Saturday, March 27. 2004

Airports, and flying, suck.

Right now I am sitting in the Montreal Airport at one of those little Internet booths, waiting for my flight to leave.. I should be in the air by now, but apparently the flight has been delayed twice already.. This means I'll miss my connection in Chicago, and who knows how long I'll have to wait there for my flight. The lady behind the counter could not have been more rude to me either. She couldn't understand that I needed to get back home and wanted to know if there was any way to re-book, etc. -- she was too busy complaining about how the flight delay meant she had to stick around to her boss on the phone.

Here's a tip: Never fly Air Canada.

The reason I am in Montreal, for those of you who weren't paying attention, is for the PHP Quebec conference. Although I was only supposed to give one talk on my Tidy extension for PHP, I ended up doing a graphics talk as well because one of the speakers was a no-show. Both talks went amazingly well, as did the entire conference. This was my first time in Montreal, and its amazing how absolutely different this region of Canada is compared to the rest of the country. Everyone here speaks French, which can make things a little difficult, but the city itself can only really be described as sort of a French-America. In all I had a great time, and hopefully I'll be back soon!

Oh, and since I can't really do it now, I will be putting my slides and materials for the talks I gave online when I have access to a real computer. For now, I've spent three dollars -- I think its time to get offline ;)

Saturday, March 27. 2004

Airports, and flying, suck.

Right now I am sitting in the Montreal Airport at one of those little Internet booths, waiting for my flight to leave.. I should be in the air by now, but apparently the flight has been delayed twice already.. This means I'll miss my connection in Chicago, and who knows how long I'll have to wait there for my flight. The lady behind the counter could not have been more rude to me either. She couldn't understand that I needed to get back home and wanted to know if there was any way to re-book, etc. -- she was too busy complaining about how the flight delay meant she had to stick around to her boss on the phone.

Here's a tip: Never fly Air Canada.

The reason I am in Montreal, for those of you who weren't paying attention, is for the PHP Quebec conference. Although I was only supposed to give one talk on my Tidy extension for PHP, I ended up doing a graphics talk as well because one of the speakers was a no-show. Both talks went amazingly well, as did the entire conference. This was my first time in Montreal, and its amazing how absolutely different this region of Canada is compared to the rest of the country. Everyone here speaks French, which can make things a little difficult, but the city itself can only really be described as sort of a French-America. In all I had a great time, and hopefully I'll be back soon!

Oh, and since I can't really do it now, I will be putting my slides and materials for the talks I gave online when I have access to a real computer. For now, I've spent three dollars -- I think its time to get offline ;)

Tuesday, March 23. 2004

For quite some time now there has been a debate raging in the PHP Development (internals) community when it comes to a standard naming convention for new extensions that are standard in PHP5. These extensions all support a dual-syntax which allows them to be used in a procedural or object-oriented context... for instance:


<?php

$tidy = tidy_parse_file('myfile.html');
echo tidy_get_contents($tidy);

?>


or...

<?php

$tidy = new tidy();
$tidy->parseFile('myfile.html');
echo $tidy->value;

?>



The big debate that is going on is how the object-oriented side of things will be named. As you can read for yourself in this Huge thread on internals, there was a lot of flaming going back and forth regarding the use of studlyCaps. There were those that thought studlyCaps were "stupidCaps" and wanted methods to be named parse_file() instead of parseFile(). When it was all said and done studlyCaps seemed to have more favor, and so the decision was made to move to them.

Because of this decision I went through my Tidy extension and changed all of the method calls to the new studlyCaps convention. However, it recently came to my attention that neither SQLite nor MySQLi (two extensions which have a similar dual-syntax) changed. With RC1 just out the door, debate has again raged. On one hand, there are those who think establishing a consistent convention in these new extensions is very important and want to see them changed to studlyCaps. On the other hand, there are those who never liked studlyCaps to begin with and are fighting hard to keep the understore_method syntax, claiming that it will break people's code if its changed.

What do you, readers of this blog, think? Are you in favor of studlyCaps or not for methods? Regardless, do you think having a consistency is important and it should either be all one or all the other? If the API is changed, are your scripts going to break (have you been writing important code based on PHP 5 already?) Let's hear from you!

Tuesday, March 23. 2004

For quite some time now there has been a debate raging in the PHP Development (internals) community when it comes to a standard naming convention for new extensions that are standard in PHP5. These extensions all support a dual-syntax which allows them to be used in a procedural or object-oriented context... for instance:


<?php

$tidy = tidy_parse_file('myfile.html');
echo tidy_get_contents($tidy);

?>


or...

<?php

$tidy = new tidy();
$tidy->parseFile('myfile.html');
echo $tidy->value;

?>



The big debate that is going on is how the object-oriented side of things will be named. As you can read for yourself in this Huge thread on internals, there was a lot of flaming going back and forth regarding the use of studlyCaps. There were those that thought studlyCaps were "stupidCaps" and wanted methods to be named parse_file() instead of parseFile(). When it was all said and done studlyCaps seemed to have more favor, and so the decision was made to move to them.

Because of this decision I went through my Tidy extension and changed all of the method calls to the new studlyCaps convention. However, it recently came to my attention that neither SQLite nor MySQLi (two extensions which have a similar dual-syntax) changed. With RC1 just out the door, debate has again raged. On one hand, there are those who think establishing a consistent convention in these new extensions is very important and want to see them changed to studlyCaps. On the other hand, there are those who never liked studlyCaps to begin with and are fighting hard to keep the understore_method syntax, claiming that it will break people's code if its changed.

What do you, readers of this blog, think? Are you in favor of studlyCaps or not for methods? Regardless, do you think having a consistency is important and it should either be all one or all the other? If the API is changed, are your scripts going to break (have you been writing important code based on PHP 5 already?) Let's hear from you!

Thursday, March 18. 2004

For the past few weeks or so I have been a part of the OSCON 2004 planning committee for the PHP track, and let me tell you there were quite a few excellent submissions this year! Although its a little close to Hollie's due date, I'll be in Portland, OR for the conference as well. During the conference, I'll be giving two talks -- One on writing PHP extensions, and the other on the sometimes mysterious way PHP and HTML forms can interact. You can read the abstractions here on my Speaking Engagements page if you'd like to know more.

Thursday, March 18. 2004

For the past few weeks or so I have been a part of the OSCON 2004 planning committee for the PHP track, and let me tell you there were quite a few excellent submissions this year! Although its a little close to Hollie's due date, I'll be in Portland, OR for the conference as well. During the conference, I'll be giving two talks -- One on writing PHP extensions, and the other on the sometimes mysterious way PHP and HTML forms can interact. You can read the abstractions here on my Speaking Engagements page if you'd like to know more.

Thursday, March 18. 2004

For a while now I have been quietly participating in the PHPCommunity.org project with guys like Chris Shiflett and George Schlossnagle as a member of the Steering committee. For those of you who have yet to be introduced to the project, the intention is to provide a real central hub for PHP users worldwide much along the same thing that Perl has. The project itself is completely volunteeer based, with O'Reilly Publishing providing server space and companies like Sams Publishing, php|architect, and PHP Magazine also contributing time and their resourcces.

The project is organized into a number of sub-projects such as Framework, Bug tracking, Blogging, Interface, etc. Each of these projects has a project lead (I am the lead of the Framework project) and the leads are starting to move forward with everything. Recently, we got our Mailing List manager set up as well, which is going to really help out in pulling everything together.

Interested? Want to get involved? Wonderful!

• If you would like to read more, we have a nice active Wiki that has been the base of operations while we get started. Feel free to read up and catch up!
  
• Subscribe! Once you have determined where you'd like to get involved, go visit the Mailing lists and subscribe to the projects you are interested in.
  
• Come talk with us. We can all be found in the #phpc channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC server.
  

This project has a lot of real backing from some of the biggest names in PHP. Get involved and be a part of something that can really make a difference!

Thursday, March 18. 2004

For a while now I have been quietly participating in the PHPCommunity.org project with guys like Chris Shiflett and George Schlossnagle as a member of the Steering committee. For those of you who have yet to be introduced to the project, the intention is to provide a real central hub for PHP users worldwide much along the same thing that Perl has. The project itself is completely volunteeer based, with O'Reilly Publishing providing server space and companies like Sams Publishing, php|architect, and PHP Magazine also contributing time and their resourcces.

The project is organized into a number of sub-projects such as Framework, Bug tracking, Blogging, Interface, etc. Each of these projects has a project lead (I am the lead of the Framework project) and the leads are starting to move forward with everything. Recently, we got our Mailing List manager set up as well, which is going to really help out in pulling everything together.

Interested? Want to get involved? Wonderful!

• If you would like to read more, we have a nice active Wiki that has been the base of operations while we get started. Feel free to read up and catch up!
  
• Subscribe! Once you have determined where you'd like to get involved, go visit the Mailing lists and subscribe to the projects you are interested in.
  
• Come talk with us. We can all be found in the #phpc channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC server.
  

This project has a lot of real backing from some of the biggest names in PHP. Get involved and be a part of something that can really make a difference!

Wednesday, March 17. 2004

I've seen a lot of stuff, but This is just over the top. It makes my Ascii art generator very sad in comparison.

Wednesday, March 17. 2004

I've seen a lot of stuff, but This is just over the top. It makes my Ascii art generator very sad in comparison.

Monday, March 15. 2004

There are a ton of things going on, so I thought I'd drop a quick note on here to let you all know:

• The Photo Gallery is back online! To get it to work, I had to do some Proxy magic to make PHP 4 and PHP 5 run on the same server. I also have photos from php|cruise now online.
  
• I am working on re-designing coggeshall.org. We'll have a new look, a new logo, and hopefully a lot sexier design soon! The site will be expanded beyond just a blog to include some more useful stuff for the PHP Community in general.
  
• A week or so ago I committed my latest experimental philter extension for PHP into the repository. Basically, this extension allows you to write "philter" modules which pre-process a PHP script before it is executed by the Zend Engine. This all happens transparently, which is why its cool. For now all I have in CVS is a base64 philter, which encodes your PHP scripts in base64 and decodes them transparently when the file is executed. However, I also have a working blowfish encryption philter as well, which will allow you to truly encrypt your PHP scripts to keep them from prying eyes. Before I commit that however, I need to work out key management so stay tuned! If you'd like to use philter you'll have to check it out from CVS:
  
  
  cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co pecl/philter
  

I'm sure I'll be hitting on these things more in the future so don't go far.

Monday, March 15. 2004

There are a ton of things going on, so I thought I'd drop a quick note on here to let you all know:

• The Photo Gallery is back online! To get it to work, I had to do some Proxy magic to make PHP 4 and PHP 5 run on the same server. I also have photos from php|cruise now online.
  
• I am working on re-designing coggeshall.org. We'll have a new look, a new logo, and hopefully a lot sexier design soon! The site will be expanded beyond just a blog to include some more useful stuff for the PHP Community in general.
  
• A week or so ago I committed my latest experimental philter extension for PHP into the repository. Basically, this extension allows you to write "philter" modules which pre-process a PHP script before it is executed by the Zend Engine. This all happens transparently, which is why its cool. For now all I have in CVS is a base64 philter, which encodes your PHP scripts in base64 and decodes them transparently when the file is executed. However, I also have a working blowfish encryption philter as well, which will allow you to truly encrypt your PHP scripts to keep them from prying eyes. Before I commit that however, I need to work out key management so stay tuned! If you'd like to use philter you'll have to check it out from CVS:
  
  
  cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co pecl/philter
  

I'm sure I'll be hitting on these things more in the future so don't go far.

Wednesday, March 10. 2004

I've been holding on to this information for a while now but I think now is as good as of a time as any to make the public announcement! Many of those who were on the Cruise last week already know, but...






That's right! I'll soon be joining the ranks of the likes of George, Wez and I'm sure many others as a proud father! Today was an incredibly surreal experience, as Hollie and went in for our first Ultrasound. To watch the baby kicking around is something that you can't really put into words. Although Chris seems to think that the baby looks a lot like StrongBad (Pictured on the right), the doctors assure us that we have a very healthy 18 week old baby on our hands.

For those who are interested, August 12th is our due date! As for the sex of the child, i