Edin Kadribašić

More N95 Gadgets

2007-05-15T19:39:00.005+02:00

It came through the mail today and its being added as the latest gadget in my collection. It's a Nokia SU-8W wireless keyboard. Much more detailed review can be found here.

Playing with N95

2007-05-02T01:07:00.001+02:00

Just a test shot of the video recording from my new toy, the Noka N95 phone.

Horde Groupware is Great

2007-04-23T23:31:00.000+02:00

I was installing a new mail server and I was sticking with my usual suspects. I usually use Postfix for handling SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP and POP3 access. No surprises there.

But then the people you install a mail server for usually want you to make their mail accessible via some web interface. There, the situation is not so clear in my mind. There are several options to pick from. There is SquirerelMail, a very easy to install program with many plugins and options available. But its functionality can be seen as limited and it has some performance issues on very huge IMAP mailboxes.

On the other hand we have IMP, part of the Horde project. This is a fully featured webmail program that performs really well. The problem with IMP and Horde was that it was really difficult to install and configure. But now we the good people of the Horde project has provided us with a solution.

Horde Groupware Webmail Edition is a package where in one download you get all the pieces that make a good webmail applications. You get extra goodies like shared calendar, address book, notes, etc. The latest release also supports the integration with the Kolab Server.

The best thing of all: the nightmare of installing Horde and all its applications is over! Now you unpack the tarball, run a setup script and your groupware webmail application is up and running in under two minutes. The sheer wealth of functionality that this install provides is a real joy.

Nothing else to say but to congratulate the Horde developers for such a great application. Highly recommended.

Serendipity on Lighty

2007-04-19T23:45:00.002+02:00

I have been moving some of my sites around and the turn came to my blog. Since I have decided to try lighttpd on my new server I was wondering how easy would it be to setup Serendipity on it.

Well the basic install went pretty smoothly, but I wanted, of course, to use "friendly" URLs. For that Serendipity supplies .htaccess file with Apache mod_rewrite rules. With a little bit of effort it was possible for me to convert those into rewrite rules that lighttpd would understand:

# Serendipidy rewrites
url.rewrite-once = (
"(archives/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\.\_!;,\+\-]+\.html)" => "index.php?/$1",
"(authors/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\.\_!;,\+\-]+)" => "index.php?/$1",
"(feeds/categories/([0-9;]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\.\_!;,\+\-]+\.rss)" => "index.php?/$1",
"(feeds/authors/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\.\_!;,\+\-]+\.rss)" => "index.php?/$1",
"(categories/([0-9;]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\.\_!;,\+\-]+)" => "index.php?/$1",
"archives/([/A-Za-z0-9-]+)\.html" => "index.php?url=/archives/$1.html",
"([0-9]+)[_\-][0-9a-zA-Z_\-]*\.html" => "index.php?url=$1-article.html",
"feeds/(.*)" => "index.php?url=/feeds/$1",
"unsubscribe/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=/unsubscribe/$1/$2",
"approve/(.*)/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=approve/$1/$2/$3",
"delete/(.*)/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=delete/$1/$2/$3",
"(admin|entries)/(.+)?" => "index.php?url=$1/$2",
"admin$" => "index.php?url=/admin",
"archive/?" => "index.php?url=/archive",
"(index|atom[0-9]*|rss|b2rss|b2rdf).(rss|rdf|rss2|xml)" => "rss.php?file=$1&ext=$2",
"(plugin|plugin)/(.*)" => "index.php?url=$1/$2",
"search/(.*)" => "index.php?url=/search/$1",
"(serendipity\.css|serendipity_admin\.css)" => "index.php?url=/$1",
"index\.(html?|php.+)" => "index.php?url=index.html",
"htmlarea/(.*)" => "htmlarea/$1",
"(.*\.html?)" => "index.php?url=/$1"
)

We only need to prevent some files from being sent to the user:

url.access-deny = ( ".tpl.php", ".tpl", ".sql", ".inc.php")

I guess the future will show how many security holes I have opened playing with these regexs :)

Leaving Emini

2007-02-23T00:52:00.001+01:00

I have known that I would be leaving Emini, company that I have founded with two partners in 2003, for a couple of months now but I was hesitant about writing about it. I hesitated because I don’t really want to go into details and explain the reasons.

I was working with the same people since 1999. It all started out as a college project to prove that “alternative” technologies could be used for powering an “ecommerce” application. The company that allowed us to use their resources and play with their technologies was Proventum and the “alternative” technology was PHP that was just going into beta testing of their new and upcoming version 4.

Back to VC6 for PHP Windows build

2007-01-07T01:26:00.000+01:00

We are back to using VC6 compiler for the official PHP Windows build. VC8 (Visual Studio 2005) was causing trouble with loading the new C runtime. You can read about the details of the problems encoutered in this thread. So I had to make yet another build, this time using good old VC6.

Benchmarks

2006-12-19T16:27:00.000+01:00

Here is the comparison of running Zend/bench.php from the PHP source using VC++ 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005) and VC++ 6.0. The test was done on my Lenovo laptop with Celron M 1.6 GHz processor and 1.5 GB ram.

Test	VC8	VC6	%
simple	0,444	0,490	9%
simplecall	0,650	0,738	12%
simpleucall	1,220	1,235	1%
simpleudcall	1,634	1,591	-3%
mandel	1,390	1,519	8%
mandel2	1,712	1,909	10%
ackermann(7)	1,637	1,844	11%
ary(50000)	0,069	0,075	8%
ary2(50000)	0,061	0,061	0%
ary3(2000)	0,808	0,876	8%
fibo(30)	5,383	4,970	-8%
hash1(50000)	0,133	0,147	10%
hash2(500)	0,118	0,130	9%
heapsort(20000)	0,462	0,454	-2%
matrix(20)	0,373	0,375	1%
nestedloop(12)	0,789	0,855	8%
sieve(30)	0,350	0,390	10%
strcat(200000)	0,127	0,140	9%
Total	17,362	17,800	2%

Second PHP build using the new compiler

2006-12-18T23:35:00.000+01:00

Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.

You should be able to use this package without installing any packages from Microsoft. Normally a VC++ redistributable would be required. Helpful information for those that are wrestling with similar problem is described in MSDN article Deploy using XCopy.

You can download this build from:

php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip

First PHP build using the new compiler

2006-12-18T01:05:00.003+01:00

I have just completed the first build of the current php-5.2 CVS using the new compiler from Microsoft. The file is avaliable at php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip.

Since this is the first build using the new tool set any help in testing it would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback. It seems that the binary does not work without the .manifest files being built in into the executables. I'm investigating how to do this with the new compiler.

PECL4WIN adds whole branch dowloads

2006-08-14T12:23:00.000+02:00

Several people have mailed me asking if it was possible to download all Pecl4Win extensions for a given branch at once. Now that is possible from the branches page of the Pecl4Win site.

The code was implemented using the new zip extension that has just been promoted to beta. I really liked its OO interface, check it out.

PHP 5.2 support on PECL4WIN

2006-08-10T21:51:00.000+02:00

For those that don't know Pecl4Win site provides PHP users on the Windows platform the opportunity do download precompiled PECL extensions.

So far Pecl4Win supported PHP version 4.3.x, 4.4.x, 5.0.x, 5.1.x and 6.0.x. From now on, the site will compile PECL extensions that are compatible with the upcoming PHP 5.2.0 too.

Developers might benefit from compilation logs that can explain why some PECL extension does't compile on Windows, etc.

PHP 4.4.3 for Windows with 5.0.22 MySQL libraries

2006-08-08T14:43:00.000+02:00

After the final release of PHP 4.4.3 here are the Windows binaries for those who need PHP compiled against newer version of MySQL libs.

Download: php-4.4.3-w-mysql-5.0.22.zip

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4.3 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

Winning the hearts and minds of the world...

2006-08-07T00:20:00.002+02:00

...one atrocity at a time.

(Satellite photos of Beirut before and after the Israeli bombing campaign. Photos by AP)

New Windows installer for PHP 5.2

2006-07-27T15:30:00.002+02:00

One of the cool new things for PHP users on Windows in the upcoming version 5.2 would be a brand new installer. It was created by John Mertic and the preview can be downloaded and tested. Feedback on how well it works is of course very welcome.

Zend propaganda (who is Spartacus)

2006-07-21T15:16:00.000+02:00

Here we go again. C|NET news brings an interview with Andi Gutmans which is full of quotes like this:

One partner is Yahoo, which is helping Zend with version 6 of PHP, Gutmans said.

Yahoo helping Zend with PHP 6? Sounds like PHP 6 is a Zend product, doesn't it? The fact is that of more than 100 Zend employees only a couple (on a good day) spend a part of their work day developing PHP 6.

I understand that the marketing machine needs catchy phrases like that but Zend should also be careful about not alienating the PHP community, the main workhorse behind the PHP development. Having articles likes this published time and time again does nothing to improve Zend's standing within the OSS community.

New MySQL client libs in PHP 5.2

2006-07-21T14:37:00.000+02:00

We were bundling MySQL 4.1.7 client library with PHP 5 releases up to 5.1.4 on Windows, so it was about time to upgrade to newer version.

PHP version 5.2.0 will contain MySQL client library version 5.0.22.

It is interesting that MySQL claims that you should matching version of your server and the client. Of course this is very impractical, and hopefully not really needed. See MySQL's PHP connectors page for details.

This upgrade sould also help resolve some outstanding PDO bugs.

You can test all this in practice by dow

PHP 4.4 for windows with newer MySQL libraries

2006-07-20T11:49:00.000+02:00

Many people still use PHP 4 on windows and have a problem in that it comes with ancient 3.x MySQL client library. Since the main PHP 4 distribution cannot be updated with the latest MySQL libs for various reasons, I will provide downloads of the latest PHP 4 with the latest MySQL libs.

Download: php-4.4.3RC3-dev-w-mysql-5.0.22.zip

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

Don't buy 3ware SATA RAID cards

2006-07-07T00:06:00.002+02:00

They suck. If you have stumbled on this rant via some search engine let me tell you, there is no fix for its performance problems. Junk the card or try to lear to live with it.

I was unfortunate not to do proper research when I ordered 3ware 8506-4LP card last year. I had nothing but trouble since. It takes forever to initialize so if you want say RAID-10 over 4 250 GB disk it would take about half a day. To be fair you can still work with the array, but the performance is going to suffer. I guess I was spoiled by 1 hour array rebuild with IBM ServRaid SCSI RAID controllers.

The worst thing about 3ware cards is catastrophic write perfomance. I could not get the card to write more than 6 MB/s. To add insult to injury just copying files from one dir to another would take the system load to 2. Many people have reported similar issues, its all over the web. 3ware people seem to blame everyone else but their poor design.

PHP 4.4.3RC2 released

2006-07-05T10:45:00.001+02:00

Derick Rethans has announced the release of PHP 4.4.3RC2. Both source and windows binary distributions are available. Users of PHP4 should probably test this one carefully since PHP-4.4.3 might end up being the final PHP4 version.

PHP Vikinger

2006-06-27T00:06:00.008+02:00

The PHP Vikinger event was a great success. It was skillfully guided by Zak Greant who did such a great job orginizing it.

Since this was the first PHP event I attended and the fist unconference, I cannot really compare with "regular" conferences, but people tell me that PHP Vikinger was more relaxed and informal. I guess that was the meaning since there was no official agenda, no commercial interest behind it, etc.

First thing we did was to pick a list of topics that people would like to present or hear about. I half jokingly proposed "How to prevent Marcus Börger (a.k.a Helly) from turning PHP into Java", but decided against it. I do have a real problem with several descisions made in the last couple of months which make PHP more strict and you will probably be hearing a lot more about those if you ever decide to visit this blog again, but at the end I thougt that I express my opinion on mailing list where it belongs.

One of the topic that I found interesting was proposed by Kristian Köhntopp under the title "Things That Have No Name". I do belive that we have so many wonderful techniques in PHP that do not have name and perhaps naming them would help diminish the perception of PHP being a "toy language". Rasmus Lerdof muttered something about this session should be called "buzzword generation" but the group in general thought it was a great idea to do it.

There were also great sessions on PHP security which seems to be on anyones mind these days. Sebastian Bergmann gave an introduction of PHP Unit and about unit testing in general. I must admit that my knowlege on this topic was pretty thin so I found his talk very informative. I don't know how practical would be to implement unit testing in a company as small as mine is, but one of these I'm going to give it some more serious thought.

The second day was spent in a workshop where there was a demonstraction about the basic rules of developing a bigger project where several programmers are involved. How to determine where are the lines that devide different components, etc. Rasmus was in charge of making the presentation layer where he used the opportunity to demonstrate very good YUI javascript toolkit that allows for easy creation of dialog boxes, use of Yahoo's map API, AJAX connectivity and similar goodies. The end result of this excersise should be the creation of people.php.net which would have a registry of all individuals involved with the project, with their location information, graphical map displays and so on. Ammar Ibrahim promissed he would clean up the code and the CSS so we should be expecting the first version soon.

Norway

2006-06-24T11:41:00.004+02:00

After living in Denamak for the past 15 years one starts to miss some things. Things like rivers and mountains. Me being from the Balkans, explains it a bit why I would miss such things.

Norway on the other hand is country that has plenty of both. Now that I am hear I wish I had more time to go around the country and see more of its natural beuty.

Last night I attended the Midsummer party organized by Skien Municipality. Lots of people showed up and there was a huge bonfire. All in all I was left with a very pleasent impression of Norway its nature and its people.

Going to PHP Vikinger

2006-06-22T11:24:00.004+02:00

I'm boarding a plane to Sandefjord, Norway tomorrow. I will be attending an unconference titled PHP Vikinger. For a long while people were trying to convince me to attend one of many PHP conferences, but I somehow managed not to visit any. I nearly got to Amsterdam last year (had the reservation, plane tickets, etc.) but last minute flue got the better of me so I was unable to go.

This time it looks like I'm going to make it. And I'm looking forward to meeting some of the people I have known for years on the mainling lists and IRC channels.

Started a blog, how original :)

2006-06-21T18:15:00.002+02:00

Well, I need to join the 21st century and try to write a note or two from time to time.