Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081

Our employee and Mayflower Fellow Thorsten Rinne develops and maintains in his sparse free time a popular FAQ management system called phpMyFAQ. Its current release is V1.6 (see press coverage on golem.de) and phpMyFAQ is licensed under MPL. Popular users of phpMyFAQ are: Stanford University, Apple, the German telecommunication company Arcor, some big E-Commerce company, Knorr Bremse AG and others.

The CVS source tree is hosted at our dev platform thinkforge.org which I mentioned in another post.

phpMyFAQ is available in 30 languages, including Chinese, …

I’m clearing some space on the bookshelf and have a few books up on eBay looking for a good home.

Click Me!

I thought I would take some time and increase my understanding of PHP and MySQL. I came up with an idea for a project and decided the lowest hanging fruit would be a script to track external links.

The script will reside on a go.domain.com subdomain with the name go.php. It takes a single parameter on the GET string named url, checks it for cleanness, checks that the referrer has the same domain name, then performs a 301 redirect and logs the request.

Here’s the table:

CREATE TABLE go_log
(
  access_time TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  user_name VARCHAR(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  user_ip INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  referer VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL,
  link VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=ARCHIVE DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The referer and link columns are roughly twice as big as what a Google search reveals as the longest URL, just to be safe …

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

PHP 5.1.3 was just released, including the latest PDO and PDO drivers. If you're still running older releases of PHP you should probably upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade the PHP core then you'll be pleased to know that I've also released the PHP 5.1.3 versions of PDO, PDO::MYSQL, PDO::PGSQL, PDO::SQLITE and PDO::ODBC to PECL--these are the versions that I've had time to personally test.

These are identical to the code in PHP 5.1.3, with the exception of PDO::ODBC, which includes two additional bug fixes that didn't make it in time.

Enjoy!

On a related note, I noticed that people were downloading PHP 5.1.2 and then trying to build older PDO drivers from PECL into it, and then filing bugs when it didn't work. Don't do that; it really doesn't make sense. As a general rule, PHP 5.1 and higher bundle PDO, so if the version of PHP you are using is newer than the latest PECL package, stick with the version of PDO that …

or, why I find the Solaris manual pages amusing.

In this thread on the php internals list, Kevin is asking why the handling of whitespace in certain PDO DSNs is inconsistent. I go on to point out that the manual doesn't say anything about whitespace in DSNs, and that all the documented examples have no whitespace around the DSN parameters.

His response was:

   but in this example we have a space and it works
   mysql: host = localhost; dbname=test

And another that I got via private email:

Read more...

I tried to upload my slides from the conference, but run into problems with a firewall somewhere, so they've had to wait for me to return home.

So, here we are: Using MySQL with PDO (PDF).

This was my first MySQL users conference, and it seemed to go well. Truth be told, I'm not a database fanatic (which is ironic considering my involvement with PDO), so I didn't find a lot of the material to my taste. I did learn a few things from Jim Winsteads embedded mysql talk (something I bet he'll be surprised to hear :) and also Hartmut Holzgraefe's mysqli talk. I also got to chat to Monty about the issues I mentioned and meet some new faces, including my Evil sysadmin, some old and some older faces (Hi …

Dear MySQL User Conference Attendees,

The resources I mentioned to some or many of you are:

• The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - the classic MIT introductory computer science course textbook (and supporting video lectures are here.)
• PHP Vikinger - a PHP-focused unconference held in Norway on June 24 and 25th.
• GPL v3 site - make sure to check out the comments section
• eZ components - well-designed components for PHP web apps that are well-designed, …

I've recently discovered a few things about how the mysql client library does things that seem a bit silly to me, so I'm going to share them with you.

• native prepared statements cannot take advantage of the query cache, resulting in lower performance.
• native prepared statements cannot execute certains types of queries, like "SHOW TABLES"
• native prepared statements don't correctly communicate column lengths for certain other "SHOW" queries, resulting in garbled results.

• calling stored procedures multiple times using native prepared statements causes the connection to drop.

I recommend that you use the following attribute when working with PDO::MYSQL, available in the current PHP 5.1.3 release candidates and snapshots:

$db->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES, true);


This causes the PDO native query parser to …