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Archive for the ‘PHP’ Category

phpMyAdmin, why so legacy?

01 Oct

I cried a bit when I updated one of our servers to phpMyAdmin 3.0.0, I mean it’s a milestone release, surely it will be full of new stuff and maybe even a new design. Sadly I was disappointed, the design is much worse and the frames are still there – a concept on the web that thankfully died a long time ago. Someone needs to give the phpMyAdmin guys a lesson in Web 2.0, throw some AJAX in there and clean up the design.
Oh wait! They added a colorpicker so you can now choose the background color, AWESOME *cough*!

Considering a switch to http://sqlbuddy.com now.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Hosting, PHP

 

Bring back PHP4!

12 Aug

Just kidding.

Finally PHP4 is dead – and I only have 10 or so servers left to upgrade. Now if only customers could understand the need to switch to PHP5, then I could upgrade all the servers and burry PHP4 for good. There is always hope!

 
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What’s up?

09 Jun

So I wonder if anyone is still reading this blog, or are even remotely interested in my words of wisdom.
In any case for the one reader who ponders my absence, I will summarize what I have been doing since my last post.

Basically I’ve been working as always. Currently I manage the daily operation of UnoEuro. My job is mainly to reply to support tickets and make sure the servers are running smoothly. As always I still manage the Linux servers at Wannafind, along with my co-worker, and write the occasional internal scripting .
I can’t really talk about it much, since the webhosting industry in Denmark is fused with accusations and fingerpointing, if someone reads something from a hosting provider, they instantly try to twist words and ignite flames, kindda sad, otherwise I would probably post more about the subject.

I also still have my small coding projects, though my last big PHP project was coding Unoeuro, it was a lot of fun and took me 2 months working day and night – Winamp running in the background and Dreamweaver in the foreground – It’s funny how some songs now instantly remind me of those months of coding, it’s like they are burned in to my memory.

In my spare time? Well I got hooked by that damn World of Warcraft, what can you do? It’s like a drug (and as you will see in a minute, I love it).

I currently have two characters, both Paladins. The first Paladin is level 60 and on the PVP server Al’Akir, I basically never play that Paladin, since I got bored of world PVP and the server sucked in terms community.
My other Paladin is also level 60 and located on the PVE server Kul Tiras, he’s currently in an end-game guild which is struggling with C’thun phase 2, he has full Lawbringer (Tier 1), Judgement (Tier 2) and currently 58% through rank 13 in the PVP ranking system. Both Paladins are named Saroz, a name I came up with on the character creation screen.
I’m an officer in the guild and i manage the Website, Forum, DKP system and the Ventrillo server. This is my first game where I’ve talked to my fellow players through voice communication, and it’s really been a blast to get to learn so many new people from all over Europe, let’s just say I’ve come to learn a few nasty greek words.
The game, and indeed the guild, has its ups and downs, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before in a game, this game is something you put your heart in to, something you prioritise because you got 40+ other players counting on your presence for raids.
I’m moving to a new apartment next month, which I am really looking forward to and should provide a nice change of scenery.

Serendipity? After I started playing World of Warcraft I sort of gave up on Serendipity. I was never comfortable with the community to be honest, I guess I have my own way of doing things and every time I tried to move the project in the direction I wanted it, I got hit by a brick wall of objections.
To be honest, Serendipity is like a huge patchwork, it’s based on a codebase and a concept that was created more than 5 years ago, and since then we’ve tried different ways of patching that framework up, I guess this is where we found our different ways of approaching that problem. We tried patching it up section by section, redesigning one part of the code and then the next, however as you may have guessed, the result is just another patchwork, it never really solved the root of the problem. I can see much of my code still lives, so that’s kind of fun.

I installed WordPress the other day and noticed it didn’t have a Serendipity importer, so I started coding one and immediately found a HUGE annoyance.. Who the HELL thought it was a good idea to absolutely abuse extract()? I got variables all over the place which I have NO idea where originates *golfclap*

Anyway, enough ranting, I’ll try and post more about less in the future :)

 

When things go bad, go open source

10 Jun

Recently Hybodus, a network monitoring tool, decided to halt development because their lead developer had left them.

Hybodus is using ioncube to encode its PHP sourcecode, preventing paying customers from distributing and modifying the code.
This is of course a good idea, but requires the company to activly develop and bugfix the project, as this doesn’t seem possible anymore, I encurrage the Hybodus developers to release the project as open source, at least release the code to paying customers.
If I had a chance to look at the code, I could fix all the bugs and implement the features I wanted, right now I’m stuck with a product I cannot control and won’t receive updates on.

 
3 Comments

Posted in PHP

 

eAccelerator provides solid PHP speedboost

07 Jan

Today I went looking for a PHP Accelerator that worked with PHP5.

The previously most used and common accelerators, like Turck MMCache and ionCube PHP Accelerator, haven’t been updated for years and they therefore do not work correctly with PHP5. Turck produced some very strange and corrupt results on my PHP 5.0.3 installation.

So I found eAccelerator and was pleasantly surprised when it blessed Serendipity with a 330% speed increase. It seems to be well maintained, the last release was 2004/12/20, but perhaps also a little new.

Anyway, it looks promising.

 
4 Comments

Posted in PHP

 

PHP Predictions for 2005

30 Dec

Sitepoint features a blog entry about PHP Predictions for 2005. Some are very doubtful (like Perl, Java and PHP developers uniting and XUL becoming mainstream), but others are very likely to occur.

I hope that the predictions about PHP5 adoption hold true. However it will be extremely hard, from an administrative point of view, to upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5, when you cannot be sure that you will not break thousands of customer-scripts.

While I believe some better known PHP applications will do a version bump and begin to require PHP5, it is likely to depend on the overall adoption of PHP5, rather than the need of the features it provides. A project is after all nothing without its users.

I hope to be able to upgrade the servers, which I manage, to PHP5 in 2005, maybe one at the time to see if it can be done without breaking too many scripts. However before applications like WordPress starts to fully support PHP5 (not require it, just support it), it will be tough.

 
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Posted in Hosting, PHP

 

MySQL 4.1 deemed production ready

28 Oct

Finally, MySQL 4.1 has been classified as production ready.

Too bad you need PHP5 and the MySQLi extension to be able to fully take advantage of the new features, this puts hosting providers in a very tough spot.

 
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Posted in Hosting, PHP

 

Profiling PHP

24 Sep

George just released the notes from his php|works presentation about PHP Profiling and also comitted a fix for my problem with APD.

I started profiling Serendipity 0.8-alpha2 with XDebug a few days ago, and can now finally move on to using APD.

I also installed Turck MMCache on my home server (this server), to speed up PHP opcode. I had no idea you could speed up PHP that much by installing an opcode cache, it’s quite impressive.

 
1 Comment

Posted in PHP

 

PHP5, object clone compatibility with PHP4

23 Sep

This is interesting, and disturbing.

 
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Posted in PHP

 

APD for PHP5 is out!

20 Aug

Sweet, APD for PHP5 is out, now lets get this show on the road!

I suspect George put some time into releasing a snapshot of CVS HEAD, much appreciated to whomever did so :)

 
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Posted in PHP