Stefan Koopmanschap's RSS

I've tweeted about this on january 1st but now it's official! I will be speaking at PHP|Architect's PHP|Tek conference in may. I will be doing two presentations: My good old refactoring talk and a joint talk with Lorna on the community.

I've tweeted about this on january 1st but now it's official! I will be speaking at PHP|Architect's PHP|Tek conference in may. I will be doing two presentations: My good old refactoring talk and a joint talk with Lorna on the community.

After (mis)using my prev-gen 15″ Macbook Pro for 8 months, today I finally got round to installing a much needed 4Gb memory upgrade. Together with the 2.6Ghz CPU and the 180Gb 7200rpm drive I should have no problems enjoying this marvel of engineering for some time to come.

Now, if I only had something (as in some gadget) to put the remaining 2×1Gb modules in. I sure do hate this kind of waste.

On the SocialGeek blog there's a recent post that looks at making stubs for your URLs, making them easier to read and remember.

This is where the fun begins of course. How many times have you been confronted with someone sending you an indecipherable, thus untrustworthy link? Right, so we agree that for a user, it is important to have a clean URL that is readable and includes the title of the page or (at least) some description related to the content. Slug time!

They explain what slugs are (and how they're useful for users) as well as how to convert a title into a "slugged" string by replacing anything that's not an A-Z or 0-9 character to remove the less URL friendly characters.

The Fliquid Studios site has posted their introduction to using the Google Search API via a cURL interface in PHP.

A lot of people these days use 3rd party sites or services to gain SEO data about their site or service. A lot of these people simply do not realize just how simple it is to build some tools to gain statistics from the big search engines. In this post I plan to give you a very basic introduction on how to go about getting some search engine statistics from Google using their API.

They show how to create the connection (including the URL to search on) and a form that can be used to submit the terms back to the script. A demo and downloadable code are included.

The php|architect crew have officially posted their schedule for this year's php|tek conference (May 2009) and have announced a free webcast series on a range of PHP subjects.

We're happy to finally announce the schedule for php|tek 2009'"a bit late, we know, but with 250 proposals to sort and rank, it was tough work! In addition, we are also introducing a series of free webcasts on a wide range of topics relevant to the PHP world to keep all of us busy while we wait for the conference, culminating with Marco Tabini's opening keynote, live from Chicago at 9:00 on May 22.

You can find out more about the conference from its website and more on the webcasts (and to sign up) here.

Apple has announced that it is to offer a much larger chunk of its music catalogue free of copyright protection technology.

DevShed has posted the fifth part of their series looking at CodeIgniter and its use to make a simple blogging application. The focus this time is on the output, working with the views to "pretty up" the resulting pages.

Although in its current state, the blogger works well, its visual presentation looks pretty primitive. Therefore, in this fifth part of the series I'll be adding some CSS styles to the view files that comprise this blog application to improve its look and feel.

They start with a review of the code so far - a simple blogging app with the ability to let users comment on each entry. The HTML and CSS you'll need to add to the views to make the output look more like this.

I'm very excited to be able to say that I was published in php|architect, in December's issue. I had the /etc column, where I wrote a bit about phpwomen.org and what we're up to these days. As I've wanted to write for them for ages, I was very chuffed to be asked and it was fun doing it :)

I'm very excited to be able to say that I was published in php|architect, in December's issue. I had the /etc column, where I wrote a bit about phpwomen.org and what we're up to these days. As I've wanted to write for them for ages, I was very chuffed to be asked and it was fun doing it :)

Johannes Schluter recently looked at one of the new features coming with PHP 5.3 - the goto functionality:

Over the last few days I already mentioned a few hidden gems from PHP 5.3. Now at Christmas I wanted to take a look at some new language feature of the upcoming PHP version: Added "jump label" operator (limited "goto"). (Dmitry, Sara)

No, its not the sort of "goto" you're thinking of - its a bit more limited than that. Johannes mentions that it only allows you to jump within the same execution unit and you can't jump into loops. Used incorrectly, it can be bad but he points out two useful instances - one being a code generator and the other an instance where you might need to drop out of code but not kill off the script in the process (sample code is included for this second one).

We will be taking the following file-servers down shortly for maintenance tomorrow 01-07 at approximately 1 AM PST. If one of the following file-servers is listed when clicking “Account Status” when logged into the panel this will affect you:

lewzealand, julius, wanda

It also might cause slightly elevated load during the down time on the following servers:

achilles, aero, alameda, alondra, archibald, arrow, atlantic, avalon, aviation, babyruth, barry, bazooka, beaudry, bellflower, blowpop, bonbon, bottlecap, boyd, broadway, burton, butler, catalina, centinela, century, cerritos, chex, cognac, compton, cookie, cordial, cupcake, dingdong, doheny, dorito, drumstick, dumdum, edendale, euclid, fairfax, fletcher, foothill, fundip, garth, garvey, gobstopper, goober, good, gower, grand, grappa, gumdrop, haven, heath, hillhurst, hillmont, hoover, hope, hops, hyperion, jefferson, jurupa, lankershim, larchmont, laurel, lemonhead, limbo-spunky4, linq, locust, look, lucas, ludlow, malt, manchester, mayo, melrose, mento, milliken, mills, monroe, nilla, nix, oakdale, ocean, olive, ord, pico, pikespeak, planters, plenty, pocky, poprock, pretzel, price, pringle, razzle, redondo, ritz, rockyroad, rodeo, rum, sake, saltine, schnapps, selma, skittle, snocap, soto, spree, starburst, sticky, sunset, taffy, tampa, temple, tequila, topanga, vanowen, vermouth, warhead, washington, western, whittier, whopper, wilshire, york

The downtime for each file-server should be in the range of 20-40 minutes during the maintenance.

In this recent post to his blog Doug Brown spends a little time comparing (at a high-level) some of the differences between ASP and PHP.

The difference between PHP and ASP is that ASP is a Microsoft product based on visual basic syntax whereas PHP has C and Java based syntax. ASP works better on Microsoft servers.

He describes the target audience for each language and talks about the environments that they work best in as well as some general statements about their speed and flexibility. Basing his judgment on the facts he noted, he suggests PHP as the best alternative of the two for being more flexible, running in more places and being a bit faster overall.

Johan Mares has a recent post about using PHP on the command line:

I already knew how to run PHP scripts from the command line (CLI), although I never really used it. What was new to me was that there are 2 ways of doing this. The first one is by using the php command and the second, and new for me, is by adding a shebang on the first line of your script.

His first way is to run the PHP file through the interpreter directly (via a command line call to something like "php myfile.php"). The second it to actually include the path to the interpreter inside the PHP file itself and use the shell to execute the contents based on that (adding something like "#!/path/to/php" at the top). Then you just make the file executable and you can run it like any other binary file.

Packing up for the drive to CodeMash... also:
Java Today: OpenMQ webinar Friday, M3DD newsletter #4, and OpenSSO policy agents
Weblogs: Styles for JavaFX, effects in JavaFX, and freezing JTable columns
Forums: JavaFX apps on USB drives, http proxies and Metro, scripting languages in Wonderland, and GlassFish to-dos

Internet-enabled HDTVs capable of streaming movies are one of the many gadgets that will be showcased at this year's CES exhibition.

Dave Marshall is having a contest to give away a few copies of the "Job Hunter's Handbook" (by Michael Kimsal) - all you need to do is sign up:

I've got a couple of copies of Php|architect's PHP Job Hunter's Handbook to give away, the only catch is you have to sign up to PHPPositions' feed via email. It's managed by Feedburner, so it can be trusted and you wont get any spam, just super smashing great php jobs in the UK.

If you'd like to find out more about the book (or to order your own copy), head over to the book's page on the php|architect website. Normal price is $27 CAD for Print/PDF and just $23 CAD for the PDF.

There is a small utility in Ubuntu called Gnome Blog which allows you to blog directly from your desktop. If you are running firefox on Ubuntu, click on this link to install the package or enter the following command in your terminal

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

Once installed, right click on an empty area on your panel and add “Blog Entry Poster”. Once you’ve added this click on it to start the app. First time you run, you’ll be prompted to enter details about your blog.

First select your blog type - Blogger, Wordress, LiveJournal and MovableType are all supported here and a few more. For Wordpress blogs, enter your blog’s URL and username and password and you’re all set to go.

Once you’ve set it up properly, you can start your blog post by just clicking on the Blog button on your panel.

With the world eagerly awaiting news from this year's Macworld Conference, satirical news organ The Onion has stolen the headlines.

Latest PECL Releases:

• Xdebug 2.0.4
• txforward 1.0.6
• gender 0.6.1