tekx – new spl features in php 5.3

Image of Matthew Turland Matthew Turland is presenting. If you haven’t heard of him, you’re a nub (k, not really…

: Image of Matthew Turland

Matthew Turland is presenting. If you haven’t heard of him, you’re a nub (k, not really but I really wanted to put that in a post somewhere). He’s an auther for php|architect and author of Web Scrapign with PHP, a contributer to Zend Framework, lead developer of Phergie. So yeah, kind of a big deal. He currently works at Synacor which provides internet solutions to ISPs, media companies and advertisers.

The biggest change to SPL in 5.3 is the containers. Why containers? Arrays aren’t always great. The underlying hash table algorithm is not always ideal for the task at hand.

We’ll be looking at a lot of benchmarks. The code is available on github so you can compare the performance results for yourself.

20 May 2010 Comments: 7

tekx – xdebug

Image via Wikipedia Today’s session is given by derick rethans, the author of xdebug so he might know what he’s…

: Image via Wikipedia

Today’s session is given by derick rethans, the author of xdebug so he might know what he’s talking about. 😉

Xdebug provides protections against things like stack overflow in PHP and infinite recursion. You can set this by setting the nesting level. It also provides a pretty formatted errors but not only is it pretty but it provides more information such as memory usage, time, function name and location on items in the call stack. It can also collect parameter information which shows the type with options to display the variable name (if possible) or values. It opts to minimal information to prevent crashing html displays with the browsers.

Another hot option is the ability to link to the files. The var_dump is overloaded to create a pretty, color-coded output. You can turn this off by setting the overload vardump option to 0.

20 May 2010 Comments: 2

tekx – code release & management

Image of EliW @eliw starts off laying down his street cred. He’ll be covering how to control the process of…

: Image of EliW

@eliw starts off laying down his street cred. He’ll be covering how to control the process of version control. As we’ve been going over the past week, use version control. The talk will be focusing on subversion as the technology but the talk will be dealing with the higher level concepts.
Basic Version Control Terminology

commit/check-in
branch
tag
trunk
merge

19 May 2010 Comments: 1

tekx – best practices

tekx stream of though on best practices tutorial.

: Image via Wikipedia

Starting off the best practices with source control @lornajane asked who is using source control and how much of that is using distributed source control. I’m 2/2 so far. woot. For those who aren’t familiar with source control, it creates a history and is a great collaboration tool.

Using source control is being discussed. You create a repository, add your project, check out your project, make changes. You can update to get changes from others then you commit it all back to the repository.

We’re looking at an svn log and will be discussing distributed vs non-distributed systems. Demonstrating a sample diff.

Source control Tool

* Subversion (svn)

* Git (git)

* Bazaar (bzr)

* Mecurial (hg)

Difference ways to interact with source control. Lorna gives a shout out for all the command line user people and is now mentioning IDE plugins, Trac, Tortoise[SVN|Git|Bzr|Hg]. I need to see if there’s a tortoiseBzr for OSX. I’m thinking of moving to Git since that gives my team more GUI tools, love Bzr but haven’t found many tools. Done with that sidebar. On to Centralized Source Control.

18 May 2010 Comments: 1

tek – bad guy for a day

stream of thought on the #tekx “bad guy for a day” tutorial. writing may resemble note-taking…because it is.

: Image by gpuliatti via Flickr

K, trying a bit of live(ish) blogging. This will be interesting since this will be stream of thought on the tutorial as it goes on.

Todays tutorial is given by Arne Blankerts.

We’re starting off with an over view of websecurity and what we’ll be doing today. Looks like I missed questions, good thing I didn’t have any.

We’ll be getting source to look at, makes me wish I wasn’t lazy and had set up an environment.

Starting off with types of security. Transport layer,infrastructure, data warehouse,interface design, user level and application level…those sort of things.

Remember to secure your infrastructure. Anecdote about a setup with default root of database was given. Keep in mind how you train users. Example error alerts training people to accept errors as ok and to click through.

18 May 2010 Comments: 1