php

I just solved an issue that had me waking up in the middle of the night for weeks (just pushing it a bit) and I have to thank PHP's community and in particular a guy named Brad Proctor for writing a very short but very important comment in the PHP manual, and I quote:

This function is relatively slow (as of PHP 5.3.3) and if you are calling a method with a known number of parameters it is much faster to call it this way: $class->{$method}($param1, $param2);

He mentions

With the Command Line Interpreter for PHP (most of the time called php-cli or php5-cli), you can check if one single file contains syntax errors by simply calling

php5 -l file.php

The problem with that is, if you have many files to check, on the command line you might easily spend your time typing filenames.

Just as a self reminder, this blog post explains why php-cgi might hang/stop silently when your load increases, and how to fix it, where it explains (in short) that fast-cgi should have the parameter PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS should equal 1000 or more (this can be done in /etc/default/php-fastcgi on my Ubuntu server).   Also worth a look is this page which has nothing to do with fast-cgi but describes how to increase th

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).

For some reason I find myself having to work with CentOS a lot these days. I hate to say I hate something, but I can't help saying I don't like CentOS at all.

There's a short but great article about setting up PHPEclipse with Xdebug here: http://bogdan-albei.blogspot.com/2010/06/php-remote-debugging-with-xdebug-and.html I really don't want to forget this one!

I've been trying to find the kind of PHP library that allows you to quick-generate an HTML form a basic XML structure. Apparently there is no such thing, so here you can find some code that will help you do that (you still have to build the form tags from outside the function).

Update 2010-12-21: A really serious security flaw has been detected in Exim 4 < 0.70.

One of the problems with having everything built into a framework is that, if someone messes up, it is really difficult to find where. If you want to debug templates in Akelos (i.e.