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Busy busy + updates

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My blog has been very quiet for about 10 months, so I thought I’d write a quick update on what I’ve been doing :
– Work has been extremely busy, with lots of new projects and lots of existing projects needing changes
– Not really helping my workload is my health, which has been slightly troubling since I got Pfeiffer’s disease last year. Although I’m mostly rid of it, it’s one of those annoying things that, even if your body has beaten it, it tends to cause some after effects.
– I’ve been speaking at a lot conferences in Europe and the US (check the conferences page on the right). All this travel hasn’t exactly been good for recovering from the above either 😉
– When I find the time, I try to put on my dancing shoes and have a good time dancing the stress away

So what’s coming up :
– More work, lots more actually. We’re about to launch a new IPv6 service and are working on exciting projects for several clients
– More conferences. In fact, I have 6 more planned right now. Looking forward to them though, as they’re in some of my favourite places (like San Francisco !)
– Planning on finally finishing some of the open source projects I’ve been working on, as well as starting a few additional ones
– Planning on working on some other projects, based on ideas I had years ago. Maybe I’ll finally get around to building them ?

And finally, I intend to write some more blog posts about various topics. Some of those posts are already partially finished. So expect more activity here 😉

Conferences, nginx, open source, PHP

Conferences, development, ideas, …

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I just returned from PHPCon Poland, a very nice conference taking place in the middle of beautiful scenery. Although there were only 5 talks in English (3 of which were given by Belgians – Thijs Feryn, Michelangelo Van Dam and myself), the conference was definitely interesting and fun.
I gave a relatively new talk, that I first presented as a 20-min ‘lightning talk’ at ZendCon Uncon 2011. It’s evolved into a 45-min talk (ok, it was only 38-min so I can add some content next time) titled ‘Remove PHP calls and scale your site like crazy’ in which I explain more about the Nginx extension we’re building to improve the performance and scalability of sites with user-specific content. I received some pretty good feedback on Joind.in and lots of people approached me afterwards, wanting to learn even more about it.

I also submitted 6 talks for Confoo, which is supposed to be one of the best web development conferences out there. Not sure if I’ll make it, but if you want to help out, feel free to vote for me. Registration is required to vote, but takes only a minute.

Lots of ideas buzzing in my head, but sadly not enough time to work on them. The Nginx thing is cool, but it’s what I call ‘phase 1’… which means there’s a ‘phase 2’ (in fact, there’s even a ‘phase 3’). But since that requires even more time, it’ll probably be for when phase 1 has been completed.

In the meantime, we’re on the hunt for people looking for a new challenge. If you’re looking to be seriously challenged, check out our jobs page and feel free to tweet/mail/call me 😉

Uncategorized

Sporza.be zonder voetbal (for Belgian users)

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For the English readers of my blog : this post is for Belgian users who want to use Sporza.be (a big Belgian sports site) without all the soccer content, since that usually fills over 80% of the site. So the content is in Dutch, sorry 😉

Sporza zonder al de voetbal… niet ideaal voor de voetbalfans, maar die hebben sites als Voetbalkrant om hun voetbalnieuws te halen. Dus er is geen enkele reden waarom 80% van Sporza.be vol moet staan met voetbal. Maar aangezien je dat niet zelf kan aanpassen, is hier de manier om Sporza.be te bekijken zonder voetbal.

Voor Firefox-gebruikers

  • Download Greasemonkey hier. Mogelijk moet je Firefox even herstarten.
  • Klik hier en kies Install/Installeren
  • Surf naar Sporza

Voor Chrome-gebruikers

  • Klik hier en kies Continue/Verder
  • Surf naar Sporza

Voor gebruikers van Internet Explorer

  • Surf naar hier
  • Download en installeer Chrome
  • Volg bovenstaande instructies
codesniffer, open source, PHP

PHP 5.4 compatibility checks using PHP_CodeSniffer

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Update (27 Nov) : Support for PHP 5.5alpha is included.

For those of you who are new to this concept, check my blog post from a while ago. It will explain the basic concept of using PHP_CodeSniffer to automate compatibility checks. But don’t use the download links, because they point to the old (PHP 5.3) version !

What’s new ?

Quite a few things have changed in this new release :

  • There’s no version specific release anymore. The previous codesniffer standard was called PHP53Compatibility, but it seemed quite stupid to make a new standard for every PHP version out there, especially since that would keep certain people from upgrading to the latest major PHP version. So the new PHPCompatibility standard works for 5.0 – 5.4
  • But since some people simply can’t upgrade to the latest version, I added version information to all the checks. For example : the deprecated  function checker will now tell you that session_register() is deprecated since PHP 5.3 and removed since PHP 5.4 – if you’re running 5.2 and want to move to 5.3, at least you know right away that you’ll have to fix that problem, because otherwise you can’t ever upgrade to 5.4. This version check is available on deprecated/removed function, deprecated/removed php.ini directives and deprecated/removed extensions.
  • Default timezone check has been added : since PHP 5.4, you need to have a default timezone set or PHP will complain. This is ofcourse only useful if you run the tests on a system with identical settings as your production environment.
  • A check for the removed functionality on break and continue was added. (Using a variable or function call as a parameter on break and continue is no longer allowed.)
  • 2 algorithms were removed in the hash extension, so there’s a check for that as well

Where to get it

2 options :

  • Using git : run this in your PHP_CodeSniffer/Standards directory :
    ~ > git clone git://github.com/wimg/PHPCompat_CodeSniffer.git PHPCompatibility
  • Downloading a zip : download here and unzip the file in PHP_CodeSniffer/Standards/PHPCompatibility

How to run it

Start PHP_CodeSniffer like this :
phpcs --standard=PHPCompatibility

Enjoy !

As always, any feedback (or patches on Github) welcome !

caching, nginx, open source, PHP, scalability, tuning, zendcon

Zendcon, ACL talk, conferences and other stuff

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ACL talk (Zend Webinar)
Remember I promised to post the code of my ACL Webinar somewhere in August ? That didn’t really happen, partly because of a lack of time, partly because after my initial hard drive crash (which made me lose my slides and code), I had another crash in August and then my boot SSD drive crashed in September. Dell was kind enough to replace the power supply, motherboard and 1 disk, but my data was lost (unless I pay over 500EUR to have it recovered, which is a bit too pricy for my liking).
So all those setbacks caused a lot of delay on my promise. Nevertheless, I presented the talk again at the Zendcon Unconference, also mentioning the plans I have in store for version 2. But ofcourse, I’ll have to release version 1 first. Currently I’m using DHTMLX Treeview for the backend treeview interface, but I’m not allowed to redistribute the commercial version I bought. So as soon as I can replace the backend treeview interface with a free one, I’ll release the entire code, including instructions on how to set it up. And since development for version 2 is already underway, I want to make sure I make a good choice there 😉

Zendcon 2011
Last week I spent a few days at Zendcon in Santa Clara, CA. I saw lots of interesting session there and presented 2 sessions during the Zendcon Unconference (community style version of the main conference) :

  • Creating dynamic ACLs in Zend Framework : the Zend Webinar I presented in August
  • Scaling dynamic sites like static sites : a first glimpse on a new Nginx module we’re building to make dynamic sites behave more like static sites in terms of scalability, without losing their dynamic nature

I received some encouraging comments, so I’m looking forward to presenting more on these topics in the next few months. The Nginx talk should also have some real-world benchmarks the next time I present it.
If you saw either one of my talks, please rate it at Joind.in

Next talks
I’m scheduled to talk at 2 more conferences this year :

  • T-Dose (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on Nov 5-6, 2011 :
    • Nov 5 @ 11:00 : Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability – the talk I presented at phpBenelux, Dyncon and FrOSCon, this time in a condensed 50 minute version – this talk discusses the techniques you can use to keep your site running when it goes from 5 to 5 million visitors/day
    • Nov 6 @ 12:00 : Beyond the code : it’s not (just) about the code ! – a brand-new talk that’s aimed at 80% of developers. Short summary : “Most PHP developers focus on writing code. But creating Web applications is about much more than just wrting PHP. Take a step outside the PHP cocoon and into the big PHP ecosphere to find out how small code changes can make a world of difference on servers and network. This talk is an eye-opener for developers who spend over 80% of their time coding, debugging and testing.”
  • PHP Tour in Lille, France on Nov 24-25, 2011 : Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability – the same talk as on T-Dose, in a condensed version

Working on…
In the next few weeks, expect a few new posts about :

  • A cool new IPv6 project we’ll launch soon
  • Some Zend Framework 2 news and stuff
  • More news on the Nginx module we’re building. At Zendcon, there were 3 large PHP hosters who were interested in testing the solution, so you can expect more posts on that.

Technical and business stuff for the open-minded

Want to discuss a problem or a business idea with me ? Schedule a free 30min session here
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