Everything about hidden people, oh, and PHP
OKey so I talked about getting some pictures online of the t-shirt and also of the envelope since they managed to get my name right :) Amazing I tells you
Anyway here’s the envelope with my proper name! Envelope
And now the t-shirt: Front Back
The white balance is way off but hey, I had a shitty camera and I’m no Derick when it comes to cameras :)
Anyway just wanted to post these pics in case someone wanted to see what the t’s looked this year.
So I finally got my GSoC 2007 t-shirt delivered at home, by finally I mean it has taken more than the usual shipping time from the USA and it’s a beauty, extra price on top of all the enjoyment working with Igor this summer.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find my digital camera to show case this nifty design they produced, I especially liked the design on the back … I shall try to snap of some pictures very soon and post for those that haven’t seen those beauties ;)
One interesting thing, Google managed to print my name correctly on the delivery envelope, which is kinda of a huge thing, even the Thorn and the funky O thing in my name … I still haven’t seen ANY company outside of Iceland do that, I had heck of a fun experience when I when to the states for the MS Web Summit ’07 but more on that in another blog post.
Update: Sara summed it up quite well here about both her naming problems with companies as well as mine :P
So it seems all the Planet PHP admins have been quite busy lately, when I logged in the admin interface for the planet I was greated with buttload of submissions, the queue was literally full :-o
So I set aside sometime to finally work through the queue, weed out all the spam links and bullshit blogs and making sure all the entries I accept are valid and won’t break the planet or any feed readers (well hopefully I managed to do so ;P), additionally I tried to make sure that the entires on each blog were worthwhile so I read an entry or two on every blog but I soon ran out of coke and only skimmed over most of them, bad Helgi! I know :-/ This process took me nearly 2 and a half hour, including lunch and now we only have 4 blogs in the queue, all due to the fact I couldn’t find a feed that worked on their site (yes I did have to look at some of the sites to find a valid feed, not fun!)
So, we finally have people like Chuck H, Steph and her weeklies on planet-php (again actually), seems her submission got lost in the huge queue else I would have accepted her weeks ago, we can’t be without her weeklies now can we!
Anyway now we have a lot of new faces (and some old ones that finally decided to blog) and hopefully we’ll see great posts from them in the future but well if any of these newcomers starts to spam the planet with posts that you guys feel shouldn’t be here then ping me in the usual places and I’ll do something about it, all to keep you peeps happy I guess :-)
For those that don’t know already, I’m a Google Summer of Code 2007 mentor for one Igor Feghali on this project.
I must say I just totally forgot to blog about it so bare with me ;-)
Anyway this project is a pretty exciting one for couple of reasons, one thing being that I use MDB2_Schema in just about everything I do at the moment and I was a little involved in the whole thing when Lukas Smith was heading it or so I like to believe *crosses fingers*, another is that I’ve always enjoyed working with Igor, a feisty young fellow he is and constantly has some new ideas and another major factor is that the DBAL in ezc uses the XML format MDB2_Schema has as well as a project called Doctrine (well at least it did use the MDB2 code as base so I’m hoping they also used MDB2_Schema) and I do hope at least ezc will sync with these Forgein Key additions :-)
Since I’m blogging about this so late in the game then I think it would take me all night to jot down everything Igor has done so instead I encourage everyone to just head over to his blog and read about it there even tho recently he was added to planet-php, Igor has done a terrific job of keeping me up to date via his blog as well via emails/IM but the gist of it and the important things are on the blog anyway.
Looks like we made a good decision about picking Igor and it seems that he will manage to finish his project second year in a row! :-) Hopefully he’s up for a hat trick next year ;-)
One thing I’ve always missed in phpt is code coverage reports, not lcov since I’m talking about testing userland code, kinda like we have in PHPUnit so I decided to implement it in pear run-tests so that I could check out how much code I’ve made tests for in PEAR and other projects where I utilize the phpt format.
So the first thing I had to figure out was the RunTest code in PEAR, it’s a old port of php run-tests and hadn’t really been updated to any real extent, mostly just adding features here and there, so what I did was to split it up into multiple functions so that it would be easier to understand the beast, run() was 700+ lines IIRC and in this process I managed to find a good amount of redundant code that we could throw out, yay! :) So the next step was to figure out how to make XDebug only provide coverage reports for only the tests and the code they run and not to include the RunTest code in the equation with out me having to filter it out, and then a very ugly solution dawned on me, I’d have to inject the XDebug start / stop / get coverage code into RunTest, OH MY GOD! :-/
But for those that understand how we execute tests this will make a lot of sense, because each test gets it’s own php process, we use proc_* for that, and why might one ask and the answer is simple, mainly to test PHP fatal errors and code that uses exit/die as well as being able to define our own ini options that the process will use (enable safe mode, disable magic quote and things like that) … There might be some other reasons but these are the most important IMHO.
Tho the first two reasons caused me some headache, since of course fetching the coverage info and throwing it into a file won’t work if a PHP Fatal error occurs or if a die/exit get processed in the test since it’s done at the end of each test, so I had a little chat with Derick to see if we could find some proper solution for that challenge and he said he was going to look into it for XDebug 2.1, yay for Derick :-D So to sum up a little I take the FILE part, detect the first and inject the start / get coverage / stop XDebug code as well as var_export($xdebug, true); and write that to a file in the same dir as the test with the file ending .xdebug (name can change, just seemed the most straight forward at the time :P) and hurray we have a file that contains a valid PHP array with the coverage info! :D
This isn’t a silver bullet, it needs some more work and a renderer package to make those pretty graphs and progress bars, like we have at gcov.php.net or similar but at least it’s progressing into the right direction and I’m pretty happy if it becomes useful to only handful of people, if more use it then I’ll be thrilled.
So anyone up to helping with the renderer package ? :-)
So it seems a project I will be co-mentoring with David C. managed to slip in :-)
David already blogged about this here but I’d like to correct one thing, I don’t see Jaws as a framework per say, it’s not like ZF, eZC, symfony, prado or fellows … i.e. you can’t really rip a component out and use it in a completely other env. well for the most parts anyway, at least that’s how I see it :-) So it’s not yet another framework just like every single one of them.
I’ve been following a little Firefox extension that Daniel Glazman has been writing for the past weeks called Fullscreen.
What it does it do enchance the fullscreen experience people get by pressing F11 and thus making the usage of online apps like GMail much more, well, readable :)
The idea is that it the ext gets rid of the location/toolbar + tab bar when you are in fullscreen (opposed to what the default behaviour in FF is) plus you can configure couple of things, like wether to show the status bar or not, how close the mouse has to be near the edge to popup the toolbars.
ctrl + l gives you the location bar, ctrl + k gives you the search feature but oddly enough I haven’t gotten it to work yet but well I’m on linux (fedora) using the fedora shipped FF so go figure :)
Anyway do give it a whirl, download it via the mozilla addon page
Just a short note in the end, this could be a great way to give your clients a better way to fully use the screen, give them something to go “woooww” about :) If you get them to use FF + this ext that is
Updated: Here’s a link to DOM Storage that’s a little bit easier to read compared to the WHATWG one :)
I just finished reading this excellent article by Matthew Gertner of AllPeers that gives people a fair idea on how the applications world might look like in the next 5 years or so.
In retrospect he hit the nail straight on the head but I think he down plays the web app future just a tad because frankly I think that’s the future, since probably none of the big players will come through and get anything widespread enough compared to a web browser without having some serious drawbacks.
Update: dotClear 2 doesn’t seem to be smart when it comes to excerpts and feeds, it doesn’t do the “continue reading X post” just shows the whole post in the feeds and uses the excerpt on the actual blog, doesn’t seem like best solution so sorry about seeing the whole post on Planet-PHP :/
So I’m back, again sigh I always seem to manage to have my blog taken down for X amount of time and then come back 6 months later or so.
I finally decided to upgrade my blog to dotClear 2 and a worthwhile upgrade that was, I’m freaking loving it :D I’m even using the default theme and it’s sooooo pretty just big hurray to the theme designer.
A lot of things have happend since I last blogged (18th July 2006, sheese), I moved, changed jobs, pulled away from PEAR, pulled back into PEAR etc etc etc.
I’ll make couple of separated posts about various issues I’d like to share with everyone :P
After having accepted the Zend devzone blog to Planet-PHP without checking how often per day they post nor rememering it then I got complaints that it’s polluting the Planet-PHP feed, granted people could filter it out and what not but I thought that to be too much hazzle so I decided to remove it, just subscribe to the devzones feeds: (RSS) (Atom)
My apologizes to everyone! :-/
One thing I must add tho, the devzones blog seems a bit useless, it’s mostly only 2 or 3 line entries pointing to other external entries which are more often than not also on Planet-PHP tho it does have some longer articles, there, had to get this thought of my cheast :-)
Cal, maybe if you put tags on the longer and … more interesting posts so that we can use that tag to subscribe Planet-PHP to that :P
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 
