Thanks to good records and a Small Claims judge, Steve Oualline got a $199 refund for his unused copy of Microsoft Windows XP. One Linux user’s story shows how to establish a good refund case.

Quite often you’re on a shared host and the default php.ini settings that your provider has left you with are less than ideal.  So you just use ini_set and ini_get to dynamically introduce your own values right?

Well, that’ll work if the particular php.ini setting you’re after is changeable:

Certain things, like zlib.output_compression cannot be altered in userland, nor can open_basedir, so you have to look for another approach to solve your problem.  As the above chart says, shared hosting subscribers still have one last chance, that is to attempt to modify the php.ini value with an .htaccess file, if of course the webserver is configured to parse .htaccess files.

But in the case of open_basedir this is not possible as the setting has a ‘changeable‘ value of PHP_INI_SYSTEM, ie, it can only be changed in the php.ini file or in apache’s httpd.conf.

This is where things start to get interesting

from the PHP Weekly Summary

If you’ve ever wondered if it possible to convert a PHP script into an executable program for a specific operating system then you aren’t alone. A number of projects which do just that were announced on the list this week.

BinaryPHP is a tool than can convert a PHP script to C++ source code that can be compiled with a standard C++ compiler. A “proof of concept” release is available for download at the web site.

John Coggeshall has been working on a Zend module tentatively called PASM, the Php AsseMbler. His web site contains some preliminary information about the project, with a download expected to be available sometime soon.

Another release of the Seagull app framework out the door, quite a few changes in this one, notably:

• name change from PHPseagull to Seagull, details here
• license change to LGPL
• module-specific dependencies moved into modules, including lang files, conf.ini files and templates
• speed improvements
• hit ‘read more’ for the full changelog

Things to watch out for:

• the new update.php script requires PHP 4.2 to execute, offers to convert it to be at least 4.1 compatible accepted
• new demo logon is seagull/admin, not phpseagull/admin as before
• CVS logon changed to reflect project renaming, see CVS details here

Get the latest version here.

If you are not fortunate enough to be a subscriber to PHP magazine, you may want to take a look at this great error handling class presented last issue by  Peter James.

The class introduces a few interesting programming ideas, like inner functions and using them to override PHP’s default error handling.