For the past few months, I’ve been helping my friend develop and market Philtro .
We’ve gone through various iterations of the elevator pitch for it, and the one that seems to be kinda working, is: “It’s like a spam filter for your Twitter account.”

At SXSW, I got the opportunity to talk to Guy Kawasaki about this tool, and he said “There is no spam on twitter, if you don’t like it, don’t follow them”.

While that’s an easy way to handle spam, I also realized that the word Spam means different things to different people.

On Twitter, nothing is UCE. It’s easy to block the profiles with …

As others wrote, or as you can read on php.net or in my twitter feed we've released the second, long awaited, release candidate of PHP 5.3.0.

5.3 is  rather big release including support for namespaces, closures, phar archives, internatioalization support via the new intl extension, improved SQLite support, mysqlnd as backend for the MySQL exensions, impressive performance improvements, ... and tons of other bigger and minor things.

Even though this server is running 5.3 already it's not suggested to be used in production evironments, yet but I'd really like to encourage everybody to test it and give feedback! I'm also interested in positive feedback, not …

Last year I was surprised to be going to Velocity.  Read the post, it was an adventure.  But, I really like the conference.  It is the perfect conference for me.  While a good majority of my work is done coding PHP/MySQL apps, I tend to focus on architecture, frameworks, performance and that kind of stuff.  So, a web performance and operations conference is just perfect.

Last year, I was on a panel with some great guys.  I was able to share just a bit about my experience dealing with the instant success of a web site.  This year, my proposal was accepted to talk more about dealing with success of a web …

I’ve packaged up and released version 1.1.2 of the Cacti templates I’ve written for MySQL, Apache, memcached, nginx etc.

Anyone who would like to help write documentation (or do anything else, for that matter) is welcomed to participate. I’ll give commit access at the drop of a hat.

Changelog:

2009-05-07: version 1.1.2

        * The parsing code did not handle InnoDB plugin / XtraDB (issue 52).
        * The servername was hardcoded in ss_get_by_ssh.php (issue 57).
        * Added Handler_ graphs (issue 47).
        * Config files can be used instead of editing the .php file (issue 39).
        * binary log space is now calculated without a MySQL query (issue 48).
        * There was no easy way to force inputs to be filled (issue 45).
        * Some graphs were partially hidden without --lower-limit (issue 43).
        * Flipped some elements across the …

Many of the DBA's at Valcora, began their careers as PHP Programmers, or before... We remember times sitting in a small office together writing PHP code before there were even books on the subject! We were scouring the web looking for examples and such and relying heavy on the documentation at the php.net site!

We wrote custom shopping carts before the days of oscommerce, zencart, and such. We wrote code to interface with payment gateways and process credit cards live. We also wrote code to pull products from MySQL databases, show staff members, and such. We worked for a newspaper group and were writing news "engines" to pull the articles, archive data, etc.

Why am I reminiscing about all of that? Well, because frankly, we have been there. We know a lot of other developers are still there doing the kind of work that we began with. We know that we can help others not to make the same mistakes we have seen some of our …

Another day, another application that insists on having to count every single object in the db/filesystem/whatever, just to show me a progress bar as it copies/updates/deletes something.

I. Don’t. Care.

Really. I just want you to get started on your task and get the job done.

If you insist on showing a progress bar, fine. But then get the counts you need in parallel with the operation you’ve been asked to perform. Perhaps you’ll find that the job you’ve been asked to do is completed before you finish counting.

User-friendliness my ****.

Getting the job done is user friendly. Wasting my time isn’t.

A four part tutorial that explains the PHP / MySQL extensions - mysql, mysqli, and pdo_mysql - with simple examples is now accessible from Sun Developer Network. While most of the information presented in the tutorial is available elsewhere in bits and pieces, the real value-add is in the introduction of the MySQL native driver for PHP, mysqlnd.

Here is a brief description of all four parts in the series. Check them out, and as always feel free to send the corrections, comments, suggestions, etc., to my Sun mail ID: Giri.Mandalika@Sun.COM

• Part 1: Using the MySQL Improved Extension, mysqli -- describes mysqli, the MySQL Improved Extension that is the successor to the mysql extension

• …

A four part tutorial that explains the PHP / MySQL extensions - mysql, mysqli, and pdo_mysql - with simple examples is now accessible from Sun Developer Network. While most of the information presented in the tutorial is available elsewhere in bits and pieces, the real value-add is in the introduction of the MySQL native driver for PHP, mysqlnd.

Here is a brief description of all four parts in the series. Check them out, and as always feel free to send the corrections, comments, suggestions, etc., to my Sun mail ID: Giri.Mandalika@Sun.COM

• Part 1: Using the MySQL Improved Extension, mysqli -- describes mysqli, the MySQL Improved Extension that is the successor to the mysql extension

• …

A four part tutorial that explains the PHP / MySQL extensions - mysql, mysqli, and pdo_mysql - with simple examples is now accessible from Sun Developer Network. While most of the information presented in the tutorial is available elsewhere in bits and pieces, the real value-add is in the introduction of the MySQL native driver for PHP, mysqlnd.

Here is a brief description of all four parts in the series. Check them out, and as always feel free to send the corrections, comments, suggestions, etc., to my Sun mail ID: Giri.Mandalika@Sun.COM

• Part 1: Using the MySQL Improved Extension, mysqli -- describes mysqli, the MySQL Improved Extension that is the successor to the mysql extension

• …

I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in …