So, we are not officially looking for PHP/MySQL developers.  However, we could start at any moment.  So, I want to be ready.  There is a really good chance that we will hire someone by the end of the year if not sooner.

So, if you want to work with an up and coming company that uses PHP, MySQL, Gentoo Linux and other open source technology, you can go ahead and send us a resume.  Just email it to me at brianm@dealnews.com.  You will have to confirm your emails.  Spam on that account reach huge numbers years ago, so I am not going to bother with cute notation for my email address.

This job would most likely require moving to Huntsville, AL.  Before you make an Alabama joke, Huntsville has been recognized as a great place for business and technology.  In 2006 it was …

Matt has a good post on the recent push to make people use PHP 5. He makes several good points, and I’m just jumping on the same bandwagon.. forcing a version # change, just because the engine works better is pointless. Going into the political arena a little bit, making people switch to PHP 5 is like changing CAFE standards, it won’t do a thing for the billions of cars already out there, and it won’t change the basic dependence on crude oil. It’s just a lot of hot air to make the choir sing to themselves, again.

I’ve been running PHP 5 on my systems for the past 3 years, without any issues. Even some of the code I wrote in PHP 4, works flawlessly (with the same bugs) in PHP 5 as PHP4. Which brings me to the main point.. End Users don’t care or want to know what the engine is doing . If the application does something they want, they’ll use it. If …

I'll be giving a 1 hour session at ZendCon this year entitled "MySQL Performance Coding - From Soup to Nuts". The abstract says 3 hours, but I believe it's a one hour slot... Either way, it'll be fun and rowdy. The PHP crowd always is a fun crowd!

MySQL developes a new driver for PHP, called php-mysqlnd.
This driver is a replacement for libmysql, but offers some new features too.

The result-object now has the method "fetch_all", which (as the name says) returns an array containing all result set rows. This method is much faster than calling fetch_assoc in a loop.
Unfortunately it´s not possible to specify a column that should be used for the array index.
Would be great if something like this is possible:

$res        =       $mysqli->query("SELECT customer_id, last_name FROM customers");
$data       =       $res->fetch_all("customer_id");
print_r($data);

Array
(
    [123] => Array
        (
            [customer_id] => 123
            [last_name] => foo
        )

    [124] => Array
        (
            [customer_id] => 124
            [last_name] …

I have been excited about the MySQL native drive (mysqlnd) since I first heard about it.  They are looking for testers now.  The sites I could test on are not really that high traffic.  So, not sure I would be much help to them.

I am not sure how I feel about this bit of news in that post:

“While mysqlnd was originally designed for PHP 6, Andrey Hristov has now finished the backport of mysqlnd to PHP 5 and added support for ext/mysql.“

On one hand, it means I can play with it sooner.  But, on the other, it gives slackers another reason not to upgrade to PHP6 and mysqli.  Its a shame.  I really like mysqli.  I would really like to see an end of life for ext/mysql.  But, this just keeps it going.  Even more scary is this line:

“Given that 60 % of the PHP user base is still on PHP 4, …

Today, I again spent about an hour to revert changes made by spambots on various MySQL Forge Wiki pages. As I was really sick of this, I now installed a new plugin: reCAPTCHA - this will hopefully raise the bar for spambots to create new user accounts automatically for spamming the Wiki. If you are a registered user already, you will probably not notice the change - by default, CAPTCHAs are only displayed on the following events:

• New user registration
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

Let's hope it helps! Please let me know if you still experience spam problems on the Wiki.

Last year at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference I hosted a BoF (Birds of a Feather) about memcached.  It was a popular event.  So, this year, I decided to broaden the scope to caching in general.  Its titled Caching for fun and profit.  It will be Wednesday, July 25 from 8:30-9:30pm in Room E141.

Anything goes. We can talk about memcached, Tugela, basic file caching… whatever.

More and more web sites are finding that they need to uses caching to increase their performance. There are those of us that have solved some problems. Others that are new to these techniques have a lot of questions. This BoF is an opportunity for …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …