Pierre-Alain Joye's Blog: Zip finally reached stable!
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Pierre-Alain Joye ha posted some great news about the Zip PECL package today on his blog - it's finally reached stable.   Zip is stable since two releases. I lacked the time to report it :) Three bugs were important. Once PHP 5.2.0 is out, I will focus on the new features. Write stream support, unicode (php6+ support), pattern based addition/extraction and crypting functions.   The three bugs he mentions were a problem with zipArchive::addFile, comment/cdir problems with new archives, and setting properties in extended classes.   You can check out the homepage for the project here or just view the Changelog for complete updates.
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A GTK/python frontend to the news leecher "hellanzb" providing most functionalities available from the "hellanzb daemon" and Drag and Drop file-enqueuing.Hellanzb can be obtained through your distro's package manager or at http://www.hellanzb.com   looks like hellagui only worked for me. There was a major bug : if no config file was present, hellagui would crash on start.  Now, if a developer, even of such a lowly glade hack as this one, says "this is working" and has even got screenshots to prove it, and the package doesn't work for you, it's very probable that there is some weird bug he (the developer, in this case me), missed.   It seriously doesn't hurt to just drop a small mail stating "sorry dude, but your application is just a pile of bugdung and it crashes". I'll even welcome "U 5vXX0r. it Cr4sh3d" messages ... If there is a shell output, even better. If not I'll survive and ask myself WHY it crashed and then fix it.  Anyway ... this version should work ... please DO tell me if it doesn't.
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An anonymous reader wonders: &quot;I had Firefox 1.0PR running smoothly on three different machines and it hardly ever crashed. After upgrading to 1.0, I seem to have at least one annoying crash a day.
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The eagerly-awaited Ubuntu Studio has been released, adding another entry into the expanding list of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but interested readers can peruse some installation screenshots or check out the latest news and information on the Ubuntu Studio Wiki. I plan to review the distro in a future column, along with an update on the latest version of the venerable PlanetCCRMA, but in this entry I'm focused on another very exciting new release. Ardour 2.0 is now available for download. This version is a significant improvement over the 0.99 series (1.0 was never released), with many new features and enhancements to performance and stability. The following article profiles the new Ardour as I employed it for three projects, all involving the program in the processes of composition and arranging as well as the more typical tasks of recording and editing. I've described each project in some detail, and each description includes a link to the final audio output.
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When Tim Howes and a group of colleagues created the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol almost 15 years ago, he had no idea this quiet little front end to the more robust X.500 directory
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We have some big news today for FlickrFan users, a major new source of high-def photography for the networked living room. They come from Agence France-Presse, one of the world's great news organizations, and a fantastic source of high-resolution news photography. I met with Agence France-Presse when I was in Paris in December, introduced them to FlickrFan and explained what we were doing with the Associated Press. They got excited, it took a little while to work out the technical details, but now we're ready to go. The updates are all out, here's the howto for FlickrFan users. Change #30: Agence France-Presse photos in FlickrFan. There were unique challenges in this project because their flow is huge. Yesterday we got over 3000 new photos. Because there are so many, I asked my friend Matt Mullenweg, if his company Automattic could help us out with server space and bandwidth, and he said yes. The AFP pictures are hosted on wordpress.com. Many thanks to Matt and his company for helping us out. To the extent we're bootstrapping a new use of the net, which I hope is what we're doing, Matt's company has made the kind of contribution we'd like to see more companies make. Usually the companies are happy to make the money, but not willing to help out with the bootstrap, which often costs money. Matt has always been a great guy and a visionary. I thank him and hope that FlickrFan users find an appropriate way to thank him too. And also, please consider the generosity of Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. We all hope that there's a market here, a way to monetize the flow of high-resolution photography to enrich and inform. Other content companies have been reluctant to take a chance on the Internet, we saw that in the early days of RSS and podcasting. I feel that these two media companies are playing the same pioneering role that the New York Times played with RSS 2.0 and NPR played in podcasting. Associated Press and Agence France-Presse deserve our respect and admiration for steping out, for going first, this is how new Internet activities get going. This is what we call market leadership, the real kind. Bravo!! And this couldn't come at a better time, with tomorrow being Super Tuesday here in the USA. Think of all the great photographs we're going to get in the next few days! Kevin Tofel helped test the feed over the weekend.
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Chris Hartjes has posted the first part of a series on the "rebirth" of a component that was contributed to the Zend Framework - Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler (to interface with the Audioscrobbler service from Last.fm).   Many moons ago I set out (along with my friend Derek) to make a contribution to Zend Framework in the form of an add-on to let people easily access the Audioscrobbler web service. We worked really hard, implemented all the features of the web service at that time. Imagine our surprise when it got accepted as part of the 1.0 release of Zend Framework! Awesome! It even has it's own entry in the manual and everything.   He admits, though, that the code is not all that it could be and cites some examples as well as ways he would make it all work so much better.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has two new updates concerning his PECL packages today, one for htscanner and the other for a bug in the zip package.   Yet another PECL release, htscanner 0.6.2 is out. This release fixes a annoying but minor bug in the shutdown function. A new error message has been added when no translated path has been found.   And, for the zip package:   Thanks to Ron Korving and Ilia Alshanetsky, a couple of thread unsafety issues have been caught in php codes, a complete list of Ron's review can be read in his original post. The fixes have been commited already, 5.2.1 will contain them.   The you can grab this latest update from the zip package's homepage over on the PECL website.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has posted several new updates concerning the packages he works on - Zip and a new offering, htscanner.   The first two concern the htscanner package - first, the initial release of the extension that works to emulate htaccess support for non-Apache web servers (like FastCGI or lighttpd). The second related post notes that that Windows binaries for the functionality are also posted on the pecl4win website.   Next on his list were some update to the Zip PECL package, a fix to correct issues found when using PHP versions 5.1.0, 5.1.1, and 5.1.2 (due to an internal function name issue).
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted his wrapup of this year's Dutch PHP Conference held in Amsterdam.   The chairs are all folded, the displays are back in their tubes and the speakers have all move on to their next big thing. Before the shadows of time fog our memory, let's take a look back over our shoulder at what was The Dutch PHP Conference.   Cal talks about the attendance (sold out!), a link to his keynote code in action and an overview of some of the talks presented.
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Matthew O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.   Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.   He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].
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OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean. To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck.
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Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager for the current PHP5 series, has announced the posting of the latest release canidate - PHP 5.2.0. RC4.   Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.   You can grab the files here:  BZipped GZipped
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David has posted an article to the Expirmentalworks.net blog about a task that he and Johannes Schluter have finished up - importing the PHP CVS tree over into Git.   A few month ago Johannes Schluter and I started discussing about GIT and other decentralized version control systems. During our exploration of GIT we thought about importing the PHP CVS tree into git. A few weeks later and a lot of wasted cpu time, we finally managed to provide an inofficial GIT mirror of the PHP CVS repository. ItÃ¢ÂÂs provided by Johannes Schluter and mirrored by me.    The post documents the path they followed - using git-cvsimport, parsecvs and a path they needed to make - to finally get the import working without any flaws. You can check out their unofficial repository here (it's updates twice a day from the live CVS).
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Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.   Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.   He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.
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Latest PEAR Releases:File_Bittorrent 1.0.2Translation2 2.0.0beta11Crypt_Blowfish 1.1.0RC1PHP_CompatInfo 1.3.2Net_Sieve 1.1.4Auth 1.4.0RC1
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We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.  Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms for feeds that you might like, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.  Normally, I'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut my server expenses now that my S3 bill is going up, serving some very big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan. If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me. Still diggin!