You have to be really smart to code PHP!
In Terry Chay's brilliant blog post about Rails and PHP, a comment read: I agree, PHP is great, but you have to be really smart to remember 3000+ core functions, totally inconsistent function names, a...
Quick script to check user bandwidth usage
A buddy needed a quick report to see if one of his users was slamming his site. I got a little carried away and wrote a PHP script (plus some awk and grep) to make a little report for him. I am sure...
Vixie Cron and the new US DST
So, the new DST changes in the US caused a small stir among system administrators recently. We got all of our servers updated and verified they were working before the even. Or so we thought. I not...
Big arrays in PHP
Update: Terry Chay has answered my question about why this is happening. In a nutshell, PHP is using 33,160 opcodes and 33,157 regsters for the verbose code. In comparison, the serialized array on...
I wish I was as cool as DJB
I should throw up a fanboy alert right here. You have been warned. =) I was reading a heated discussion about security (no link, MARC is read only right now) on the PHP internals list this past wee...
Is Yahoo!ed a word?
Everyone has heard of being slashdotted or maybe dugg. But have you ever been Yahoo!ed? Phones started beeping, mayhem ensued. The first thing we looked at was the database. Is some MyISAM table l...
Browser KeepAlive Secrets
So, at dealnews, we are getting ready to launch a super secret thing (redesign beta preview) that requires us to use some cookie tricks. What we decided to do was to give our users a link to a page ...
Getting all SOAPY
So, we (dealnews.com) rolled out a new site this month, metaprice.com. Its young and lacking features of many of the other price comparison sites, but is has great potential. Our hope is to bring ...
One million dollars (picture Dr. Evil)
I followed the lead of others on the PHP Planet and added Phorum to Ohloh.com. They have completed their analysis and have determined that Phorum would cost $1 million to produce. Its probably wou...
Initializing & typing variables with settype()
These days, the way to develop is to have E_ALL and maybe even throw in E_STRICT if you are really hard core. That of course means having all your variables initialized before they are used. You cou...