Sometimes you hear about programs but you never really know how awesome they are until you actually use them. Unfortunately, at this point in life I wished I’ve discovered LaTeX around 15 years ago, when I first heard of it. That would have made the way I would have written documentation the last years massively different. So hopefully I will get you hooked on LaTeX with this post. Read more…
So probably you are aware I’m currently exploring the deeps on the Apache source internals. One of the discoveries I’ve made was a (for me unknown) command in mod_dir that will make your life a little bit easier: fallbackresource. Read more…
I think everyone has heard at least 5 five horror-stories when it comes to PayPal. And every time people will be upset, will tweet about it but then go on with their lives. I get it, I do the same thing. But just a few days ago I came acros the gazillionth message about PayPal. Short story: guy sells violin for 2500$, buyer says it’s fake, PayPal orders buyer to destroy the violin in order to get money back. In the end: seller looses violin AND 2500$, without ever being able to defend his claim. As LeoMcGarry could have said: The last straw has just been placed on the camel’s back.. and then PayPal drove over it with a tank.. Read more…
I like to play with unfamiliar stuff. Not that I’ve never written an Android or java application, but this one is a bit different. It’s a simple game I’ve made while I was looking at (real life) puzzle game where you have to switch knights from a chess-game from one position to another. Not really hard, but not very simple either. I knew there are plenty of puzzle games like this out there, so I decided to create a simple game-engine that allows to create those games easily. The result: a 90% finished game called PuzzleChess. This blog-post is trying to find the last 10% of the game :)
When you are dealing with Zend Server on a puppetized machine you can run into trouble: Zend Server uses it’s own packages for maintaining things like PHP etc so when you are installing PHP, you might end up with the PHP version of your distribution instead of the ZendServer. WE actually run into trouble once where we have 3(!) different PHP versions installed on the same server. What could possible go wrong!
This means you should not install the default PHP package for your distribution when the distribution also runs on Zend Server. This Facter plugin will allow you to use the $zendserver fact inside your own manifests to check if Zend server is installed, so you can take measures against installing stuff that is taken care of by ZendServer itself.
Note: it’s a VERY crude check, nothing more a check to see if a directory exists, and we don’t return the Zend Server version (Zend Platform is not supported). However, these things can be changed quite easily.
Version 5.4 is soon to be launched as the next new stable release of PHP. Granted, there will not be major changes like we saw in version 5.3, but it will still have some nifty new features. Two of the most important ones: traits and the internal web server. This post is about the latter one. The new web-server makes it possible to run your PHP code through your browser even when you don’t have your own web-server like Apache or nginx installed. It has got some advantages, but this of course has raised some serious discussions: should PHP even be distributed with a web-server and if so, how can we make sure that it won’t be misused as a production server? Well, we really can’t forbid people to (mis)use this, but we hope most of us will use common sense.. The project in this blog-post however, can be considered as “The Enabler”. It can be a powerful tool for developers, but makes it easier for people to misuse the web-server. Time of course, will tell if this will be the case, but I think I’ve created a (simple) tool that will create the new Dr Jeckyl web-server into a Mr Hyde… What could possibly go wrong? :-) Read more…
Ok, so it’s not he most beautiful website you will ever see. Nor will it be the one with the most content. But it’s my company website, and I’m proud of it. Even if it was only a matter of installing WordPress, finding a theme, do a little bit of tweaking and adding some content. However, I’m happy to say that at least I have a point where (future) customers can find information about me and the things I can do for them on a freelance base. There will be updates, maybe I can invest some money in someone to create a decent theme, but in the meantime, here it is: http://www.noxlogic.nl
I’m not exactly sure where I got the link to this book. It was probably a tweet or IRC-posting from somebody, but it actually was because of Amazon’s take-a-look-inside that made me buy the book. The few parts of the chapters I read where not only funny, but had lots of interesting tips & tricks for me as a (wannabe) speaker. Read more…
The SPL is one of hardest things to grasp for most PHP developers. But why is this? The lack of documentation inside the manual, the fact that there are not many real-life examples, or maybe it’s just too hard? In this post I will try to explain a bit more about the “iteratorAggregate” interface. Together with its more famous brother “Iterator”, they are currently the two only implementations of the “Traversable” interface, which is needed for objects so they can be used within a standard foreach() loop. But why and when should we use the iteratorAggregate? Read more…
Because learning new stuff is just one of those things I need to do on regular basis, I’ve decided to dive into another framework than the ones I’m used to. Having dealt with mostly Zend Framework 1 on a daily basis, and CodeIgniter which is the one I deal with a lot inside the Joind.In project I’d like to contribute to, I’ve decided to give another framework a chance. A framework that is on the shortlist for a long time now: Symfony 2. The tl;dr: winning! Read more…
Joshua Thijssen is a freelance consultant, developer and trainer.
His daily work consists of maintaining code bases, working on different projects and helping other to achieve higher standards in both coding and thinking.
