If you want to get the best performance out of your PHP apps, you need to read this presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky.

(use Mozilla/Firefox to view presentation, doesn’t work in msie).

Check out the web developer extension for Firefox, if you’re interested in building standards compliant sites, this is the tool for the job.

If you’re running on Linux there are many easy ways to synch your PC with an NTP server, guaranteeing that your local machine’s clock is running the identical time to any servers where your apps are deployed.  On windows, however, this is not so easily achieved, and since there are a huge amount of people developing PHP solutions on windows machines while deploying them on Linux, this seemed like a worthwhile tip to post.

Any large scale app will inevitably run a number of cronjobs whether you’re synchronising data, updating feeds, syndicating content etc.  And in order to debug the jobs, it certainly is easier if you know exactly the second they’re going to fire off.  Well short of issuing lots of ‘date’ commands, using this useful app will synch the clock of your windows development box against the NTP server you’re using for your live machine.  What a relief to watch the second hand approach 12 o’clock.

Surely there can be no doubt regarding the superiority of spaces over tabs in any serious coding project

If you’re stuck on windows, however, and you don’t have perl installed it’s a bit of a hassle to remove the tabs from other peoples’ contributed code.  That is, until you’ve been introduced to  the Find And Replace Text command line utility (available on windows and linux).

Aside from burdening us with a rather unfortunate acronym,  this software replaces all tabs with spaces in a great one-liner:

C:/htdocs/my_project>fart -r -C * t “    ”

This will recursively blast through your project and rip out all tab offenses.

Packt Publishing have just released their first book, titled “Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management.

Whether you are an experienced developer, system administrator, web designer or new to MySQL and phpMyAdmin, this book will show you how to increase your productivity and control when working with your databases. You will learn how to:

• Administer MySQL users and privileges, and get statistics about MySQL servers and databases
• Manage databases, table data and structures, and indexes
• Use bookmarks and metadata
• Generate multiple SQL queries
• Generate better documentation of evolving table structures

Along the way you’ll build a more detailed understanding of SQL and how it works in MySQL.

As an application developer you’ll learn how to use phpMyAdmin to:

• Effectively perform day-to-day database and table management.
• Create better database tables and relational structures
• More easily document your evolving data structure

As a MySQL server administrator, you’ll benefit from the in-depth and practical coverage of:

• Using phpMyAdmin to manage users and privileges
• Getting server and database statistics

All database users will expand and refine their knowledge of SQL in a MySQL context through using phpMyAdmin to track SQL execution and results.

You can read more about the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/view_book/isbn/1904811035

Quite like this comment in the recent slashdot post regarding hardened-php:

as the japanese car makers discovered (or at least the idea came to prominence) in the 1950s, ANYBODY (even people with 93 PhDs) who assembles something makes mistakes occasionally. the trick is to limit the number of modalities that allow for mistakes. a person who is asked to make a wheel fairing in three minutes using simple hand tools will make far more mistakes than one who has a dedicted stamping machine.

in fact, the japanese cars excelled in quality, worker satisfaction, and in the competitive marketplace for many years in large part that their idea that a) errors are natural stochastic processes b) the rate of errors in an any process is more determined by the design of the process than some inherent quality of the worker and therefore c) when a mistake is made, analyze the process, don’t blame the worker as this will lead to d) continuous improvement and also empower workers to speak up.

even the most experienced PhP programmer can make an error. education helps, but fixing the system is a better idea.

If you haven’t looked at Python yet, a good a place as any to start is with the Devshed tutorials and Instant Python.

A few interesting points:

• python’s been around since 1989
• the class library is very complete
• the name was inspired by Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• much early Google work was done in python where it continues to be widely used today
• the documentation and tutorials are extensive, more essay focused than what you find in PHP
• similar to PHP: choice of procedural/OO coding style is left to the programmer, the language is loosely typed and there is no concept of private/public vars
• different from PHP: a very elegant handling of namespaces, compiled code from imported modules, and a very flexible interactive shell environment

Thanks to Jon Ramsey from the PHPlondon group who presented some interesting tutorials on PEAR’s console classes at the last meeting.

You can check out Jon’s overview that uses the del.icio.us social bookmarks project to provide sample data that he transforms using Console_Color, Console_Getopt, Console_ProgressBar and Console_Table.

If you work with Linux, or even WinXP, you’ll find you get quite used to the convenience of tab completion, in other words, of the ability to type a few characters of a path name, hit tab, then have the full path completed for you.

So when you find yourself back on a Win2k box, whether because you prefer greater stability, less RAM hunger, or even fewer TCPA issues, unfortunately you find yourself without tab completion.

Until, that is, you have been exposed to the hermetic knowledge shared by the privileged few.

During the alcohol-doused exchanges of this month’s PHPlondon meetup, Paul Vanlint revealed that it is possible to alter a registry key in Win2k to provide tab completion, here’s how:

1. start -> run: regedit
2. locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> MICROSOFT -> Command Processor
3. select the ‘CompletionChar’ key
4. modify its value to 9, the decimal ASCII value for a tab

If you use MySQL in any halfway serious way, and have not *yet* downloaded the MySQL Administrator tool, you need to do this asap   (available for both Windows and Linux)

The amount of configuration options made easily available to the admin is tantalising.  Aside from the usual user/privilege handling, the following categories offer many configurable options:

• MyISAM parameter
• InnoDB Parameters
• Performance
• Log files
• Replication
• Networking
• Security
• Advanced

… and a 3 graph health status monitor, similar to the Windows Task Manager.