Cracking the Vivaldi Code
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Can a computer program generate new works from long dead legends? By Douglas McGray from Wired magazine.
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P&aacute;draic Brady has a suggestion for all of the PHP readers out there - two articles in the latest edition of php|architect magazine, the May 2007 edition:   The two that stick in my mind are Jim Delahunt's "Unicode and PHP: A Gentle Introduction" and Jeff Moore's "Test Pattern: Model View Controller". Both are something those seeking illumination on these topics should certainly read.   The first presents an introduction to one of the hottest topics in the PHP world - Unicoding - including a few same scripts to get you going. The second article, a look at the Model/View/Controller pattern that really gets more to what the pattern is about rather than just talking about its structure.
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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If you weren't able to make it to this year's just passed php|works conference in Atlanta, you missed out on the keynote that Marco Tabini, founder of php|architect gave at the start of the conference. Fortunately, he's posted the video of it on his blog:   What they didn't tell me, however, is that they had arranged for a simple (but, as you will see, very effective) web-based system that allowed members of the audience to submit "captions" to the screen as I was speaking. The results were, of course, hilarious - mostly because they "forgot" to tell me about the idea until a few days after.   Be sure to check out the video of the video for some great one-liners.
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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In this final section I'll present some MIDI-specific troubleshooting tips, along with a brief description of the setup here at StudioDave, a few closing remarks, and of course some links to the Linux music-maker du jour.
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PÃ¡draic Brady continues his series looking at the creation of complex views in the Zend Framework with part six today all about gathering together the thoughts and ideas from the previous articles into a cohesive whole.   Part 6 now takes our previous fragments of theory and attempts to stitch them together into a cohesive whole - a description of a possible end solution. Yes, I know code talks loudly, and we'll get there with an almighty bang in Part 7 (which I promise is no more than a week away). Until then it's more verbosity.   He suggests a list of six terms to help get everyone on the same page when talking about the complex views:   Includes Partials Dispatches Layouts Placeholders Response Segments   Since these terms would mean nothing without proper definitions, he provides a few paragraphs on each explaining what they are and, where necessary, using code to illustrate the point.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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Ivo Jansch discovered something interesting by way of an applicant's resume - a hidden "trick" that PHP pulls on the user when they try to use a Java-like syntax with System.    So yesterday I was reviewing a code sample that a job applicant had written during a test and I encountered the following line of code:  It's not hard to guess what his background was :), but I was initially stunned that this actually works in php.    After a little investigating (and ruling out the Java Bridge), Ivo found that the line was being interpreted literally and was just being handled as a string instead of a constant. He gives two other examples to help with clarification.
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The composer and musician shares his stylish essentials.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Tobias Schlitt shares some of his toughts on one of his latest in a list of books to read - Exporing PHP.    Although I did not read it, yet, I'd like to recommend it to you, since I think to know the authors good enough to believe they write good books.   In short, "Exploring PHP" is a roundup about advanced PHP programming experiences, covering different topics like: Event driven programming in PHP, Generation of 3D graphics, Refactoring and Migration, PHP6.    From the little that he's looked into the book, he can already tell it's a good resource and is recommending it based on that and the authors it comes from.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.   While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality   She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.
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Un fine settimana pieno di appuntamenti: tutti i concerti di grande musica italiana, gli appuntamenti in libreria, le nuove uscite in sala e il Live@Kataweb. Tutte le previsioni del tempo