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 [...]

If you haven’t heard of MCollective, think of.. The Borg.. Except without the laser-eye, or the spaceship-cube, or the scary voices. Come to think of it,.. it doesn’t really have anything to do with the Borg, except they are both a collective, and you are in charge.. just like the Borg-queen. And everything else is [...]

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 [...]

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’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 [...]

A friend of mine posted a tweet about problems with Zend Guard just the other day. My friendly advise was: try using another encoder. Which he kindly ignored :) Which on my turn again made me wonder: how many encoders are out there, and more important how easy are they to work with?

Today i was reading upon this wonderful article about writing a trace-route program in Python in 40 lines. Even though trace-route is one of the many tools i use on day to day basis, i never really got into writing a version myself (something I like to do just to gain knowledge how things works). [...]

Caching is THE magic solution when it comes to optimizing your web applications. There are a lot of caching strategies and applications outthere. Some prefer MySQL query caching, others use memcache to cache either queries, objects, html or other data. However, one of the biggest problems that a lot of people tend to ignore with [...]