• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

Anyway, this post is about “must have tools”. So here is the list:

• XCode: First of all, you need to get a copy of XCode, Apple’s IDE.
• Cocos2d: Cocos2d is one of the best frameworks to create 2D games.
• ParticleDesigner: A great tool to create beautiful particle effects. A demo version can be downloaded here.
• TexturePacker: an awesome tool to “turn chaos into order”, i.e. to put all you sprites into a single sprite sheet. Get your copy here.

That’s all for today. I’ll keep you up to date about my progress in game development.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

In it’s simpliest form, unset() will look like this:

<?php
php $i = "is now set";
echo $i;
unset($i); // remove $i from memory, i.e. tell the garbage collector that it may unallocate $i
?>

Internally, PHP works more or less like Java when it comes to unsetting variables. Thus, unset() will not immediately unset the corresponding variable. Instead, it simply tells it’s garbage collector that the variable is no longer needed and may now be removed from memory. Good news are that the garbage collector now works quite smart and usually you don’t have to take care of how it works. Bad news are, that there are still some cases when the garbage collector fails.

I’ve just stumbled uppon the following problem:

<?php
class Foo
{
 public $id = 0;
 public $var1 = "this is a looooooong string";
 public $var2 = 102980912098;
 public $var3 = "another meaningless but loooooong string";

 public function __construct($id) {
 $this->id = $id;
 }
}

// init an array of 30.000 Foo-Objects
$fooarray = array();
for($i=0;$i<30000;$i++) {
 $v = new Foo($i);
 $fooarray[] = $v;
}

$i=0;
// now, iterate over the array
foreach($fooarray as $k => $v) {
 // do something meaningful with $v
 unset($v);
 unset($fooarray[$k]);
 if ($i++ > 1000) {
   echo "Memory allocated: ".number_format( memory_get_usage())."\n";
   $i=0;
 }
}
?>

This script simply inits an array of 30.000 objects, iterates over them and (within the iteration) unallocates the parts of the array which are no longer needed. Surprisingly, the output of this script will look like this (tested with PHP 5.3.3):

Memory allocated: 15,474,664
Memory allocated: 15,426,584
Memory allocated: 15,378,488
Memory allocated: 15,330,392
Memory allocated: 15,282,296
Memory allocated: 15,234,200
Memory allocated: 15,186,104
Memory allocated: 15,138,008
Memory allocated: 15,089,912
Memory allocated: 15,041,816
Memory allocated: 14,993,720
Memory allocated: 14,945,624
Memory allocated: 14,897,528
Memory allocated: 14,849,432
Memory allocated: 14,801,336
Memory allocated: 14,753,240
Memory allocated: 14,705,144
Memory allocated: 14,657,048
Memory allocated: 14,608,952
Memory allocated: 14,560,856
Memory allocated: 14,512,760
Memory allocated: 14,464,664
Memory allocated: 14,416,568
Memory allocated: 14,368,472
Memory allocated: 14,320,376
Memory allocated: 14,272,280
Memory allocated: 14,224,184
Memory allocated: 14,176,088
Memory allocated: 14,127,992

If you replace the last part of the script with this…

for($k=0,$c=count($fooarray);$k<$c;$k++) {
   $v=$fooarray[$k];
   // do something meaningful with $v
   unset($v);
   unset($fooarray[$k]);
   if ($i++ > 1000) {
      echo "Memory allocated: ".number_format( memory_get_usage())."\n";
      $i=0;
   }
}

…and run the script again, the output will look like this:

Memory allocated: 13,535,336
Memory allocated: 13,118,520
Memory allocated: 12,701,664
Memory allocated: 12,284,832
Memory allocated: 11,867,992
Memory allocated: 11,451,160
Memory allocated: 11,034,328
Memory allocated: 10,617,496
Memory allocated: 10,200,656
Memory allocated: 9,783,824
Memory allocated: 9,366,992
Memory allocated: 8,950,152
Memory allocated: 8,533,320
Memory allocated: 8,116,488
Memory allocated: 7,699,656
Memory allocated: 7,282,824
Memory allocated: 6,865,976
Memory allocated: 6,449,144
Memory allocated: 6,032,312
Memory allocated: 5,615,480
Memory allocated: 5,198,648
Memory allocated: 4,781,816
Memory allocated: 4,364,984
Memory allocated: 3,948,152
Memory allocated: 3,531,320
Memory allocated: 3,114,488
Memory allocated: 2,697,656
Memory allocated: 2,280,824
Memory allocated: 1,863,992

Obviously, using a foreach loop will cause problems when it comes to unallocating parts of the array you iterate over within the foreach.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

However, I really hate Zend Studio when in comes to performance. It takes ages to start up (and believe me, I have a pretty fast machine here) and if Eclipse is updating its whatsoever-files you can start your coffee break because the text editor gets freakingly slow.

Luckily, I’ve just read a very nice tutorial about how to start with Sublime Text 2 published by Stuart Herbert.

I don’t want to repeat what you can on Stuarts post, so let me conclude this article with some bullet points:

• Installing Sublime Text 2 is very easy
• You’ll find hundreds of plugin to fit Sublime Text 2 to your needs
• And most of all: Sublime Text 2 is extremely fast

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

Under Construction

A few months ago, I wrote an article about how to implement an “under maintenance” plugin using Zend Framework plugins. This plugin allows you to easily redirect users of your website to an “under maintenance” in case of a planned downtime. Simply set a flag in your application.ini and that’s it. In this post we will extend this plugin.

A meaningful extension for this plugin would be to inform web crawlers & search engines that this downtime is temporary. Basically, all you have to do to inform Google, Bing and Co. about the status of your website is to set the correct HTTP status code. For our maintenance plugin, this would be 503 “Service Temporarily Unavailable”. According to W3C this status code is defined as: “The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.”

Furthermore, you can tell the web crawler when you expect your website to be up and running again by setting the ‘Retry-After’ status. In our example, we tell Google that it may retry crawling our website in 3600 seconds. Alternatively, you could also set a date, e.g. ”Sun, 22. Jan 2012 23:00:00 GMT”.

Both can be done in your maintenance Action by simply adding the following two lines of code

$this->getResponse()->setHttpResponseCode(503);
$this->getResponse()->setHeader('Retry-After', '3600');

Hope this helps…

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

Some technical notes: the project has been implemented using Zend Framework on the server-side and jQuery on the client-side. The backend (the process that crawls the web, analyzes & organizes text, and calculates a relevance for each user) uses dozens of free or commercial web services.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

In fact, there can often be a number of advantages to creating an original website design. Often, it can be particularly beneficial to those who are looking to develop their own brand or image. Whether you’re creating a games sites, like party poker, or developing a new email client, similar to hotmail, developing a recognisable brand image can prove crucial By designing your own sites, complete with unique features, you can help to ensure that the products or facilities which you are offering have their own unique image. If you are hoping to match up to your biggest competitors, then this is something which can be of a huge advantage.

As well as helping to make sure your site stands out from the crowd, customisation options can also help to make sure your web pages are as user-friendly as possible. Whilst pre-set layouts and designs may look impressive, they rarely cater for a site perfectly. Added features – such as an image gallery, for example – can be the perfect way display a product or theme, and can make all the difference to your site as a whole. With step-by-step web development guides available online, there are certainly a number of benefits to be had from including relevant examples of web coding within your overall site design.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

Anyway, I’ve just wanted to let you know that web punk is not dead. I’ll publish some (hopefully) interesting posts within the next days.

PS: I’m still looking for co-authors. If you are interested, please contact me…

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it

If you don’t know yet what ZIDS is, or want to know how it works, please have a look at the manual

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it