The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. Its goal is to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. So what does this mean for Drupal?

An opcode cache is used to keep compiled PHP code in memory. In a nutshell, when there's a request for a Drupal node, there are all kinds of PHP code that need to  be compiled before PHP can execute that code to query the database, create the webpage, and send it to the browser. The more complex your Drupal site, IE the more modules you have installed, the more PHP code that needs to be compiled. This compilation process occurs on every request to your Drupal site. By installing and enabling an opcode cache, your server will compile all the PHP code once, then store it in memory for later use. When a request happens again for the same PHP code, the opcode …

The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. Its goal is to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. So what does this mean for Drupal?

An opcode cache is used to keep compiled PHP code in memory. In a nutshell, when there's a request for a Drupal node, there are all kinds of PHP code that need to  be compiled before PHP can execute that code to query the database, create the webpage, and send it to the browser. The more complex your Drupal site, IE the more modules you have installed, the more PHP code that needs to be compiled. This compilation process occurs on every request to your Drupal site. By installing and enabling an opcode cache, your server will compile all the PHP code once, then store it in memory for later use. When a request happens again for the same PHP code, the opcode …

A new release of the PrimeBase Media Streaming daemon is now available for download at
http://www.blobstreaming.org .

This release doesn't contain any major new features just some bug fixes and a lot of house keeping changes.

If you look at the download section on http://www.blobstreaming.org you will see that there are now more packages that can be downloaded. I have separated out different client side components from the PBMS project and created separate launchPad projects for each one. You can see them listed in the "Related Links" side panel to the right of this post.

• The "PBMS Client Library" facilitates communication with the PBMS daemon. This library is independent of the PBMS daemon's host server and can be used to communicate with a PBMS daemon hosted by …

In facebook stream you’ll see the time period at the bottom of the stream. For example: 4 minutes ago, 2 days ago, 3 weeks ago…. In our recent project we have to show similar time fashion for our application’s activity stream. So I write a function to retrieve the time duration. In our mysql database, [...]

…

Over the last little while I've come across quite a few XML feed generators written in PHP, with varying degrees of 'correctness'. Even though generating XML should be very simple, there's still quite a bit of pitfalls I feel every PHP or (insert your language)-developer should know about.

1. You are better off using an XML library

This is the first and foremost rule. Most people end up generating their xml using simple string concatenation, while there are many dedicated tools out there that really help you generate your own XML.

In PHP land the best example is XMLWriter. It is actually quite easy to use:

1. <?php
2.  
3. $xmlWriter = new XMLWriter();
4. $xmlWriter->openMemory();
5. $xmlWriter->startDocument('1.0','UTF-8');
6. $xmlWriter->startElement('root'); …

If you haven't already heard PBMS is now part of the Drizzle tree.

Getting it there was a fair bit of work but not as much as I had thought it would be. The process of getting it to work with Drizzle and running it thorough Hudson has improved the code a lot. It is amazing what some compilers will catch that others will let by. I am now a firm believer in treating all compiler warnings as errors.

I am just in the process of updating the PBMS plugin so that it will build and install the PBMS client library (libpbmscl.so) as well as the plugin. The PBMS client library is a standalone library that can be used to access the PBMS daemon weather it is running as part of MySQL or Drizzle. So a PBMS client library built with Drizzle can be used to access a PBMS daemon running as part of MySQL and vice-versa.

There is also PHP extension for PBMS that is basically just a wrapper for the library. Currently this is …

<p>Imagine we have a user table in MySQL and similarly, a products table. Each user can now busily buy items. But this is not what this article is all about. This article is more about, that users can also favor articles they like. From a database point of view, this represents a <em>m:n</em> relation, which is resolved by an additional table. We now want to display a list of all products and all users who favor a specific article. In real world scenarios, this can be a really big amount of data, but let's bring an approximation later into play and focus on the main idea for the moment. In addition we want to know, if the person who is actually logged in into the system, already favors a certain product.</p>

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1. Law of Success 2.0 -- a blog of interviews with famous and/or interesting people, from Brad Feld to Uri Geller.
2. Pioneer One -- crowdsourced funding for TV show, perhaps a hint of the future. Pilot shot for $6,000 which was raised through KickStarter. Distributed via BitTorrent.
3. DrasticTools -- PHP/MySQL visualisation tools, including TreeMap, tag cloud, hierarchical bar chart, and animated list. (via TomC on Delicious)
4. GoogleCL -- command-line interface to Google services. At the moment the services are Picasa, …

Something that is great about PHP is that you can write code that generates more PHP code to be used later. Now, I am not saying this a best practice. I am sure it violates some rule in some book somewhere. But, sometimes you need to be a rule breaker.

A simple example is taking a database of configuration information and dumping it to an array. We do this for each publication we operate. We have a publication table. It contains the name, base URL and other stuff that is specific to that publication. But, why query the database for something that only changes once in a blue moon? We could cache it, but that would still require an on demand database hit. The easy solution is to just dump the data to a PHP array and put it on disk.

<?php

$sql = "select * from publications";

$res = $mysqli->query($sql);

while($row = $res->fetch_assoc()){

    $pubs[$row["publication_id"]] = …

I was trying to setup cacti on my ubuntu desktop to gather metrics from few new database servers we were planning to replace. Installed cacti using the following command

apt-get install cacti

Then the next step was to download and the install the cacti mysql templates from http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/. Thanks to Baron, was able to get this up and running fast using the templates. But had one problem though, while importing the mysql template “cacti_host_template_x_mysql_server_ht_0.8.6i-sver1.1.7.xml” cacti bombed with the below error

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 41 bytes) in /usr/share/cacti/site/lib/xml.php on line 32

The fix was to edit “/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini” change the parameter “memory_limit” from 16M to 32M and …