Some weeks months ago I finally got my hands on the ThoughtWorks Anthology and got immediately hooked on one of the featured essays called 'Refactoring Ant Build Files' contributed by Julian Simpson aka the build doctor. After absorbing and studying the provided catalogue of overall 24 refactorings, I spent some time to transform a few health-promoting ones to the Phing universe. So the following post will outline six five basic, but valuable Phing build file refactorings by showing the smelly example first, followed by the scentless one and a closing refactoring description.

Making build files 'first-class' codebase citizens

You might ask yourself if there even is any need to refactor and care about mostly poorly treated project artifacts like build files. Well according to the bo ......

The PDO SQL parser causes many bugs. All drivers suffer from it. By default the parser replaces placeholder with ''.'' is a string. This can clash with the SQL syntax. PDO can make an INSERT fail. Please learn why and stop reporting bogus bugs.

Why does PDO parse my SQL ...

Via: Theo Hultberg.

An odd story caught my attention recently, and I've been meaning to put my thoughts down.

I'm often asked the question about indexing flash content recently, and the recent announcement by google only increased the stir.

It's odd, because even Adobe employees seem completely clueless about what it means, and the implications.

Quote from Ryan Steward:

So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of ......

Every time I need to reset the admin password in Open X it takes me ages to scan through all the tables, thinking “which bloody table would contain the admin password”, remembering from the last time it’s the one you least expect …

For future reference, it’s the preference table, record 0 and where the agency_id = 0.  Imagine, who ever would have thought of a password as a preference.  I suppose it’s getting better, in phpAdsNew it was in the config table!

This is where logical thinking can cause you to waste hours of time: an application has many users, each user has a password …

On his blog, Jonathan Street has posted some "random thoughts" on generating random (or not so random) strings in PHP.

Humans are astoundingly bad at being random and I just slapped the keyboard a few times until I felt I had the required 16 characters. Writing some code to produce a fairly random string is incredibly easy. I've easily done it a dozen times or more. Though only because it is easier to re-write it than to find where I put the last one

He gives two examples that work, but aren't the best possibilities for making truly random strings - one using mt_rand to select a random character from a string and the other using the same idea but instead using the char() function to replace the string of characters.

His other examples include the use of the uniqid function with the more_entropy setting enabled and an md5 or sha1 hash ......

So I have now joined Johannes as a co-RM for PHP 5.3. Its quite an honor and a challenge. Especially since I still need to find enough OSS time to continue to work on emPHPower and write out a proper proposal for a "constitution" (expect a mailinglist to be setup soon). We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions. Speaking of the scratchpad, we really really really need more people helping to identify the changes in PHP 5.3.

Scavenge the NEWS file, test your apps against current 5.3 CVS. Do whatever it takes to f ......

Mike is asking I`m hoping that MySQL stored procedures will work properly. Especially multiple calls in one request. in reply to PDO_MYSQLND: R[a|u]mbling and a breeze of progress


Mike, it depends what you mean by “properly”. If you use the API properly it works fine with mysqlnd. See below for code ...

Here are the slides from my Streams talk; they cover a variety of bits and pieces of streams background and implementation that may or may not be useful to you.

type="text/css"> pre {font-size: 12px; line-height: 100%; } kbd {font-size: 12px;}

I have tried to write a custom coding standard for PHP_CodeSniffer. The documentation shows you how to do this when the coding standard ist located in the PEAR directory.

I don't want to put the standard into the PEAR directory, because I need more flexibility. Some projects may have stricter or more relaxed standards, and I'm also working towards using phpUnderControl together with CruiseControl, so I'd prefer to keep the coding standard in s ......

The modification of PDO_MYSQL to support the MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd) is progressing. We are using the project title “PDO_MYSQLND” for the modification. The goal of PDO_MYSQLND is to provide a PDO driver for MySQL which can be compiled either against the MySQL Client Library or against the ...

Today on the IE blog a big announcement was made regarding the upcoming security features in Internet Explorer 8.

Definitely check it out! Among things it includes an XSS protection filter, html sanitizing built straight into the scripting engine and a way to disable the infamous 'content sniffing'. I'd still hope to see the content-sniffing 'feature' to be opt-in, instead of the proposed opt-out solution.. but hey, at least it allows us to plug the hole.

To serve files as text/plain, serve the document with the Content-Type header as:


Content-Type: text/plain; authoritative=true;


I have to say, I'm quite impressed how IE is catching up with things like standards and security.

Lorna Mitchell has posted some great news about the article contest that the PHP Women are running - prizes!

The article contest running on PHPWomen.org through July just got more exciting. We have asked people to post entries to our Best Practices forum. The authors of the best two entries will win copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Besides the possibility of winning one of these licenses, entrants will also be entered into the running (two winners) to get a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro Magazine and have the opportunity for their article to be featured on the magazine's website.

I first started to think about random strings when going through the process of registering an application for Windows Delegated Authentication service. As part of the application you are asked to provide a secret key. You want this to be difficult to guess so a random string is going to be best. Humans are astoundingly bad at being random and I just slapped the keyboard a few times until I felt I had the required 16 characters.

Writing some code to produce a fairly random string is incredibly easy. I've easily done it a dozen times or more. Though only because it is easier to re-write it than to find where I put the last one. They generally look something like this:

Georgina sent me two more recs. The first is for a front-end developer and the second for a PHP developer (and front-end).

PHP Web developer - Facebook Photo application (East bay area, CA)

Apparently, you can mention my name and I get a bonus. If you get the job, just tell me and you can have it.

ShareThis