bjori doesn't blog

There is an app^Wppa for that

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 04:23:00 PDT

Want to try out PHP5.next (PHP5.4?) on Ubuntu?
After the death of PHP6.0 a while ago, development of PHP.next (PHP5.4 probably?) has been going on.
There are a lot of cool features there try out - like traits, scalar type hint, and sh**loads of smaller features.

There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc.
It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

When I was playing with launchpad the other day I figured.. why not provide a daily build of PHP trunk/ (PHP.next, PHP5.4 or whatever you want to call it)?

Launchpad isn't all to happy with git, and doesn't support mirroring git branches, so a fork of the php5-vanilla-ubuntu repo to php5-next-vanilla-ubuntu was needed as some of the patches there don't apply to trunk/. But that was about it.

So, want to try out PHP5.4 daily builds? Checkout the PHP5.4-daily PPA on launchpad!

Play around with the new features, provide feedback to the PHP development mailinglist, and make sure your application if forward compatible with it today.

up2date PHP5.3 packages for Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:22:00 PDT

Most Linux distributions have a policy of not being to up to date with upstream releases of software, mostly for good reasons. This however is extremely painful for developers, as it means they often need to use really outdated version, containing all sorts of bugs - and even missing features.

This has been pissing me off for quite some time, so I have been running my own PHP builds for a while - but when it comes to deploying the apps... the sysadmins obviously start complaining that they have to invest a lot more work into maintaining the servers then they otherwise would have to.
So.. What can we do about that? Launchpad to the rescue!

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

After hunting down the debian PHP packaging repo, I forked it onto github (as php5-vanilla-ubuntu) and started ripping out some of their weird patches and enabled mysqlnd, but otherwise keeping their package splitting and the things you would expect from a debian package.

What does this mean?
- Well, if you are looking for up2date PHP packages (currently PHP5.3.6) to work with, checkout the PHP5.3 PPA on launchpad :)
This PPA works just fine as a drop-in-replacement for the default Ubuntu packages, and provides builds for Lucid and Maverick (there are some changes in Natty I need to look into..).

I have been running these packages for some time now, but if you notice any issues - please let me know :)

The PHP project and Code Review

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 01:35:00 PST

Reading code is not only fun, its also a great way to exercise your brain - not to mention a fantastic way to discover new ways to solve problems. At work (we are hiring btw!), for example, I read pretty much every single commit (and merge requests, for that matter) - and I'm subscribed to several different OSS commit lists. I can't say I read every commit to PHP, I focus on the areas I care about, but I do skim over the rest - if only just to see when new features are added.

The PHP project has a good chunk of mailinglists, everything from support lists, developer discussions, QA, and so on. Every commit to our SVN is automatically posted to the relevant commit mailinglist(s).
The main commit lists are;
- PHP (php-cvs@lists.php.net, http://news.php.net/php.cvs)
- PHP Documentation (doc-cvs@lists.php.net, http://news.php.net/php.doc.cvs)
- PHP-GTK (phpgtk-cvs@lists.php.net, http://news.php.net/php.gtk.cvs)
- PEAR (pear-cvs@lists.php.net, http://news.php.net/php.pear.cvs)
- PECL (pecl-cvs@lists.php.net, http://news.php.net/php.pecl.cvs)

Then we have specific lists for each translation of the docs, all the websites, PEAR docs and so on.
The great thing about these commit lists is that *anyone* can subscribe to them, and quite a lot of people actually are.
For example, there are over 200 people registered to the PHP commit list, and over 100 people on the documentation commit list alone. That is ca 25% of the people that are subscribed to their discussion counterparts.
Granted that most of the subscribers do not actively review the commits, I guesstimate there is still a sizable percentage of them that do.

Just the simple fact that I know people will be reading through my commits makes me think about what I am doing a bit more; "Is this really needed?", "Is there be a better way solving this?", "Could it potentially break other things?", "Is this actually correct?"..
The people who review the commits often don't seem like the friendliest people in the world.. If there are issues with the commit; You will be told. No doubt about it. And you will feel like an idiot, for few minutes, for not having caught it yourself - and promise yourself to review your commits better in the future. Learning from your mistakes. I love it. Mission accomplished.

Last year I updated the credit list, printed out by phpinfo() & phpcredits(), for the people maintaining our websites, with the commit message "Throw some credit around" (yes, the typo and incorrect colspan in the commit was caught and fixed).

Fast forward 15months, to last Friday. Another commit from me to PHP trunk with the commit message "Throw some credit around", and then to PHP 5.3 a minute later with the same commit message.
Less then 10minutes after the commit I had received 2 emails asking me "WTF?" - and a poke on IRC.
I had no idea what those guys were talking about. None what soever. I had not committed anything to any PHP project for several days. Nothing. Not even a typo fix.

Turns out that someone in Asia had somehow managed to get his/hers hands on my PHP.net account credentials.
Interestingly enough the commit doesn't introduce any security holes, bugs, or anything at all really. It just adds "Wolegequ Gelivable" to the credit list (whatever that means).

Its not a great feeling to have your account hacked into, but I do wonder what the intentions were.. Maybe just an credentials check, which was supposed to be followed by evil commits if noone had spotted the first one? The Chinese government trying to introduce security holes so they can break into PHP websites?

In any case. It took less then 10minutes for 3 people to catch it, that is pretty cool.

-Hannes

p.s. Last year, one of my new year's resolutions was to "blog once a month". My last blogpost was in January.

Unix manual pages for PHP functions

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:45:00 PST

Did you know that unix manual pages for PHP functions and methods existed?

For a while I had vim configured to run reflection when I hit "K", but after the PHP documentation team released unix manual pages for PHP I now get the manual page in all its glory; function description, parameter descriptions, return values, examples, notes, see also and everything you are used to see from the online manual.
Its awesome.

As many PHP functions use "standard names" the documentation team decided to not install the manual in the standard man directory.
When you install the unix manual package you get a little shell script (called "pman") which runs the normal "man" command for you, and sets the manual directory to wherever you installed the package.

To install the PHP manual as unix manual pages:



$ pear install doc.php.net/pman

If you are running very old pear version you need to "discover" the doc.php.net channel first:



$ pear channel-discover doc.php.net

And then run the command above.

The manual will install into whichever directory you have specified as the "doc_dir" in the pear configuration, and the "pman" script into "bin_dir".
By default I believe pear sets the "bin_dir" to something that is already in your $PATH so you should be able to execute "pman strpos" now.

In VIM you need to update the "keywordprg" config (or add it, if it doesn't exists already) to "pman":



set keywordprg=pman

Now open up a .php file, place your cursor over some PHP function and hit "K", you should get the manual page for that function \o/.

Unfortunately Symfony, Zend Framework, Doctrine, and other frameworks/libraries/.. do not distribute unix manual pages yet so I use the Taglist plugin to jump to the code.

Looking forward to when these frameworks start producing unix manual pages, so much easier to read :D

-Hannes

Most PHP releases in August!

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:15:00 PDT

Since PHP 3.0.18 (released October 2000) (no, php.net doesn't keep release records before that for some reason) 60 PHP releases have been made. August and May are the most common months for PHP releases, with 9 releases each.

PHP5.3.1 and PHP5.2.11 are in the works these days.. Judging by the August release "frenzy" I bet both will be out by the end of the month!

Other useless stats?

26 PHP releases have been on Thursdays
1 On Saturday
There have only been 2 releases in 2009 so far
2004 had 10 releases
January, April and October have only had 3 releases (each)
There has never been a release on Sunday
The 89th, 121st, 122nd, 194th, 228th, 241st and the 349th day of the year have had 2 releases each
The 3rd day of the month is most likely to be a release day, with total of 6 releases
The 9th, 16th, 18th and 21st (of any month) have never been release days...
The 18th week of the year is most likely to have an release, whole 8 releases have been made in that week!

Want more?


php -r '
function fetch($arg) {
  static $mirror = "http://no2.php.net/releases/index.php";
  return unserialize(file_get_contents("$mirror?$arg"));
}
foreach(fetch("serialize=1") as $major => $unused) {
  foreach(fetch("serialize=1&max=-1&version=$major") as $version => $data) {
      echo $version, " - ", $data["date"], "\n";
             $foo[date("l", strtotime($data["date"]))]++;
  }
}
arsort($foo); print_r($foo);
'

Google breaking up with me?

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:17:00 PDT

Dear Google.

There is a reason why my browser does not send out request for Norwegian content. That reason is the same reason why I change all my language profiles to English. Even though I live in Norway please respect my wishes and stop serving me Norwegian content.

Earlier today I got this usually weird message from Google Reader saying "There is an update available for Google Reader click _here_ to refresh" (or something along those lines). I have no clue what that means, but I get that message regularly. I always click "here" and never notice any changes.
I suspect this is Google Gears (yes, it will always be called "Google Gears") that is updating the content, but what is the "Go offline" button then for? Clicking that button fetches my unread items and "disconnects" so I can read my feeds on the train.

Related note: I am pretty sure Google Gears swallows some of my still-unread-items when going online again. Very annoying as I explicitly check the "Keep unread" box so I can read the posts later on in a more friendly environment.

Back to the point. After clicking "here" earlier today Google Reader decided to change my profile settings to say "Norwegian" and displays everything in Norwegian, removing the offline feature and "Friends shared items".

After changing my profile settings again to English only the settings dialog is in English. The rest of Google Reader is still in Norwegian with missing features I use regularly.
To make things worse, clicking "Logg ut" does not work. Simply throws "Beklager, det oppstod en feil. Prøv igjen om noen sekunder." back at me. No matter how long I wait or how often I try.

Going into my profile settings again, and change the language to Norwegian gives me back the offline feature and "Friends shared items" - and some random things in English. Apparently I can log off now, which is a appreciated.

While writing this entry on blogger.com "Autosave failed" has been blinking for most of the time, and now a big fat red line showing "ERROR" below the "Title" textbox is showing.

Dear Google, do you not like me anymore? I thought we were friends and shared something special. If you are breaking up with me I'd like to hear it straight up. Not randomly throwing errors at me for several months. I do understand your feelings though. After growing up together for so long we have finally reached the the tipping point, and started to grow apart the past months. You not caring anymore about the products I used to love, and me moving on to greener pastures.

We had a good run you and I. But I guess all good things come to an end at some point.

Love,
Hannes

8 reasons why you should not write for the php.net manual

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:40:00 PDT

8 reasons why you should *not* write for the php.net manual:

You get more page hits by publishing your work on your blog
You get a free pass to conferences by converting your work into presentation
You get paid to submit your work to magazines & commercial websites
You get a "trading card" and considered a star
The community will know your name
You can flame the documentations without needing to do anything about it
You can copy&paste parts from the manual and sell it (see point#3)
You can license your work to forbid any commercial use or further improvements

PhD: The [PH]P based [D]ocbook renderer RC1 released

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:46:00 PDT

Quick note; We released PhD0.1RC1 today \o/

Building the php.net documentations has never been as easy or as fast.

Note: You'll need 200M free diskspace (90M for the phpdoc XML sources and 110M for the generated html/php files).

Fetching the phpdoc sources:
bjori@lindsay:~$ cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net/repository co phpdoc cvs checkout: Updating phpdoc U phpdoc/.cvsignore U phpdoc/LICENSE U phpdoc/Makefile.in [snip]

Configure and test the XML
bjori@lindsay:~$ cd phpdoc/ bjori@lindsay:~/phpdoc$ php configure.php configure.php: $Id: configure.php,v 1.7 2007/10/02 12:03:16 bjori Exp $ PHP version: 5.3.0-dev [snip] * No missing ids found All good. All you have to do now is run 'phd /home/bjori/phpdoc'

Installing and rendering the php.net documentation
bjori@lindsay:~/phpdoc$ cd .. bjori@lindsay:~$ pear install http://doc.php.net/phd/PhD-0.1RC1.tgz downloading PhD-0.1RC1.tgz ... Starting to download PhD-0.1RC1.tgz (19,683 bytes) .......done: 19,683 bytes install ok: channel://__uri/PhD-0.1RC1 bjori@lindsay:~$ mkdir build bjori@lindsay:~$ cd build/ bjori@lindsay:~/build$ time phd /home/bjori/phpdoc Creating php/toc/manual.inc... Creating php/toc/introduction.inc... Creating php/toc/getting-started.inc... [snip] Creating php/toc/userlandnaming.inc... Creating php/toc/about.inc... Creating php/toc/opl.license.inc... real 1m40.448s user 1m20.309s sys 0m6.420s bjori@lindsay:~/build$ ls -l total 26M -rw-r--r-- 1 bjori users 26M 10-02 12:28 bightml.html drwxr-xr-x 2 bjori users 364K 10-02 12:28 html/ drwxr-xr-x 3 bjori users 336K 10-02 12:28 php/ bjori@lindsay:~/build$ ls php | wc -l 6288

Thats right. It takes less than 2 minutes (on my two years old Precision M70 laptop) to render the entire php.net documentations in three formats.

To celebrate the release we have registered a new "special" mirror, docs.php.net,
which is running these experimental builds of PhD, and would like to request
that people take a quick look at it before we start pushing these builds out
to the rest of the mirrors.

There is currently no known bug in these builds so if you find one then
please file a bug report or at least let us know about it.
I don't care how small or major the bug is, a missing whitespace or a
whole page missing, let us know if you find anything.

-Hannes

"Latest releases" box and "conference teaser"

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:52:00 PST

Update (February 19th): Thanks to Steph this should look fine in our favorite browser, IE6, now.

I committed the conference teaser patch few hours ago, and as usual it only took about an hour for it to go live. I really think its a nice compromise, looks nice there above the news entrys and isn't that intrusive.

Anyway. I also committed "latest releases" box on the right, above the "event section".
The idea is to list the latest, stable, releases there - and when we are in RC phase then list them in a box below it. The links will be to qa.php.net where a "big fat warning box" will welcome the user and explain what a "release candidate" really is.
Release Candidates will now get more exposure and, hopefully, get more testing - benefiting all of us.

Speaking of 'latest releases', I've seen lot of code parsing the frontpage, the download page, the php-announce mailing list, heck, even cvs log in order to get the latest release info.
Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...

What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?...
Send me a mail (private or to the webmaster@ mailing list), add a comment, blog about it, scream loudly (hoping we hear you) or whatever. If the idea interest you, its your chance to get heard!

PHP.net frontpage changes

noreply@blogger.com (bjori) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 08:55:00 PST

As many of you know I changed the frontpage of php.net recently by moving conference announcements and call for papers to its own dedicated page in a desperate attempt to regain the control of our frontpage.

WTF?! came up among conference planners which didn't like the changes at all. Heck, why should they? They lost an important, free, ads on a very popular page on the web. The flip side: they have now their own page free of any distractions and irritations around their advertisements.

Regain control? Yes. Conference planers have treated php.net frontpage as their private commercial ground for long enough. It was time for the php.net "staff" to take control of the frontpage back and publish php.net relevant news.

This is a community effort, you are no king. Good point. I am no king. But enough is enough. Flooding the frontpage with conference announcements and call for papers had to stop. It was so overwhelming that there was no point for us to post real news about what was going on with php.net. 24 hours after an important PHP release a call for papers was committed above it, making the release "old news". Within a week of phpdoc major update there was a new conference announcement posted. This is ridiculous. I kicked around on IRC the idea of dedicated conference page and immediately got praised for it. Everyone (online and awake) agreed. Few hours later in a frustration caused by all those announcements I cleaned the frontpage up, moving old stuff into the archives and then added the conference page. Few days later I then added a dedicated feed for the announcements.

Now that things are starting to cool off I posted a patch for a conference teaser on the frontpage. I've learned my lesson. There is no way in hell I will commit without a notice.

Just to be clear. I do think PHP conferences are important, but they are not as important as what the php.net team is doing. They are however important enough to be on php.net, just not cluttering and making fun of php.net efforts.

Seeing post like the one from Cal Evans, Extra! Extra! Get Your Conference News Here!, is kinda funny. I had a hard time finding those feeds, in fact I can only see them in that blog entry.. and his php.net has had a change of policy link points to a post by conference planer.. Heh? Even funnier is the the fact I can't see any indication on importance of conferences on Zends Developer Zone at all. *sigh* That's the spirit Cal! Kick my nuts and send out fancy statements without anything to back it up.

Cal: I'll avenge my nuts in London... ;)