I am calling it.  The death of the PHP die function.  Now, I have no actual authority to do so.  My PHP CVS karma does not extend that far.  And I doubt it will actually get removed despite it being nothing more than an alias for exit now.

No, what I would like to call a death to is the usage of die such as:

$conn = mysql_connect($server, $user, $pass) or die("Could not connect to MySQL, but needed to tell the whole world");
I don't know who thought that particular usage was good, but they need to .... no, that is harsh.  I just really wish they had never done that.

So, what should you use?  Well, there are a couple of options depending on what context you are working in and whether or not the failure is actually catastrophic.

…

I’ll be travelling all over the US to talk about CouchDB and meet the community for hacking & fun. If you’d like to meet & greet & talk about anything CouchDB, get in touch.

The “tour dates” are:

April 19th – 22nd: CouchHack, Asheville, NC

CouchHack.org is a four-day hacker event featuring 4/7th of the CouchDB developer group including original author Damien Katz. But you can also meet Paul Davis and J Chris Anderson.

We’ll be hacking on cutting-edge CouchDB features and help everybody there to get up to speed with CouchDB usage and internal development.

It’s a free event, just go to the …

I’ll be travelling all over the US to talk about CouchDB and meet the community for hacking & fun. If you’d like to meet & greet & talk about anything CouchDB, get in touch.

The “tour dates” are:

April 19th – 22nd: CouchHack, Asheville, NC

CouchHack.org is a four-day hacker event featuring 4/7th of the CouchDB developer group including original author Damien Katz. But you can also meet Paul Davis and J Chris Anderson.

We’ll be hacking on cutting-edge CouchDB features and help everybody there to get up to speed with CouchDB usage and internal development.

It’s a free event, just go to the …

I’ll be travelling all over the US to talk about CouchDB and meet the community for hacking & fun. If you’d like to meet & greet & talk about anything CouchDB, get in touch.

The “tour dates” are:

April 19th – 22nd: CouchHack, Asheville, NC

CouchHack.org is a four-day hacker event featuring 4/7th of the CouchDB developer group including original author Damien Katz. But you can also meet Paul Davis and J Chris Anderson.

We’ll be hacking on cutting-edge CouchDB features and help everybody there to get up to speed with CouchDB usage and internal development.

It’s a free event, just go to the …

Wow, I'm done with my book ""Developing Web Applications using Perl, memcached, MySQL and Apache" which is slated for July sale. What an experience, one that I intend to write about some day in a separate post. Now I can get back to managing some of my open source projects which need attention. These include:

* DBD::mysql
* DBD::drizzle
* FederatedX Storage Engine
* Memcached Functions For MySQL
* MySQL Web Tutorial Site

I'm really excited- this week I just started working with a fellow Stiepan Kovac (IT-Kovac, Geneva CH). He's been working on implementing SSL into Federated. We are going to try out Amazon's EC2 for our development. Seems pretty interesting so far. No need to have to go through the trouble of installing a Linux box - just select what I want, turn it one and use it!

Another reason for this post is because I'm quite excited about what I've been working on and have …

I’ll be giving my new “Advanced CouchDB” talk at the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) in June. I’m looking forward to go to Amsterdam again after ApacheCon EU a few weeks back.

The talk will be about different data modelling patterns, making the most of views, building distributed applications with replication and share some hints on high-performance.

DPC’s line up looks pretty sweet. I like that it focusses on advanced topics. This is something I see missing from other conferences and I hope to see some interesting talks and I hope that mine is worthwhile and interesting enough for you :)

PS: The Early Bird registration ends April 30th

#dpcthursday

I’ll be giving my new “Advanced CouchDB” talk at the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) in June. I’m looking forward to go to Amsterdam again after ApacheCon EU a few weeks back.

The talk will be about different data modelling patterns, making the most of views, building distributed applications with replication and share some hints on high-performance.

DPC’s line up looks pretty sweet. I like that it focusses on advanced topics. This is something I see missing from other conferences and I hope to see some interesting talks and I hope that mine is worthwhile and interesting enough for you :)

PS: The Early Bird registration ends April 30th

#dpcthursday

I’ll be giving my new “Advanced CouchDB” talk at the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) in June. I’m looking forward to go to Amsterdam again after ApacheCon EU a few weeks back.

The talk will be about different data modelling patterns, making the most of views, building distributed applications with replication and share some hints on high-performance.

DPC’s line up looks pretty sweet. I like that it focusses on advanced topics. This is something I see missing from other conferences and I hope to see some interesting talks and I hope that mine is worthwhile and interesting enough for you :)

PS: The Early Bird registration ends April 30th

#dpcthursday

There are several key changes in Wordcraft 0.9.1. The two big things are:

• Tokens on post forms in the admin to help ward off CSRF attacks.  
• Database schema updates automated.

The first comes as a result of us doing the same work on Phorum recently.  I realized I needed the same protection in Wordcraft.  The second was done out of neccesity as I changed the datetime fields in the database schema into int fields.  Not sure why I ever made them datetime fields.  Unix timestamps are much easier to work with.  It saves many strtotime() calls and will make eventual time zone settings much easier to implement.

In addition to those two big ones, there were some notable small ones:

• HTML 4.01 validation fixes
• Ensuring UTF-8 on all …

Marco Tabini has a great post discussing the cost of the cloud, and the current state of affairs. He calls for a simpler cloud platform, not just in terms of cost, but ease of use and products and services that adapt to changes in the market. Though the $100/month Mosso offering is mentioned (this site is hosted on Mosso), I would like to point out the recent acquisitions by Rackspace/Mosso that make their cloud offerings even more compelling than AWS for me.

• Slicehost : Rackspace announced the acquisition in late 2008. This allows me to spin up virtual instances or Slicehost’s version of AMI’s called Slices (this was updated due to Ian’s comment below. You cannot migrate an AMI from EC2 to …