Mental notes to myself

There is an article on PHP on CIO, bashing it a bit.

PHP may be the most popular Web scripting language in the world. But despite a large collection of nails, not every tool is a hammer. So when should it be used, and when would another dynamic programming language be a better choice? We identify its strengths and weaknesses.

For the ones, who doesn’t know about CIO, their target audience is managerial. not developers.
So potentially reader will be your manager and they’ll get this info as a reference.
I’m copy/pasting some parts of it for your convenience. Let’s assume your manager does not know about PHP (I hope not) and you’re about to convince him/her to use PHP on a project. What whould he/she think after reading this?

When should you use PHP?

• Creating an intranet site.
• Prototyping an application that will be converted to Java or some other language.
• Creating a Web database application.
• Deploying an inexpensive or quick solution.
• Using ready-made apps from Sourceforge.net or other sites.

In general you should not use PHP:

• Where data security is of high importance.
• In Shell or automated scripted applications.
• In enterprise applications where scalability takes higher precedence than economy.

What a short sight!?!? Kenneth Hess the author of the article, is also the new “On The Desktop” columnist for Linux Magazine. Honestly, I would not really expect these claims from Ken Hess.

Please share your comment.

Link: You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!

I was trying not to write about facebook but it came to a point that it’s a good example for my post.

Classic web advertising for banners (in some cases text links) are still paid by impressions. Like the banners on the left column of Facebook pages, everytime user changes a page, an ad is shown, and the advertiser is charged per 1000 impressions. Everybody knows that there is nothing interesting with this.

Facebook, some weeks ago has changed their photo gallery to an ajax photo gallery.
Everytime you see a photo and start browsing to the other photos, without refreshing the page, an Ajax call was done and new photo was shown on the very same page. There was no refresh, therefore the rest of the page -as well as the banner on the left- were not changed.

Facebook recently switched back to their old way. One photo is 1 page view again. I wondered why? It was really obvious. They’ve lost major page views with just this change. On the old system, people were rapidly viewing photos spending (in most cases) no more than 15 seconds per photo. For an album of 20 photos, it was an easily generated 20 page views for them. New system, slowed down the page views but now the users were spending more time on the same page with the same banner. Still with the old metric, 1 page view for 20 photos.
Read more…

I’ve just finish checking this years roster for PHP Quebec Conference 2008.
The list is quite good. Lots of interesting sessions, some not-so-really-php sessions. But this year, there is no Rasmus
I’ve always found him interesting to listen to and inspiring. It’s quite interesting to see what challenges he’s seeing at Yahoo.
Between the lines, he gives a lot of tips. Is it just me who likes him talking ?
I’m sorry that he’ll not be in Montreal this year. Maybe he didn’t like the food last year lol.

I was trying to explore alternatives for slave/master architectures and gave a try to federated tables.

No this post is not about Sun buying mySql.

Read more…

I’ve just changed the design of my blog. I’ve tweaked a template from styleshout.com to wordpress. If you see any bugs here and there let me know. When it’s good I’ll be giving this away.

I have a feeling this year will be good.
Have great year everyone!

Nobody denies the benefits of testing and especially unit testing.
However I’m still having hard time understanding the baised testing methodology of phpunit or other automated unit testing frameworks.

In test driven development, programmer writes a test then fills in the code to make the test pass. I find this extremely baised.
Alternatively, I find coding baised test cases that can cover the code 100% gives the developers a false sense of safety. This is rather a phylosophycal discussion than practical.

For complex scenarios of testing, can unit testing cover everything efficiently? How efficient is to find and write the correct test cases that test everything throughly? Does any company have the time and money for this (or they are willing to pay for their testers to write code for 100% coverage) ?

I really like the idea of php unit and automated tests. However for web, I’m still for the black box testing, if there is a good way of analysing the efficiency of blackbox tests.
Feel free to comment.

Updated: typos

I was reviewing the formula 4C + V + P = Web 3.0

This is what I think:
Read more…

I’m looking for 2 PHP Programmer for the company I’m working for.
I’ll be hiring a Senior and Intermediate PHP programmer.

If you’re in Montreal, QC and intrested in drop a comment I’ll contact you.
This is not a webmaster/designer etc job, if you’re a pure PHP programmer I want you!

Position: Full Time, Permanent
Industry: IT Multimedia/Entertainment
Qualifications: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Javascript (Ajax)
Assets: CSS, Java,Oracle, PL/SQL
Important: Version Controlling (CVS,SVN or BitKeeper), Debugging (XDebug, Zend or DBG)
Start Date: Immediate

PS: If you are a PHP Guru, you should definately apply, it’s a well paid job.
PSS: This ad is valid until the end of 2007.

Important update: If you are not already living in Montreal, you don’t need to apply. Thank you.

You’ve just bought a new dedicated server, what should you do before moving?
Check what is promissed and what is given!

1. Check the CPU
   # dmesg | grep "CPU:"
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (2813.54-MHz 686-class CPU)
2. Memory
   #dmesg | grep memory
real memory = 1072627712 (1022 MB)
avail memory = 1040084992 (991 MB)
3. Hard Disk
   #di -th | grep Total
Total 104.4G 1.2G 94.8G 9%

4. Number of IPs (I’ve masked my ips with ?)
   
#ifconfig -a | grep inet
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet ??.???.??.?? netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast ??.???.?.?
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000


It was weird when I see a keyword, that I’ve regularly watched, poped up at a .gov site.

Some blackhats, hoping to get the page rank benefits of a .gov site, hacked the forum of the site and placed a gateway like page. I guess search results come from google as well.

Check it out yourself.
nevadacityca.gov

PS: the keyword I was looking was the name of one of my sites, not cealis lol.