December 31, 2006

2006 - a personal review

Posted in Planet at 6:14 pm by lig

I have to admit - I am not one of the great PHP coders. Just a normal Joe (or in my case Jane) here. But I wanted to look back on the year to see what I have learned and done as well as how much the year has changed me.

Well I started 2006 with an earthquake on the January 4th. Talk about shaking up the new year. The only really interesting thing I posted about was a simple question - Who owns your code? Well and a plug for the #phpc channel on freenode.

February had me reading “Objects, Patterns and Practice” (which I still haven’t finished), learning about the phpDoc plugin for Vim (I love that thing), changing hosting services (had to do some modifications on the site to get it working on the new one), and having to cancel my trip to the Philippines to see my dad while he is out here.

March had the first release of the Zend Framework - which I promptly played with for a while but didn’t come back to until the end of the year, and my taking and passing the MySQL4 Core Certification test.

April saw my good friend Davey start of the PHP thinktank channel on freenode (yep - another channel I normally am on), the start of the call for the Google Summer of Code, and my Dad flying out from the Philippines to visit me.

May was quiet since my dad was visiting. I was writing a few basic phpt tests for the QA team at the time and made a couple of notes to myself.

June saw me upgrade the blog and bring it to it’s current implementation, my daughter come out from California and get diving certified, me becoming a codewalkers admin, an apress technical editor, and get Part I of my MySQL Stored Procedures article accepted for phparchitect’s A/R/T.

July was when I almost killed myself out of good old fashioned stupidity. That was fun and I still have the scars. Anyway - it was also the month when we took our Australia trip which was fabulous. Have the pictures to prove it.

August had Part II of the MySQL Stored Procedures article go up on A/R/T, my posting of 25 ways to help PHP and the guys on Pro::PHP podcasting mentioning me because of it, the first glimmers of the PHPCommunity site being moved to ning (which it later did do), my daughter flying back to the US to live with her biological father, and my being hired for a new job.

September saw me start my current job, remember Sept 1t1h and cry again, and do a blog post on MySQL user defined functions. So it was a pretty quiet month.

October had me turn a year older, make the call for PHP women to stand up and be counted (which in turn lead to the start of the PHPWomen.org site). I also managed to take and pass the PHP4 Zend certification test.

November saw the beginning of the holiday craziness, my mother-in-law coming out for a visit, and my husband reenlisting for the last time (he will be retiring from the military after this). Basically anything PHP related was put on a back burner.

And finally, December had the book I was tech editing being published, my being asked to help write a book with a friend, and though I haven’t posted on it a return for me to working with the Zend Framework.

All in all it has been an incredible year for me with so many opportunities and lots fun along the way. So what are my goals for this next year?

  1. finish the book I am helping write and see it published
  2. get PHP5 ZCE
  3. get MySQL5 developer certified
  4. learn Javascript and DOM
  5. either go back to the little bit of C# I know and become more comfortable in it - or try a new lang. Not sure which
  6. Attend a PHP conference

Cross your fingers so hopefully I get to do them all next year.

December 30, 2006

Windows Builds for Php-Gtk2

Posted in Planet at 9:38 pm by Elizabeth Marie Smith

I now have working almost automated builds running for PHP-Gtk2 with CVS versions of PHP-Gtk2 and PHP5.2. Almost because 1. I haven’t written code to automatically upload the zip files and delete files if there are more than 5 snaps sitting there and 2. I still have to start them manually by calling the .bat file. And [...]

December 25, 2006

So how well do you know your holiday specials?

Posted in Planet at 4:57 pm by lig

Try taking this quiz and see how well you know your holiday specials. I thought I knew them pretty well but I guess not. Only got 17/36 correct. Have to pay closer attention next year.

And just to have it PHP related - the site uses the .php extension.

So what is your score?

December 18, 2006

Fun with compiling - Gtk+, PHP-Gtk2, and MSVC

Posted in Planet at 1:39 pm by Elizabeth Marie Smith

So I’ve been using microsoft visual studio (actually it’s Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I’ve been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working [...]

December 13, 2006

SQL Server DNS

Posted in Planet at 10:31 pm by lig

Was having problems getting my PDO to connect to the SQL Server with ODBC.
And to make matters worse I am on a windows LAN, the web server is a *nix box and my testing computer is M$. My DSN just was not right and wouldn't play - my host string was off and any permutation I used wasn't working. Looked at the PDO docs, the DSN docs in the manual, connectionstrings.com and no love.

I am most comfortable working with MySQL so getting the SQL Server to play had been frustrating in the extreme (hate when simple things are made hard - wanted to kick something). Turned out I needed to add my "instance" of the SQL server (not my word - bosses) to the host. So what did I finally come up with that works

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. $host = '192.0.0.0\InstanceName';
  2. $user = 'user';
  3. $pass = 'xxxxxxxx';
  4. $db = 'test';
  5.  
  6. $dbh = new PDO("odbc:Driver={SQL Server};Server=$host;Database=$db;Uid=$user;Pwd=$pass;");

* was it just me or was that an alphabet soup?

December 12, 2006

PHP 5.x - What is your server running?

Posted in News at 4:39 pm by Elizabeth Marie Smith

Ilia Alshanetsky - an active PHP developer, has posted an interesting post asking opinions about upgrading from PHP 4.x to PHP 5.x The comments seem to host a range of excuses, like the chicken and the egg application quandry ( Popular PHP applications don’t require PHP 5 so hosters don’t upgrade so popular PHP applications don’t require PHP 5.x - do you see the infinite recursion?), the cost in both time and money of running and testing “legacy code” - even blaming Linux distributions.

I’ve personally been using PHP 5 since the first beta, and can’t even remember how to code for 4 anymore. I’ve also had some surprisingly pleasant experiences moving procedural style applications from 4 to 5. I’ve also had a horror story featuring much search and replace dealing with an upgrade of a predominately OO application.

So what are your thoughts on PHP 5.x? Are hosters the problem? Or applications? Or is it just word of mouth marketing that needs to bring the new version into the spotlight? PHP 4.x is dead, and as Ilia states - “PHP 4 is basically in low maintenance mode with very few developers even looking at it. The only things going into it are security fixes are [sic] critical bug fixes. Even that may go away once the current maintainer Derick Rethans loses interest”

What is your server running today?  Upgrading isn’t as hard as you might think.  There’s even a book to help you out - although it’s probably easier just to read the manual.

CC_Tooltips - easy php-gtk tooltip management

Posted in Planet at 11:57 am by Elizabeth Marie Smith

This is the first article in a series on the features and usage of Callicore Desktop. CC Desktop is a “framework” for php-gtk2 applications. Basically it includes commonly used widgets and classes to make developing programs quick and easy. Tooltips are useful snippets of information displayed in a pop-up window that appears when a [...]

December 10, 2006

Writing a book

Posted in Planet at 10:21 pm by lig

Can you believe someone actually asked me to help write a book?! Me. LOL. Anyway the papers are signed and I already have a looming deadline. Can't say what it is on other than PHP - but was just so tickled pink I had to share.

December 6, 2006

Quick snip

Posted in Planet at 12:58 am by lig

Am playing a bit with the ZF - basically doing shiflett's tutorial on it, when I came upon a bit of a problem.

*Right about here I should note I haven't even looked at the ZF in almost a year and quite a bit has changed.

Anyway - I am using a subfolder of web root to play with the ZF and was having troubles getting my controller to go to the correct place. After considering hacking both the Apache doc root and the actual Zend_Controller_Router code and writing a patch, I stumbled on the answer - Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter.

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. // url - http://localhost/Test/www/:controller/:action
  2. $router = new Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter();
  3. $router->setRewriteBase('/Test/www/');
  4. $controller->setRouter($router);

Seems to be working so far.

December 1, 2006

Callicore Desktop - A PHP-GTK2 Framework

Posted in Planet at 8:48 pm by Elizabeth Marie Smith

I haven’t posted for awhile but I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on Writer, well rearranging actually, to make the code easier to use and manage. Callicore Desktop is the base of Writer (really Callicore Writer) - it’s basically a framework for PHP-GTK2. Don’t look at me like that, I haven’t lost my [...]