaluated several frameworks for PHP web application development. Many of them could have worked, but they really tried to lock you in to their way of doing things,” explains Bob Rayl, Chief Technology Officer at CPA Site Solutions. “They did not offer the flexibility we need to accomplish some of the heavily proprietary functionality we bundle into our systems.” As part of the original article they also state that CI helped cut… -
PHP Framework Usage Survey
9 Dec 2011 | 3:02 pmA PHP framework usage survey has been created with our community in mind. Though not strictly limited to CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine developers, the questions are particularly relevant to you. The anonymous survey is very brief—just seven questions—and should take no more than five minutes or so to complete. The survey is open immediately and will remain open over the weekend. We quickly discovered after opening the survey that Survey Monkey has a setting to enable “Other” as an option in addition to providing the “Other” box. This… -
Sky Clerk
5 Dec 2011 | 8:37 amWhat can you tell us about the team that built skyclerk.com? Skyclerk is a product of Cloudmanic Labs, once a consulting firm, now more of a product company. Currently, we are a 5-person team: 2 designers, 2 programmers, and a content person. Our team is simply amazing. We have a love of strong design, from the UI to the code. We spend much time looking at different products on the market and have a great deal of internal debate on how we could make things better. While the resumes of the team are impressive, our real secret sauce is our deeply shared passion to always make super high quality…
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WordPress News
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Year of the Meetup
27 Jan 2012 | 2:17 pmWe hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action. meet·up \mēt-əp\ noun A meeting, especially a regular meeting of people who share a particular interest and have connected with each other through a social-networking Web site: a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users.1 So what is a WordPress Meetup? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be… -
Internet Blackout Day on January 18
17 Jan 2012 | 5:18 pmWordPress.org is officially joining the protest against Senate Bill 968: the Protect IP Act that is coming before the U.S. Senate next week. As I wrote in my post a week ago, if this bill is passed it will jeopardize internet freedom and shift the power of the independent web into the hands of corporations. We must stop it. On January 18, 2012 many sites around the web — from small personal blogs to internet institutions like Mozilla, Wikipedia, reddit, and I Can Has Cheezburger? – will be going dark in protest and to drive their visitors to sites like americancensorship.org to… -
Help Stop SOPA/PIPA
10 Jan 2012 | 1:18 pmYou are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it. Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know… -
WordPress 3.3.1 Security and Maintenance Release
3 Jan 2012 | 3:24 pmWordPress 3.3.1 is now available. This maintenance release fixes 15 issues with WordPress 3.3, as well as a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected version 3.3. Thanks to Joshua H., Hoang T., Stefan Zimmerman, Chris K., and the Go Daddy security team for responsibly disclosing the bug to our security team. Download 3.3.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates in your site admin. -
WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”
12 Dec 2011 | 4:58 pmThe latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports. Check out this short video that summarizes the things we think you’ll find are the cat’s pajamas: For Users Experienced users will…
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Joomla Announcements
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Joomla! 2.5 Released with Extra Features and Easy Updates
24 Jan 2012 | 8:21 amJoomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announces the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5. Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases. “Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than… -
Joomla 2.5.0 Released
24 Jan 2012 | 12:00 amThe Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5.0. This is a security release. Version 2.5.0 is is the next update from version 1.7. (Note that we have skipped from version 1.7.x to 2.5.x.) Version 2.5.0 is the second release made within the new six-month release cycle that started with the delivery of Joomla 1.6 in January 2011. Version 2.5 is also a long-term-support (LTS) release that will be supported for at least 18 months. The Production Leadership Team's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. Learn more about… -
Joomla 1.7.4 Released
23 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pmThe Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.7.4. This is a security release. Note that most users should update their sites to version 2.5.0 instead, which is now released. Version 1.7.4 is only intended for those users who for some reason are unable to update to version 2.5.0. Version 1.7 will reach end of life on 24 February 2012. The Production Leadership Team's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. Learn more about Joomla! developement at the Developer Site. If you are upgrading your existing 1.7 site, you… -
Joomla 2.5.0 RC1 Released
18 Jan 2012 | 1:14 pmThe Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of Joomla 2.5 RC 1 for download. Version 2.5 is the second release made within the new six-month release cycle that started with the delivery of Joomla 1.6 in January 2011. What is this release for? There are several goals for this release: To allow advance testing of sites and custom extensions so that site administrators and developers can report any problems before the final release. To raise awareness that the end of the current development cycle is fast approaching. To allow testing of the upgrade from version 1.7 to 2.5.0. Click… -
Joomla! Joins Protests Against SOPA
18 Jan 2012 | 8:19 amThe Joomla! project joins the ranks of US and international internet and technology organizations like Free Software Foundation (FSF), Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Mozilla, Google, Wikipedia, Open Source Initiative, WordPress, and Human Rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, in expressing our concern with these US Congress and Senate bills: Information on H.R.3261 - Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show A US Congressional…
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drupal.org
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DrupalCon Denver Final Sessions Are Posted
26 Jan 2012 | 11:03 amThe final session selections for DrupalCon Denver were announced this week. DrupalCon will take place March 19-23, 2012. Get your tickets soon so that you don't miss out on over 100 sessions across 8 tracks! This year we have added tracks specifically for Non-profit, Government & Education, in addition to Community, Commerce, Mobile, Design & User Experience, Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Site Building, and Core Conversations. Conference Dates: March 19 - Pre-conference trainings -- over 16 from beginners to advanced + API Hack-a-thon March 20 - 22 - Three… -
Getting Involved in the Drupal Community: Survey Results
23 Jan 2012 | 10:52 amIntroduction Drupal.org has over 725,000 registered members in 228 countries. However, only a very small percentage of this members contribute back to the project. Why is this? How can we attract more contributors? What can we do to make it easier for people to contribute? Which areas of the Drupal project would people want to contribute? To get answers to these questions, two surveys were conducted in 2011 by the community to understand the experience of contributing or considering to contribute to the Drupal project. This is a combined report of 358 respondents’ responses to the surveys. -
Candidates Needed: Drupal Association 2012 elections are on!
18 Jan 2012 | 8:36 pmCome one, come all! As of January 18, 2012 nominations are open for the 2012 elections of two "at large" directors of the Drupal Association. The at large directors are intended to represent the Drupal community. Specifics of the election were decided through a community-based process with participation by dozens of Drupal community members. More details are in the proposal that was approved by the Drupal Association board. Who can vote? Voting is open to all individuals who have a drupal.org account by the time the elections begin and who have logged in at least once in the past year. These… -
Docs Team 4th Quarter 2011 Update
18 Jan 2012 | 11:40 amHello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team. As you probably heard, Ariane's role in the Documentation Team has changed, and she is no longer my co-leader (sob!), so I'm looking for a new deputy leader or co-leader (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details). Here's what Ariane and I oversaw in the Documentation Team at the end of 2011, with a look forward to 2012. September - December Events The Documentation Team is holding weekly ”Documentation Office… -
Documentation Team Leadership Change
16 Jan 2012 | 1:02 pmHi everybody - Hope you all had a great holiday, and are easing into 2012 nicely! I'll cut right to the chase with this announcement: effective pretty well immediately (as this has been in the works for a little while now), I'm stepping down as Documentation Co-lead. Awwww, sad, I know! It's been quite the experience, and I feel like along with Jennifer and the other docs enthusiasts, we've gotten a lot done over the course of the last year and a bit of official leadership term. It's been great helping set the direction of the documentation plans, and working with everyone who's been…
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Planet PHP
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Static Analysis with HipHop for PHP - Sebastian Bergmann
27 Jan 2012 | 1:00 pmIn July 2010 I already blogged about the fact that HipHop for PHP, the source code transformer that turns PHP code into C++ code that can then be compiled with g++, can also be used for static code analysis to find problems in PHP source code. Today I started to work on a convenience wrapper for HipHop's static analyzer: ➜ ~ hphpa /usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP hphpa 1.0.0 by Sebastian Bergmann. /usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP/CodeCoverage/Filter.php 206 TooManyArgument: $this->addFileToWhitelist($file, FALSE) Of course the tool can also generate an XML logfile in a format that is… -
Mockery 0.7.2 Released (And On Packagist.org!) - Pádraic Brady
25 Jan 2012 | 5:07 amMockery is a simple yet flexible PHP mock object framework for use in unit testing with PHPUnit, PHPSpec or any other testing framework. Its core goal is to offer a framework for creating test doubles like mock objects through the use of a simple and succint API capable of clearly defining all possible object operations and interactions using a human readable Domain Specific Language (DSL). Designed as a drop in alternative to PHPUnit’s phpunit-mock-objects library, Mockery is easy to integrate with PHPUnit and can happily operate alongside phpunit-mock-objects. Today, I am pleased to… -
Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 12) - Fabien Potencier
25 Jan 2012 | 12:39 amThis article is part of a series of articles that explains how to create a framework with the Symfony2 Components: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. In the last installment of this series, we have emptied the Simplex\\Framework class by extending the HttpKernel class from Symfony. Seeing this empty class, you might be tempted to move some code from the front controller to it: <?php // example.com/src/Simplex/Framework.php namespace Simplex; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel; use Symfony\Component\Routing; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel; use… -
PECL/mysqlnd_qc: query cache statistics log - Ulf Wendel
24 Jan 2012 | 11:20 amIs it worth the efforts to cache the results of a MySQL query at the client? In most cases the answer is: try it, measure it! Install the development version of the mysqlnd query cache plugin, which can be used with PDO_MySQL, mysqli and mysql. Set three PHP directives and find the answer in a log file. While updating the query cache plugin to support PHP 5.4, the latest versions of APC and Memcached for cache storage, I virtually stumbled upon an undocumented feature I had long forgotten. The plugin can periodically dump statistics into a log file. The plugin collects tons of statistics and… -
Top Ten Reasons To Go To DrupalCon Denver - Larry Garfield
24 Jan 2012 | 10:38 amYou mean you aren't already attending what will likely be the largest web developer conference in the Western US this year? What are you waiting for? Not sure if it will be worth it? It will be. Oh, it will be... If you still need some convincing, or if your boss still needs some convincing, here's the top ten reasons you want to be at DrupalCon Denver: read more
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PHP.net news & announcements
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PHP 5.4.0 RC6 released
24 Jan 2012 | 6:05 amThe PHP development team announces the 6th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the 6th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. The 6th release candidate focused on improving traits. Please test them carefully and help us to identify bugs… -
ConFoo 2012
19 Jan 2012 | 11:20 pmConFoo 2012 in Montreal, Canada on Feb 29 - Mar 02 ConFoo is the unique web conference in Canada gathering different tech communities in one place. find working solutions for your day to day challenges; discover new tools that increase your productivity; network with people from some of the world’s biggest companies; 160 presentations focusing on core competencies improvement; Don't miss this great opportunity and register today! Also check out our two training days around PHP, HTML5, Symfony2 and security topics right before the conference. -
PHP 5.3.9 Released!
10 Jan 2012 | 3:29 pmThe PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.9: Added max_input_vars directive to prevent attacks based on hash collisions. (CVE-2011-4885) Fixed bug #60150 (Integer overflow during the parsing of invalid exif header). (CVE-2011-4566) Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.9 include: Fixed bug #55475 (is_a() triggers autoloader, new optional 3rd argument to is_a and is_subclass_of). Fixed… -
PHP 5.4.0 RC5 released
7 Jan 2012 | 8:44 amThe PHP development team announces the 5th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the 5th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. We got a lot of feedback that helped us to improve the upcoming PHP version. Please continue to help us to… -
PHPBenelux 2012
7 Jan 2012 | 7:47 amThe PHPBenelux Conference is ready for its third edition and takes place January 27th & 28th in Antwerp (Belgium). We're very proud to have a great lineup this year and some awesome social events. All information about the conference can be found on our conference website http://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2012. There are some tickets still available, get them at http://shop.phpbenelux.eu.
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Latest PHP Classes blog posts
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PHP Zeitgeist 2011
18 Jan 2012 | 11:54 amPHP Zeitgeist 2011 By Manuel Lemos The PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that allows us to understand what were some of the main new trends and concerns of the PHP developers in the past year. Read this article to learn about what new things PHP developers have been searching more in 2011 and what are their needs that probably still need to be fulfilled. -
PHP Vulnerability May Halt Millions of Servers
12 Jan 2012 | 1:56 pmPHP Vulnerability May Halt Millions of Servers By Manuel Lemos A security vulnerability found in PHP and many other programming languages may allow attackers to halt servers with vulnerable PHP installations. Read this article to learn more about this vulnerability and what you can do to avoid that your servers running PHP may be brought down due to this problem. -
The Debate of Making PHP Faster using a JIT Compiler - Lately in PHP podcast episode 19
5 Jan 2012 | 11:10 amThe Debate of Making PHP Faster using a JIT Compiler - Lately in PHP podcast episode 19 By Manuel Lemos The official PHP implementation is evolving too slowly, while alternative implementations like Phalanger and Facebook HipHop can run PHP faster thanks to the use of JIT compiler engines. JIT compilation was the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene. They also made a… -
Encouraging the Authors to Do Better
22 Dec 2011 | 11:37 amEncouraging the Authors to Do Better By Manuel Lemos The site just launched a new feature that hopefully will encourage the authors that contribute to the site to do better and eventually get more feedback and recognition from the users that take advantage of their work. It is basically a personalized report message that is sent by e-mail regularly with information about how each author is doing, as well insights that give them ideas on how they can do better. Read this article to learn more about this initiative as well others there were implemented this year to make this a better site for… -
Can .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation?
15 Dec 2011 | 12:50 pmCan .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation? By Manuel Lemos Phalanger is compiler that generates .NET assemblies from PHP code, so it runs in a .NET virtual machine. The latest benchmarks seem to indicate that PHP applications compiled by Phalanger execute noticeably faster than when they are executed by the official PHP implementation based on Zend engine, even when a caching extension is used. Read this article to learn how Phalanger works and what lessons can be learned to make the official PHP implementation run at least as fast, eventually in PHP 6 based on Zend…
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Chris Shiflett
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2011 Highlights
23 Jan 2012 | 1:59 pmA new year begins, so for the ninth year in a row, I'm taking a moment to record, reflect, assess, and aim. Last year, I described 2010 as a landmark year, and it was. Analog, Mild Bunch, Brooklyn Beta, Mapalong, and PHP Advent. Even without factoring in conferences and such, it was a big year. All of 2010's accomplishments seem trivial when compared to 2011, because in May, Tegan was born. She's eight months old as I write this, and being a father still feels new. Life has changed, and I have a renewed excitement for what lies ahead. I love what I do, and I love where I do it, but I can't… -
PHP Advent 2011
29 Dec 2011 | 1:42 pmThe fifth edition of PHP Advent has come to a close. Since 2007, we have published 120 articles, many of which are just as relevant and useful today as when they were first published. This year, Sean and I decided to choose only authors who did not write for PHP Advent last year, and we made an extra effort to seek out authors who had never written for PHP Advent before. We were pretty darn successful; our first-time authors include: Derek Sivers Laura Beth Denker Chris Hartjes Evert Pot Wez Furlong Samer Atiani Ryan Parman Michael Nitschinger Beth Tucker Long Jeremy Kendall David Walsh… -
Stop SOPA and Save the Internet
16 Nov 2011 | 11:16 amI'll level with you. I've not really paid much attention to all the chatter about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act. I'm busy, and I know anything to do with government policy as it relates to the Internet is going to be a big bummer. This is definitely a big bummer, and if you're like me, our inaction sure hasn't helped. I've always felt like there's not much I can do to prevent the US government from doing stupid things from time to time, especially when it comes to the Internet, or even technology in general. Most of my peers feel as helpless as me, which is why we…
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Paul M. Jones
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Econ 101: “Nothing Has Any Value”
25 Jan 2012 | 2:18 pmThe value is not in the object, it is in your mind. Short, sweet, and genius: Via ‘That’s the mistake that Karl Marx made’ | Samizdata.net. -
Obama’s Dumbest Critics
18 Jan 2012 | 7:51 amHow would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following? (1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) … Continue reading → -
Uh Oh: Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India
14 Jan 2012 | 4:39 pmPhysicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease1. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a … Continue reading → -
Government Health Care Kills 23-Year-Old Hottie
14 Jan 2012 | 1:23 pmA 23-year-old died of cervical cancer because doctors said she was too young for a smear test, her devastated family have claimed. Mercedes Curnow, from Cornwall, first went to her GP at 20 years old but her mother says her … Continue reading → -
How To Carry a Concealed Gun in a Dress
13 Jan 2012 | 9:51 pmThis is *so* hot: How To Carry a Concealed Gun in a Dress | The Firearm Blog.
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stu.mp
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Year in Review
1 Jan 2012 | 11:23 am2011 was a tumultuous year for just about everyone in the world, particularly Osama bin Laden. I’m no different than the average person on the planet and can be included in the masses thankful that an extremely stressful year has come to a close. 2012 is already shaping up to be an exciting time for myself and Diana, but more on that next year. The following is a highlight reel of my 2011. January started out with me working at SimpleGeo in San Francisco, Diana in Denver, and SimpleGeo’s team still split between Boulder and San Francisco. All three of these facts would be upended… -
Looking back while moving forward
8 Nov 2011 | 11:49 amA little over the last two years of my live has been devoted to building, funding, and growing SimpleGeo. The experience was, without a doubt, life changing in many ways. It was a crash course in a bunch of disciplines that I knew little to nothing about. Managing clients, iterating on your product, sales, business development, raising money from investors, etc. were all wide open holes in need to my attention and input. It goes without saying that this was not an easy endeavor. Along with being constantly challenged and learning new things, I was fortunate enough to work with some of the… -
Dear Yahoo!, hire me as your next CEO
22 Jun 2011 | 12:52 amNews is going around that Yahoo! is looking for a new CEO. I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is, I would like to announce that I’m ready, willing, and insane enough to go long and go big with Yahoo! as your new CEO. Yahoo! showed glimmers of hope when it bought Flickr and Delicious. It’s been a bastion of some of the most impressive technology of the last 15 years. I believe it can be great again. Sounds great, how the hell am I going to do it? I’m going to take the $20bn in market cap and build an empire of product and design talent that will be beyond… -
HOWTO: Spend your investors’ money
8 May 2011 | 5:24 pmI’ve invested in two startups and advise, officially and unofficially, a dozen or so other startups. Recently, a company that I’m involved with, attachments.me, raised $500,000 from Foundry Group. Since their raise, the two cofounders, Ben and Jesse, have been on a tear adding features, solidifying the infrastructure, and ramping things up to a public beta. Attachments.me is a unique consumer service in that a single user could have gigabytes of data to crawl across multiple accounts. As a result of this unique challenge, Ben has been spending a great deal of time working out how… -
The Cloud is not a Silver Bullet
25 Apr 2011 | 2:32 pmThere has been much brouhaha over the recent EBS outage. I say EBS to be specific as this, despite the sensationalistic headlines, was not an AWS or EC2 outage. RDS was also affected as it is built on top of the EBS product. As has been reported just about everywhere, the outage affected many large websites that are built on top of AWS. Much of the banter was mainly around how the “AWS outage” had “brought down” these sites, which couldn’t be further from the truth. What brought down these services was poor architectural choices combined with a lack of…
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@TheKeyboard
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PHPUnit aborted fix
16 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pmA while back I ran into a problem on a server where PHPUnit kept reporting “aborted” no matter what tests were run. That was a pretty annoying bug. I never did find out what the problem was as I moved onto other problems and chalked that error up to some undiagnosed weirdness on that particular server. From time to time I would get asked on Twitter if I had ever solved the problem. My answer was always “no, and if you do solve it please let met know how you fixed it.” Today, my friends, was the day. Kudos to Damian Katz for coming up with a solution. Without digging… -
CodeMash 2012 Review
15 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pmLast week I attended CodeMash 2012 as a speaker and gave my talk on building testable PHP applications (don’t forget to buy the book that the talk inspired). Held in Sandusky, Ohio in the cold of January it is an interesting conference. Unlike most conferences that I attend, it is multi-disciplinary. There were talks on .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, and two lonely talks about PHP. For me, this is somewhat uncomfortable. It is only natural that people who use certain tools tend to flock together at a conference. I joked that where were only 3.7 PHP developers (with someone stating that the… -
Better Remote Code Development
4 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pmI am struggling to find a better way to handle a new paradigm in development. At Moontoast all our servers are up on EC2, which includes the two dev servers (one for each project) that I use every day. I’ve been playing around with Sublime Text (because of the awesome vim bindings) and was thinking about why do I always have to be logged into the remote server to do my work. Normally I connect using SSH, then attach to my tmux session and then fire up vim. This is okay but it lacks a certain elegance in it’s approach. As a result I end up using things like Dropbox to synchronize… -
The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications
2 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pmAfter the middling success of my first programming book I had been thinking about writing another book. When the end of October rolled around and National Novel Writing Month was about to happen I decided to take the plunge and write something. It didn’t turn out to be The Great Canadian Novel but I did collect my thoughts on what goes into building PHP applications in such a way that they are easily testable. I called it “The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications”. When I wrote my first book I did everything in Pages but that was before the… -
The Year of the Struggle
29 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pmFor those who know me outside of the context of my ranty tweets and occasionally-lucid blog posts you will know that I am an avid simulation baseball game player. I’m about to start my 15th season in my current league and it has taught me a great many lessons about myself and the importance of having a set of skills that turn independent bits into a cohesive team. (If you care the league uses a game that it creates itself using freely-available data from Retrosheet and if you’ve ever come across Strat-O-Matic-Baseball you might have an idea of how game-play works) I’ve had…
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SugarCRM Developer Blog
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SugarCRM: Making Fields Required But Not Hidden
27 Jan 2012 | 5:35 amWelcome to the first Jon’s Tips and Tricks for SugarCRM. In this post I’m going to cover how make fields required when other fields equal something specific. Now I know what you are going to say, “This is available in studio” and while it is, it will hide the field on the edit view when you don’t have the values selected/set in the specific control fields. This is done though a vardef (variable definition) extension in Sugar and it’s an upgrade safe customization. Here we go: 1. Start by making sure the file path exists:… -
HOWTO: Grab fields from a related record into your DetailView
26 Jan 2012 | 5:36 amRan across a great forums post the other day, that is a common request I’ve seen before. Hi All! I have created some custom fields in the Leads Module. When the Lead is converted, at least, I would like to have that custom Lead information show up on the Opportunity Module with the Lead data. How can I achieve this? For us, the Opportunity is directly related to the Lead. Thanks in advance for your help This is something that is very easy to do with Sugar Logic in Sugar 6.3. In that release, we introduced a related() function, which will look in a related module to grab a field value… -
HOWTO: Add custom Smarty plugins
25 Jan 2012 | 4:43 amWe had a great question come up internally here at Sugar last week: Is it possible to put custom smarty plugins in custom/include/Smarty/plugins/ and have smarty pick them up or do they need to be in include/Smarty/plugins/? The answer here is yes! This was a new feature added in Sugar 6.3 and came from our Professional Services team, where Smarty will look for available plugins first in the custom/include/Smarty/plugins directory if it exists, and then in include/Smarty/plugins/. This allows you to not only add new Smarty plugins, but also customize the behavior of the existing ones that… -
What’s new in 6.4.0 — Database Layer Updates
24 Jan 2012 | 4:49 amSugarCRM 6.4.0 includes a new database layer that’s been drastically overhauled under the hood. This refactor is a big step in cleaning up the Sugar code base and will allow for future DB support to come at a lower development cost. The need to litter code with conditional statements that branch on different DB types is gone. For example, consider the following code snippet based on the old codebase that converts a date input from a form as $field_value into DB format: $dbType = $GLOBALS['db']->dbType; if($dbType == 'mysql') { $dbValue = $timedate->to_db_date($field_value,… -
HOWTO: Disable the Mozilla Firefox ‘telemetry’ feature
23 Jan 2012 | 5:14 amFirefox 7 last year introduced a new feature you could opt-in to called ‘telemetry’, which logs your browser performance on your local machine and sends it back to Mozilla to help them make future versions faster. This is great in the spirit of open source, as you as a Firefox user are contributing to helping them deliver faster and more stable browsing experience. And none of the data is personally identifiable or contains your browsing history, so it’s safe from a privacy standpoint as well. However, for those of you in an enterprise environment, you may not want to have…
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Steve Francia's Epic Blog
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Backups, Replication, and Disaster Recovery
11 Jan 2012 | 8:26 amOne of the most common concerns people have is how to ensure that their application is safe, secure and available in the event of an emergency. Often I have found that people are mistakenly believe that they are protected when in fact they often have ignored potential scenarios. The principles explained apply equally well in RDBMSs, MongoDB and other databases. Potential scenarios to protect against Drive failure Machine failure Switch failure Power circuit failure Data center failure Intrusion Fat fingers Programmer error Raid To prevent drive failure use multiple drives in a single machine… -
Hybrid MongoDB / SQL Applications
6 Jan 2012 | 3:27 pmMongoDB is often used alongside a relational database such as Oracle or MySQL. It is often unclear when one should use one or the other, or if a combination is really ideal. During this online presentation, we will discuss the ideal use cases for each, and how they can be used in conjunction. We’ll make sure to touch on several real world examples. The full recording can be found at 10gen’s site at http://www.10gen.com/events/hybrid-applications Hybrid MongoDB and RDBMS Applications View more presentations from Steve Francia Other Resources:… -
Windows Power User Tools
28 Dec 2011 | 2:54 pmI’m a huge fan of Windows 7. It’s the first time I’ve ever run a Microsoft OS on my primary (home) machine. I’ve compiled a set of programs that I have found to be invaluable in using Windows for serious development and computing. All are free and clean of any ads or spyware. EaseUS® Partition Master 9.1 Home Edition As Partition Magic alternative, EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition is a ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management freeware. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space… -
Building your First app with MongoDB at MongoSV 2011
9 Dec 2011 | 6:18 pm10gen had our flagship conference in Silicon Valley. I gave an introductory presentation at the first session on building an application in MongoDB. This talk will introduce the features of MongoDB by walking through how one can building a simple location-based application using MongoDB. It covers the basics of MongoDB’s document model, query language, map-reduce framework and deployment architecture. Building your first application w/mongoDB MongoSV2011 View more presentations from Steve Francia -
E-commerce in LA
8 Dec 2011 | 5:08 pmThis week I joined a few of my co-workers down in LA. We met with a few companies and ran the MongoDB LA Users Group. Notably I met with Magento about the possibility of Magento 2.0 being built on MongoDB. On my final night in LA I presented on MongoDB, E-commerce and Transactions. I really enjoyed my time in LA and am looking forward to returning. I was impressed by how many companies are using MongoDB in LA and how great the interaction was at the Meetup. MongoDB, E-commerce and Transactions View more presentations from Steve Francia
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code-diesel
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Using the new Page visibility API in your apps
19 Jan 2012 | 1:01 amOne of the features lacking in the current browser api is that of determining whether the web page is currently visible to the user or is hidden (either in another tab or window). The new Page Visibility API allows you to do just that – determine whether your web page is visible to the user, is hidden in a background tab or window, or is prerendering. It allows the developer to use the page visibility state in JavaScript logic to make the user experience more friendly; for example, by stopping video, animation or slideshow playback whenever the user switches to another browser tab or… -
Generating clean URLs with javascript
18 Jan 2012 | 2:43 amIn a recent project I needed to generate clean search urls on a form submit. There are basically two ways to do that. One is to post the search variables to the same page, and generate a clean url using PHP and then redirect it to the new url. The other way is to generate clean urls using JavaScript and immediately direct the page to the new url. This saves some processing on the server and one redirection, and also allows us to generate a url without a page refresh. I decided to go with the JavaScript solution. A rough idea of the first option is given below. -
Rejecting unwanted characters from input
7 Jan 2012 | 3:23 amIt seems that some common elements of programming stump us from time to time. Take the task of filtering a input search string in PHP to remove unwanted characters. Using a RegEx many developers find it easy to search for a substring, but find it difficult to use the same to reject some particular characters from a string. A simple solution is shown below, which rejects all the characters from the input except alphanumeric and a space. $search "the great /%&&world ,fair of 1964" $cleaned preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]/" "" $search) Returns: the… -
Amazon Advertising API BrowseNodes
1 Jan 2012 | 10:25 amAmazon uses a hierarchy of nodes to organize its various items. Each node represents a collection of items, such as Harry Potter books, not the items themselves. Browse node IDs are positive integers that uniquely identify product collections, for example, Literature & Fiction: (17), Medicine: (13996), Mystery & Thrillers: (18), Nonfiction: (53), Outdoors & Nature: (290060). Amazon uses over 120,000 browse node IDs in the US locale alone. The BrowseNodes tool automatically gets all the child BrowseNodes and their names. The program recursively traverses the BrowserNode… -
Create a infinite scroll page using jQuery
14 Dec 2011 | 3:54 amWaypoints is a small jQuery plugin that makes it easy to execute a function whenever you scroll to a particular element – a ‘waypoint’. This can be used to highlight when a element comes into view, load additional html or throw a popup. In this post we will use it to create a infinite scroll page. An infinite scroll page can be useful when you do not want to add pagination, but would rather load the content on the same page when the user requests. Waypoints requires jQuery, so you need to add that to your page before initializing waypoints. <script…
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Gonzalo Ayuso | Web Architect
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Checking the performance of PHP exceptions
16 Jan 2012 | 7:18 amSometimes we use exceptions to manage the flow of our scripts. I imagine that the use of exceptions must have a performance lack. Because of that I will perform a small benchmark to test the performance of one simple script throwing exceptions and without them. Let’s start: First a silly script to find even numbers (please don’t use it it’s only for the benchmanrk ) error_reporting(-1); $time = microtime(TRUE); $mem = memory_get_usage(); $even = $odd = array(); foreach (range(1, 100000) as $i) { try { if ($i % 2 == 0) { throw new Exception("even number"); } else {… -
Working with clouds. Multi-master file-system replication with CouchDB
2 Jan 2012 | 7:46 amWhen we want to work with a cloud/cluster one of the most common problems is the file-system. It’s mandatory to be able to scale horizontally (scale out). We need to share the same file-system between our nodes. We can do it with a file server (samba for example), but this solution inserts a huge bottleneck into our application. There’s different distributed filesystems such as Apache Hadoop (inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System). In this post we’re going to build a really simple distributed storage system based on NoSql. Let’s start. NoSql (aka one of our… -
Coding Katas, TDD and Katayunos
12 Dec 2011 | 7:20 am2011 is about to finish, and I want to speak about my way through the world of TDD. In the beginning of the year appeared a new cool project called 12meses12katas (12 months – 12 katas). The aim of the project was to propose one coding kata per month, and allow to the people to publish their implementation of the kata over github. In the line of this project a crew of crazy coders started another cool project called Katayunos. Katayunos is a small pun with the word Desayuno (Breakfast) and Coding Kata. It’s something similar than a code retreat. The purpose of the katayunos was to… -
Playing with the new PHP5.4 features
28 Nov 2011 | 6:49 amPHP5.4 it’s close and it’s time to start playing with the new cool features. I’ve created a new Virtual Machine to play with the new features available within PHP5.4. I wrote a post with the most exciting features (at least for me) when I saw the feature list in the alpha version. Now the Release Candidate is with us, so it’s the time of start playing with them. I also discover really cool features that I pass over in my first review Let’s start: Class member access on instantiation. Cool! class Human { function __construct($name) { $this->name = $name; }… -
Working with Request objects in PHP (II). Back to the past
7 Nov 2011 | 7:48 amIn one of my last post “Working with request objects in PHP”, I wrote a simple library to handle request objects. According that post let’s do a bit of history of PHP. In the early years of PHP (PHP3 – PHP4) one of the cool features of PHP was the “variable injection” inside our projects with register_globals=on. If you had the following a url: index.php?parameter1=Hi Your script had magically a variable called $parameter1 with the value “Hi”. This feature has horrible security problems, if our user can inject variables in our scripts, especially with a loose…
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WebcodingEasy.com RSS Feed
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Managing X.509 certificates using PHP
22 Jan 2012 | 9:20 amTo generate, sign and verify certificates you need to have OpenSSL module installed and provide file with OpenSSL configuration. Here is an example OpenSSL configuration file: [ req ] default_bits = 1024 default_keyfile = privkey.pem distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name attributes =... -
Generate text using images as letters
16 Jan 2012 | 11:34 amImage Font class can generate text taking images of symbols as font. You can provide path to directory with images, using symbols as file names, or you can provide and array with symbols as keys and paths to images as values It is also possible to set a maximal width restriction and alignment of text.ContentsDownloadExample codesExamples in... -
The most annoying javascript object
7 Jan 2012 | 10:14 amAnnoyer class creates an HTML element which is annoyingly moving across the users screen. Even when user scrolls, object moves to visible area. Object tries to find only top of elements. It is also possible to provide callbacks for different events, for example, to change picture in object, or change object's position on hover, etc. Object's... -
CSS3 Isoworld
12 Dec 2011 | 3:23 pmIsoworld class provides a way to create an illusion of isometric view for a website, by transforming provided HTML elements. It can create ground and infinite amount of isometric cubes. This class is best viewed by Chrome, other browsers might have slower animations and displacement of elements Package contains isoworld.js,... -
Input for selecting images with preview
26 Nov 2011 | 6:25 amImage Selector class creates an image selector input with image preview based on select element. Images can be changed using select element itself or by clicking on image. Additionally this class provides API to select first, last, next or previous images or an image with specific index. It also can regenerate preview images for dynamical input...
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php|architect - The site for PHP professionals
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Tame DVCS with our Git Summit!
5 Jan 2012 | 9:47 amIf you’ve ever wondered whether reading the entire manual entry for git rebase will cause permanent brain damage, you’re not alone—but there is hope. Git is a great version-control tool designed for today’s nimble, distributed teams. For those of us who come from the world of CVS and SVN, however, mastering its features takes… some getting used to. Fear no more, for your friends at php|architect have put together a great half-day event dedicated entirely to Git called the php|architect Live! Git Summit. With talks from developers who have first-hand experience using Git… -
And Now, a Word on SOPA
2 Jan 2012 | 10:38 amBy now, you’ve probably heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (better known in internet circles as SOPA), a law that is currently making its way through the United States legislative process. As a rule, we normally shy away from political speech here at php|architect. On this particular topic, however, we feel that we should take a firm stand against SOPA, and explain our position. Why You Should Listen to Us We make our living by selling intellectual property. Our books, magazines, and training materials are precisely the kind of content that is all too easy to copy and distribute… -
php|tek’s Call for Papers is Closing Soon
30 Dec 2011 | 8:59 amThe 31st is sneaking up on us, and just like the year, the call for papers for php|tek’s 2012 edition is rapidly coming to a close. If you haven’t submitted your proposals yet, now is a great time to do so (you know, before the new-year celebrations kick in, and you get distracted by more… urgent fun). Don’t forget, you don’t need to be a professional speaker to present at tek—all you need is a great idea and an infective passion that will rub off on your fellow attendees. Some of the best speakers we’ve ever hosted were first timers—and we love to… -
Today only: Half off all training!
21 Dec 2011 | 10:00 pmFRIDAY’S SPECIAL: 50% OFF ALL TRAINING As the week winds to an end and the festivities inch closer, our final promo gives you access to our wonderful online training classes for half price. This means that you can take a full 19-hour course, analogous to (but much better than) three days in a real classroom, for as little as $250! Don’t wait—grab your seat before they’re all gone. The promo runs until 12AM EST on Monday, December 26th. The Mag Is Back! Did you miss the premium subscription + full back issue catalogue promo that we ran on Monday? No problem—we’ve… -
A Chat on Zend’s phpcloud at ZendCon 2011
21 Dec 2011 | 1:13 amAt the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it’s different than most of the other options out there. Download the mp3 here Supporting links: phpcloud.com Zend Technologies ZendCon Disclosure: I – personally and via Blue Parabola – have a long relationship with Zend. I attended ZendCon this year via a press pass they granted php|architect. Further, while Cal Evans is unavailable, I have served as (fake)…
