A quick note to anyone building PHP with cURL or http extension support as well as one of the MySQL extensions (mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql). The MySQL binaries found on mysql.com are built against yaSSL as opposed to the more common openssl against which libcurl (usede by cURL and HTTP extensions) is linked. The conflict between the two libraries causes curl initialization of the SSL layer to fail preventing startup of the PHP extensions.

To fix this problem you can either use older mysqlclient binaries (5.0.18 works) or compile MySQL yourself against openssl, either of these two will allow a working build of PHP with MySQL and curl support.

The Term Tagging

The popular feature of 'tagging' content is nothing new. The average netizen should have encountered it by now. Tagging was made popular by sites like del.icio.us and flickr, where users can attach free-form strings, so-called 'tags' to their bookmarks and images. The viewer can then use these tags to navigate through one or more user's contents and locate related content.

Scientific Background

The most-cited work on tagging is this research paper from HP, which starts categorizing tagging as 'folksonomy' (folk taxonomy) in contrast to the conventional term taxonomy. A taxonomy is usually a categorization of content according to a hierarchical and exclusive tree of attributes, while the folksonomy is …

two interesting posts arrived on the memcached list which might be interesting to performance people.

The first was a comparison of The fastest lanugage binding on which ‘P’ language performed better. To make a note the PHP version actually uses libmemcache a ‘C’ library which goes a bit of the way to explain the wild disparity in speeds.

The 2nd more interesting one (to me) was the discussion of how Digg switched from using mysql to memcached with v3 of their new interface to handle storing sessions, due to a hardware crash on their mysql server.

others mentioned using InnoDB for this instead of MyISAM, with the biggest issue …

“There?s no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don?t match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience.”

I’m not sure I agree with her, just like there really is no shortage for skilled workers, there are a lot of companies that are willing to train and mentor. What’s happening is that the people who need to be trained/mentored are asking for salaries that would say they don’t need to be trained and mentored. The companies that are crying about the shortage, usually don’t pay well enough, or are in not so prime locations anymore. A company wants to pay 2001 prices for someone with 10 yrs of experience, in an area that is over priced real estate wise, or the commute to the office is horrible, this prevents the qualified, highly skilled people to not want to work.

When I lived in …

The method I would like to describe is based on the webserver lighttpd.

Lighttpd is a single process webserver written for high traffic sites. It supports fast-cgi out of the box which makes it ideal for hosting PHP applications. There are lots of nice modules for the daily work like mod_access or mod_rewrite. For more infos see the internals

There are also some benchmarks there. Lighty´s home is always worth having a look at.

Continue reading "Methods to reduce the load of your webserver by caching content: using lighttpd, MySQL UDF, LUA and speed everything up."

Right now I am in Skien, which is somewhere in the middle of the dark forests of Norway. Skien, a bustling town of a whopping 45.000 people is the seventh largest municipiality in Norway, and also the home of the PHP Vikinger Unconference.

My part on this Unconference was to hold a Nontalk, a session where I asked the audience to come up with things that they think are typical for Everyday PHP use and that currently do not have a name.

The following stuff are the slightly edited and commented notes I made in front of the audience while moderating our session.

Continue reading "phpvikinger.org: Things that have no name"

Garvin Hicking has released Serendipity 1.0 today.

Congratulations to Garvin and his contributors! Thank you for the best blogging software there is!

Garvin Hicking has released Serendipity 1.0 today.

Congratulations to Garvin and his contributors! Thank you for the best blogging software there is!

Using MySQL most of you will be familiar with this: searching in textfields for keywords is quite uncomfortable when using other table handler then MyISAM. If you use MyISAM, you can utilise the Fulltext-Search with MATCH … AGAINST. Otherwise you are thrown back to “simple” string comparison functions (LIKE). Not really satisfying. As this won’t [...]

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting …