It's about time, PHP 5.3 is about to be released and with it a lot of new features are introduced into the language. Those of you who have tested the early snapshots and release candidates know of what I'm speaking.
Namespaces, lambda functions, closures, functors and late static binding are some of the new features of the release.
The most important thing for shared hosts might be the ".user.ini", a .htaccess like file that allows users in a virtual hosting environment to change settings of their php instance.

It's too bad that it will take a long time until 5.3 has found it's way on to the webservers. In this time there won't be any big software making use of the new features for the sake of backwards compatibility.
Let's hope it will not take as long as it took to replace PHP 4.

While writing a new article I realized it would be so much better with a screencast. To manage future screencasts I began writing a small framework and called it GeekCast. GeekCast tracks the number of views per video, provides video tagging and an easy API to include videos into foreign pages. I will make GeekCast open source when I consider it to be ready for the public. The project will be the core of the soon to be released Geekmonkey Video service.

The Internet Malwarenet: As of today it's official, the whole internet is a declared malware zone.
Ok, serious. Today, for a short time, Google showed the message "This site may harm your computer" for every search result. Even this page has been marked as malware:



And what happens when the biggest search engine in the world gets unusable? A substitution takes place and yahoo's web servers can show their will to survive.
The whole magic was over after 45 minutes, but it might show some of us how dependent we are from the big "G".

Edit: It seems that the problem still exists internally. The public search is back to normal, but the google webmaster tools report that every page of mine may distribute malware. Let's hope this does not affect global rankings.

Edit: Everything is back to normal. Google reports, that StopBadWare.org mistakenly submitted the URL "/" as a dangerous website, which matched for all domains resulting in the error we've just experienced.

Happy searching :)


- StopBadWare's blog entry

Merry Christmas to you all :)

Working as a System Administrator always means you have to keep your systems up and running. If a system or service goes down, you usually want to know it before any of your customers notices. This is where Server Monitoring comes in. There are a bunch of services that provide server monitoring services on the net, either for free or for a small fee, but the usability and the number of configuration settings however are often unsatisfactory.

Free desktop monitoring software is rare and commercial products are likely to be very expensive. As a matter of fact, my server was under some heavy attack recently, and I would have been grateful if I'd had some desktop software for monitoring my server. In the meantime, I wrote myself a very simple tool telling me if my server is responding to ICMP echo requests - also known as ping.

My server is now back up and running without any loss of data. I began writing a monitoring software in C# 3.0 (C# 3.0 is supported by Mono 2.0) to keep track of my server and the services running on it. In the current pre-alpha state my tool is highly customizable to specific user requirements. An included small web server (http://www.codeplex.com/webserver) will supply XML-data to web services, making it easy to build a web interface.