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  • 1 min read

Reply to forwarded message in Thunderbird

Why won't it let you do it??

Am I the only person that gets forwarded email (as an attachment) and that needs to reply to the original sender?

It seems to me that someone went out of their way to prevent you from doing it; well, slap their wrists!

  • in Blog
  • 1 min read

Back to the UK for a week

I'm about to depart for the UK for the Inbox Outbox conference. I'm leaving a little early so that I can fit in some family and friends time over the weekends and some other business either side of the conference itself.

Normally, I would say something about having choppy internet access, but given that I have none at home right now, whatever I'll have will be better than nothing. I hope. :)

  • in php
  • 1 min read

Stupid error in PHP 5.1beta

Well, if you haven't tried it already, and you're interested in PDO, don't: just grab the latest snapshot from snaps instead.

Lack of communication, and perhaps some politics, meant that 5.1beta shipped with a stupid bug in the PDO core extension, causing a infinite loop on request shutdown.

I'm somewhat annoyed at this, because it's a showstopper that we could and should have caught before announcing the beta.

Oh well, such is life.

I'm just getting stuck into packing things up ready to move into our first home in the USA (we've been living in an apartment for a few months), so I'm not going to let it bother me.

Have a good weekend.

  • in php
  • 2 min read

A Decade of PHP

As Zak kindly reminds us, it is the eve of PHP's tenth birthday. My first involvement with PHP was as an alternative to ASP for a client in Japan; they wanted a dynamic web site, but it had to run on their Solaris servers. At that time, PHP 4 was still in beta, but already felt superior to ASP. As that project grew, I felt that it would be cool if I could use fsockopen() to talk to a credit card payment processor.

In September of 2000 I came up with a crude patch that got SSL to work with fsockopen(). I went on to refine this patch (a great deal!) and wound up implementing the Streams layer.

I've always been surprised and impressed at how easily my contributions were accepted by the PHP project, especially because the patch to enable streams was so wide-ranging (it touched pretty much every file in the source tree), and even more so because I'd never previously met anyone from the PHP project, either in real life or even just "around" online.

Getting involved with PHP has had a profound effect on my life; being invited to speak at conferences in Holland, Germany, USA, the Carribean, Toronto and more recently in Mexico has been a hell of an experience. And I mustn't forget that I wouldn't be working here with George Schlossnagle at OmniTI, on a different continent from where I was born, if it wasn't for PHP.

I owe the majority of my salary over the last few years to PHP, and so I want to send my thanks to Rasmus for getting the ball rolling, keeping it rolling, and pimping my name when I was looking for work. I'd also like to extend my thanks to Christine; based on the reactions of my own wife (Juliette) to some of the PHP things I've done (and that's nothing compared to Rasmus), I have some idea of how much effort you must have put out over the years. Thanks to you both!

Long live PHP :-)

PS: thanks to everyone that has contributed to the PHP project over the years.

  • in php
  • 1 min read

PHP Podcast

I've just finished chatting with Marcus Whitney for part of the next installment of his Pro PHP Podcast show. It's my first recorded conversation/interview for public consumption. I'm kinda nervous and hope that I didn't ramble on too much. But that's what it's all about; getting more personality out of people than you would with just text alone.

As ever, technology has a wicked sense of humour, so there are probably going to be a couple of stops-and-starts (perhaps more if I really rambled on and Marcus has to edit ;-). Oh yeah, I might come across as sounding more like Barry White than I would normally.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the show develops--listening rather than reading is not just a refreshing change but also something you can do while working on other things.

The next installment of the show should hit the 'net in the next couple of days.

  • in php
  • 2 min read

Re: PDO meeting in Cancun

Just a quick response to Lukas' blog entry.

I know Lukas would love to see things work a little differently in PDO, but there are good technical reasons why things are the way they are now. Here are some reasons in random order:

  • It's impossible to build a magic database abstraction layer that works for everything
  • PDO is data-access abstraction (not database abstraction). The primary goal is to make things similar enough that you don't end up cursing at the API. The abstraction is also present for the benefit of extension developers, making it less of a headache to build database drivers for PHP.
  • No two underlying database client APIs are the same
  • Most don't separate the concept of a prepared statement handle from a result set.
  • Most overload functions like RowCount() to have the dual meaning that Lukas mentioned.
  • the MySQL client API is a bad example of a typical database client API. Don't use it as your baseline for comparisons to the others.

A closing comment regarding the naming of the PDO methods; I didn't follow Lukas' "Unofficial subjectively observed key design principles"; the PDO APi just happens to follow the APIs of the underlying database clients because it means that PDO doesn't have to do too much work on top of those APIs, and because those particular APIs have been designed by people that live and breathe databases. I like to avoid the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome where I can (although I confess that I do succumb to it from time to time). Regarding the length of the method names, I don't believe that they should be as short as possible, but don't believe inOverlyLongNamesForTheSakeOfMakingTheCodeReadLikeEnglish().

  • in php
  • 1 min read

Computer Languages History

This site has an interesting timeline that shows the how around 50 major programming languages are inter-related and how they developed over time.

  • in Blog
  • 1 min read

Crappy cable day, and Geek Fantasies

Comcast has had really crappy internet connectivity tonight, which has made it frustrating to try to get any hacking done--surprising how many projects I have simmering right now that need to access the 'net.

While I'm here, I'll post this rather amusing link to geekfantasies.com; I saw it mentioned on TV the other night but the site was down (bandwidth limit exceeded!).