Monday, June 28. 2004

Well I've made it back from Karlsruhe, Germany for this year's LinuxTag conference! It was a great conference and I enjoyed myself very much. For those of you who were curious, you can see the photos from the conference Right here.

While at the conference, Wez and I hacked together something that is going to very cool for PHP. However, I'm not ready to tell the world yet as we need to polish it up a bit before letting it out into the wild. All I'll say is its for PHP 5, nearly every application will benefit from it, it's going to be very easy to use, and it's going to really rock :)

I know. The anticipation is almost too much to stand. ;) Give me a little time to hack on it some more before I commit it to PECL.

Monday, June 28. 2004

Well I've made it back from Karlsruhe, Germany for this year's LinuxTag conference! It was a great conference and I enjoyed myself very much. For those of you who were curious, you can see the photos from the conference Right here.

While at the conference, Wez and I hacked together something that is going to very cool for PHP. However, I'm not ready to tell the world yet as we need to polish it up a bit before letting it out into the wild. All I'll say is its for PHP 5, nearly every application will benefit from it, it's going to be very easy to use, and it's going to really rock :)

I know. The anticipation is almost too much to stand. ;) Give me a little time to hack on it some more before I commit it to PECL.

Monday, June 21. 2004

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for Karlsruhe, Germany for the 2004 LinuxTag conference. I've heard a lot of good things about this conference, and although they aren't specifically PHP-related I'm looking forward to see what all the hype is about! For those of you who will be attending, I'll be giving two talks. One will be on Tidy, and the second will be about the PHP Community project I am involved in with George and Chris. So if you'll be there, stop by and say hi!



On another note, shortly after I return from Germany I'll be moving to New York City where I accepted a full-time position as Senior Developer at Community Connect, Inc. This has been on the burner for a while now, and I'm very excited that CCI was interested in hiring me. The company is very open-source minded whose employees have written both APC and APD. They have even has agreed to allow me some time to attend conferences in the future (for instance, I'll still be at OSCON and php|works). I still plan on being very involved in PHP as well as the open-source community, and if they'll have me I would love to become an active member of NYPHP as well.

Well that's all for now. I'll release a new version of BLENC as soon as I can find some time to hack on it.

Monday, June 21. 2004

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for Karlsruhe, Germany for the 2004 LinuxTag conference. I've heard a lot of good things about this conference, and although they aren't specifically PHP-related I'm looking forward to see what all the hype is about! For those of you who will be attending, I'll be giving two talks. One will be on Tidy, and the second will be about the PHP Community project I am involved in with George and Chris. So if you'll be there, stop by and say hi!



On another note, shortly after I return from Germany I'll be moving to New York City where I accepted a full-time position as Senior Developer at Community Connect, Inc. This has been on the burner for a while now, and I'm very excited that CCI was interested in hiring me. The company is very open-source minded whose employees have written both APC and APD. They have even has agreed to allow me some time to attend conferences in the future (for instance, I'll still be at OSCON and php|works). I still plan on being very involved in PHP as well as the open-source community, and if they'll have me I would love to become an active member of NYPHP as well.

Well that's all for now. I'll release a new version of BLENC as soon as I can find some time to hack on it.

Thursday, June 10. 2004

For those of you who use the Tidy extension in PHP 4 (available in the PECL Repository), I have released Tidy 1.1. This release fixes a few memory leaks and other minor issues. So if you are using Tidy version 1.0, it is recommended you upgrade.


You and find the latest version Here.

Thursday, June 10. 2004

For those of you who use the Tidy extension in PHP 4 (available in the PECL Repository), I have released Tidy 1.1. This release fixes a few memory leaks and other minor issues. So if you are using Tidy version 1.0, it is recommended you upgrade.


You and find the latest version Here.

Thursday, June 3. 2004

Back in Vancouver I first brought up the usefulness of a PHP extension which ran encrypted PHP scripts transparently as part of what was then called the philter extension. Since then, I have moved away from the philter extension and taken my work in a more focused direction. Today the public gets its first glance at this work with the alpha release of the BLENC extension in the PHP PECL Repository. To my knowledge this alpha should work on versions of PHP 4.3.0+ and higher, although honestly it was only tested in PHP 5.0 RC3. Using BLENC is really simple, as it only has one function:

blenc_encrypt($input_data, $output_file [, $key]);

The $input_data parameter is a string representing the data to encode (in general this would be a PHP script loaded using the file_get_contents function). The $output_file parameter is the filename to write the encrypted script to (i.e. myscript.phpe), and the third optional parameter $key is the key to encrypt the PHP script with. If no key is provided, a random one will be generated.

Once an encrypted PHP script has been generated, the key to decrypt it must be stored in the key file in order for the PHP script to be executed. These keys are stored in the text file specified by the blenc.key_file php.ini
configuration directive (one per line, default /usr/local/etc/blenckeys).
Assuming you have a valid decryption key in your key file, the PHP script will execute as if it was any other PHP script. However, if you do not have a valid decryption key you will receieve a message such as the following:

Fatal error: Validation of script 'encrypted.phpe' failed, cannot execute.

Let me know if there are any problems using it! Have fun!

Thursday, June 3. 2004

Back in Vancouver I first brought up the usefulness of a PHP extension which ran encrypted PHP scripts transparently as part of what was then called the philter extension. Since then, I have moved away from the philter extension and taken my work in a more focused direction. Today the public gets its first glance at this work with the alpha release of the BLENC extension in the PHP PECL Repository. To my knowledge this alpha should work on versions of PHP 4.3.0+ and higher, although honestly it was only tested in PHP 5.0 RC3. Using BLENC is really simple, as it only has one function:

blenc_encrypt($input_data, $output_file [, $key]);

The $input_data parameter is a string representing the data to encode (in general this would be a PHP script loaded using the file_get_contents function). The $output_file parameter is the filename to write the encrypted script to (i.e. myscript.phpe), and the third optional parameter $key is the key to encrypt the PHP script with. If no key is provided, a random one will be generated.

Once an encrypted PHP script has been generated, the key to decrypt it must be stored in the key file in order for the PHP script to be executed. These keys are stored in the text file specified by the blenc.key_file php.ini
configuration directive (one per line, default /usr/local/etc/blenckeys).
Assuming you have a valid decryption key in your key file, the PHP script will execute as if it was any other PHP script. However, if you do not have a valid decryption key you will receieve a message such as the following:

Fatal error: Validation of script 'encrypted.phpe' failed, cannot execute.

Let me know if there are any problems using it! Have fun!