Wow, 15 years ago, on June 8th 1995, Rasmus announced PHP 1.0. Time for a personal look back:

I can't remember when I first went online. Out from the local BBS systems into the wide open net. It must have been around the same time. But soon I figured out that I needed my own homepage, so I created one, using black fonts on a green (#00ff00) background. I was proud. The only issue: I had no idea how to make it accessible to others, I had the HTML file local on the PC, but well, I still was proud. I was proud since the effect of this HTML with a little bit of JavaScript was way stronger than most of my BASIC stuff I did before.

A bit later, in 1998, a cousin brought a magazine about writing Perl CGI applications which caught my attention so I started learning about CGI and Perl and all the …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.04 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 10.04 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

A useful feature of statistical systems in social networking backend's is the analysis of when members are mostly, or better said, in average online. Imagine, that we have a database table to store DATETIME-timestamps of when users logged in, which could look like this:

Read the rest »

Everybody working on Unix or in the database world stumbles over Oracle Berkeley DB every now and then. DB is an Open Source embedded database used by applications like OpenLDAP or Postfix. Traditionally it followed mostly a key-value access pattern. Now what caught my attention was the fact that the recently released DB 5.0 provides an SQLite-like C API with the promise of providing better concurrency and performance than regular SQLite. Time to give it a shot.

So I grabbed the source distribution, checked the documentation and saw that I shall use the …

These are the slides to a talk I did earlier this week for students of the professional bachelor in ICT course at KaHo St. Lieven. I wanted to give a clear and simple introduction to the memcached service, as I think it’s an invaluable tool in today’s web development.

It's taken almost 12 months, but I finally finished a CalDAV plugin for SabreDAV. I've stayed within the standard as much as possible, but had to leave out some features that failed to meet the cost/benefit requirement.

Most importantly, there's solid support for Apple iCal, Evolution, Lightning/Sunbird, and the iPhone.

It all uses PDO, and it's tested on both SQLite3 and MySQL.

SabreDAV is primarily intended as a toolkit to implement these protocols in different applications. Despite that, it should be reasonably easy to setup your own CalDAV server. …

I created a new tool this week:
http://code.google.com/p/shard-query

As the name Shard-Query suggests, the goal of the tool is to run a query over multiple shards, and to return the combined results together as a unified query. It uses Gearman to ask each server for a set of rows and then runs the query over the combined set. This isn't a new idea, however, Shard-Query is different than other Gearman examples I've seen, because it supports aggregation.

It does this by doing some basic query rewriting based on the input query.

Take this query for example:

select c2, 
       sum(s0.c1), 
       max(c1) 
 from t1 as s0 
 join t1 using (c1,c2) 
 where c2 = 98818 
 group by c2;

The tool will split this up into two queries.

This first query will be sent to each shard. Notice that …

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If you are one of the following:

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Two examples of escaping data are the following:

• Before you insert a value into a SQL query, using for example mysqli::real_escape_string() or PDO::quote().
• Before you insert data into your output HTML, using htmlspecialchars().

The question I'd like to ask today is, when to do this? There are two possible moments:

1. Right when the data comes in. For SQL this used to be done with 'magic quotes' quite a bit in PHP-land. In general I don't see this happening a lot anymore for SQL. I do however see data encoded using htmlentities/htmlspecialchars before entering the database.
2. The other way to go about it, is to only escape …