A day in the life of…

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 [...]

Yesterday the February edition of php|architect came out. I always look forward upon the new release every month, but even more so this month since it features an article about “Public Key Encryption” I’ve written for php|a. It’s more or less a written version of my public key authentication 101 talk and consists of not [...]

As you might know, the PHPBenelux Conference 2011 is right around the corner. Happy to inform you that not only will I attend, but also will be speaking at this event. My talk will be about the awesome things you can do with Sed & Awk. Not necessarily a talk you would expect on a [...]

Linux, and other unices have an excellent system to centralize log events. This is done through syslog. This system removes the need for every application to maintain their own log files and let the syslog server handle all the events. Depending on the type of event that is logged, it can take additional action like [...]

Recently, my colleague Jeroen van Dijk needed to extend (or better yet: override) the accept() method for the RegexIterator. Turns out this wasn’t as easy as it might sound in practice. So after extending and overriding multiple methods he found an acceptable solution. But there is room for improvement. And starting from PHP 5.4, this [...]

I’ve posted a blog at the @enrise techblog about enhancing SPL’s appenditerator. This lovely iterator can be useful from time to time but it does not always do what you need. Here’s how you can easily create your own iterator: http://www.enrise.com/2010/12/appending-the-appenditerator/ At Enrise, we decided to start blogging more about our projects, the techniques we [...]

Oauth is a very popular authentication mechanism used for a lot of web applications. And not without good reasons. It is relatively easy to implement, has different flavours (2-legged, 3-legged system) so you can use almost anywhere that requires authentication and authorization. This post is not about how to implement oauth. That can be found [...]

Today I stumbled across an odd problem which took me about an hour to figure out what was going on. It had to do with mt_srand(), where it looked like it didn’t work properly. I needed a repeatable sequence of random numbers (which is EXACTLY what the Mersenne Twister produces) so I used mt_srand() with [...]

Today I overheard two colleagues discussing one of my favorite subjects: encryption. The discussion was about that encrypting data (with a normal block cipher) was working perfectly in ECB mode, but not in CBC mode. So, this all leads up to the question: what is ECB and CBC? And when should you use them? Although [...]

Today I’ve passed the Zend Framework Certification exam and with that I can finally close my new years resolution for 2010: doing 12 (tech related) exams in 2010. So I’ve seen a lot of exams, good ones and bad ones and I want to share with you my experience by creating a top-5 of must-have [...]