There are a lot of cases where having one computer just isn't enough. If you're a web developer or webmaster, you'll want to view your website in more than one browser. If you're a PHP programmer, you may be itching to check out the new 5.3 release and test your web applications on it. Using virtualization, you can set up self-contained instances of any Operating System configured to your heart's content on your computer.

Add it to your aliases, this one liner adds all unrecognized files in the current directory (preceded by ? in svn status) to a svn project.

svn st | grep '^?' | cut -d ' ' -f 7 | xargs svn add

If you're not familiar with them, anonymous functions seem to be a term of art that very advanced programmers throw around to make others feel dumb.  Until now, my closest experience has been in using them with jQuery and javascript, but tonight I found a use for them in PHP.   If you don't read the wikipedia article linked before, let me pull out a quote that reflects the "Aha!" moment I had tonight. 

On development, testing, and staging site you normally don't want Drupal's caching, and javascript/css aggregation features enabled.  Drop the following into your sites settings.php file to override these settings.

Looks like my favorite PHP wiki has some really cool plugins for it. 

During the last few weeks I wrote a few new DokuWiki plugins and updated some old ones.

I stumbled on this post over at the flickr developers blog while chatting with Jo about web applications designed and built for "the cloud". An article earlier this week piqued my curiosity about message queues, and got me thinking about how they can be used to move processing tasks out of the way. I'd known already that minimizing those tasks within, let's say, a PHP script that builds a page can help your application scale or seem more responsive.

If you're contemplating switching to running PHP5 under FastCGI, to take advantage of apache's threaded worker model and improve your server's performance, think again.  If you're used to setting and overriding php values via .htaccess files or using php_value/php_flag in your virtual host directory, this is not supported with FastCGI.  You'll have to figure out how to set those values via some other means.  Some PHP ini directives can be set in your script directly, with ini_set, but others have to be set outside of it (register_globals for example).  There are ways to

I was noticing today many apache segfaults on this server, and pretty high traffic loads at times. I haven't pinpointed the exact cause of high traffic, there are a couple candidates, but the apache segfaults seem to accompanied by the following PHP errors:

Cal Evans wrote a straightforward and excellent tutorial on how to to use Zend_Auth and its OpenID adapter to authenticate users today.  I was not only impressed by the tutorial itself, and I liked how he had code up front and so well commented, but also by how easy it was to implement the code here on my blog.  This was my first practical look at the Zend Framework, and the o

Don't expect to find it here, but Laughine Meme posted the most comprehensive one I could find.  You would think that with the introduction in 5.2 of the DateTime and DateTimeZone objects, that date math would be a lot easier in PHP.  Unfortunately, the implementation isn't as advanced as I'd expected, maybe a case of high expectations.  Dealing with dates,especially once timezones are involed can be very unintuitive, and this