php

Do you have a Mac still running Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? And did you recently decide to install a PEAR component for use with some PHP? And lastly, did it fail with some cryptic HTTP error "410 Gone" that you had very little luck finding with Google? I did.

The solution is a bunch of steps backward and then forward again. Unfortunately, it's not very clear to the perhaps large number of Mac users who did not keep their PEAR libraries up to date all along on Tiger. But the answer is here, at the moment (it will scroll off when more news is added): http://pear.php.net/

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

I was profiling one of my favorite large PHP applications today using APD. I kept getting what seemed to be strange results -- it was telling me that bunch of defines statements (30+ of them) were responsible for an inordinately large percentage of the page generation time. On minimal pages it was as much as 37%. Even on the well-known largest of pages, they were still clocking in at a not insignificant 5%.

That just didn't seem possible.

Back in July I wrote about a development meeting I attended with a bunch of really smart guys. One of those guys was Arto Bendiken.

In the past couple of months, he's added at least 4* new cool Drupal modules to the contrib repository, of which I'm aware (there may be more gems to find -- I didn't even look!). In just the past few days, he added an absolutely amazing module called Trace which is developer's and maintainer's dream come true.