In times of tight budgets, quality is a key success factor to reduce risks in IT projects.

I have joined forces with Arne Blankerts and Stefan Priebsch and founded thePHP.cc, The PHP Consulting Company.

Together we help businesses and enterprises to reduce IT costs in the long term with Open Source technologies and PHP and MySQL in particular. We support our clients in improving their employee's qualification to overcome skills shortages.

The three of us have long-standing experience in consulting, coaching, and training and are sought-after speakers at international IT conferences. We previously have helped clients such as Cisco and Digg as well as government agencies.

I am pleased to announce the release of Wordcraft 0.8.  I have managed to release about once a month since November.  I also have actually gotten some feedback and tickets posted.  Thanks to those that have tried it out.

I have decided to go back to YUI's Editor.  I tried TinyMCE in the last release.  But, using it full time I found it messed with my HTML too much for my liking.  When I would switch to raw HTML mode and add something like a <code> tag, it would be lost when saving the data back into the WYSIWYG editor.

I also converted the admin HTML to HTML 4.01 Transitional.  I never use XHTML anymore these days.  So, I was writing invalid XHTML inadvertantly.

I worked on the session handling some more in this release.  Users should stay logged in to the admin …

To some kick ass DBA or someone that works on MySQL internals, this is probably a no brainer.  But, for just joe schmoe power user types, we wonder about these things.  We could not find the answer on the internet, so I decided to blog about it.  We expected the result we found, but I think it's good information.

Have you ever had to make changes to several indexes or columns in a table?  With Phorum, we keep a series of scripts that run queries to upgrade the database as we make changes.  Recently I had to delete about 12 keys and add about 7 back in their place.  I initially thought to make two sql statements.  One to delete indexes and one to create new ones.  But, Thomas, one of the other developers, wondered if that was really any better.  So, I decided to run some tests.

First I altered a table with 70k rows, …

Ian Bullard asserts that you should never use the RAND() function. The Ayn Rand Google Ad is pretty funny. The new Zend Server is coming out as a web stack. Although it can be easier to install a Xampp style … Continue reading →

The move from PHP 5 to PHP 6 will be a painful one. But once it’s done, I hope that it will be easier to handle safe web development for a global, multi-language internet. After all these years, we still … Continue reading →

Let’s say you need to do a website that must support multiple languages for cultures as diverse as Japan, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, as well as the US. This can be quite a daunting task, with all kinds of unexpected gotchas.

The ideal character set of choice is, of course, UTF8. Alas, you will note that most of the systems you’ll need to use defaults to LATIN1, including MySQL. If your site is written in PHP, that also by default is set to LATIN1.

I find it quite puzzling that in this day and age of globalization that many of the tools don’t default to UTF8. And there are major issues with this, because everything in the chain of delivery must either be set to UTF8 or can handle UTF8 or you’ll see bizarreness when you attempt to display the characters of some languages. You will probably see a series of question marks (“??? ??? ?????”) instead of the actual words. Sometimes you may see a series of squares. …

Since I’m creating a new install of a development environment on an XP gaming machine, I thought I’d just document the process for posterity. Make sure you are running at least Service Pack 2. Here is the version I’m installing: … Continue reading →

How To Add Two-Factor Authentication To phpBB

This document describes how to add WiKID two-factor authentication to phpBB through Apache using mod_auth_xradius. Given the recent attack against phpBB and the exposure of it's users' passwords, we thought two-factor authentication might be timely.

Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.

Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an …

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …