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I really liked the status feature on Facebook so I thought I’d take a look at Twitter. Now I was under the impression that I needed a fancy phone to use Twitter. This really annoyed me and made me wish even more that I could have an iPhone. Well I was wrong, I can send updates via SMS, So I’m going to start making updates and hopefully find other people to follow too. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/SamHennessy.

So as well as being the God of unit testing in PHP it seems that Sebastian Bergmann ahas created a new project called BugMiner. It looks to be a very cool tool that will use your version control repository to ascertain metrics about risk and complexity. I’ve not had a chance to play with it yet but I’m always impresses with Sebastian so I have high hopes.

Over on Greg Beaver’s Blog he talks about a patch he very quickly got into the PHP 5.3 and HEAD repository that will allow you to import a class into the global name space and override the internal PHP classes if the name matches. This means you could fix a bug in one of the PHP classes if you needed to or even use it for unit testing. I wounder if you could over load PDO?

So I’ve been getting very heavily into QA here in my new job at Beatport. As a result I’ve been doing alot of work with PHPUnit and I came across two problems one same and one large. The first was that the very useful iniSet function that will let you change an PHP setting like error_reporting and then restore it for you after the test has run. The problem I has was it required the value to be a string, which while not a show stopper was a pain. So I was very excited in a very nerdy way when my suggestion was implemented in the code and made it into a release.

The next problem was a biggie as far as I can tell the DBUnit port into PHPUnit know as the Database extension doesn’t support MySql 4. I outlined the problem in a ticket and also posted a patch that will get everything working for MySql 4 and 5.

Mike Lively the creator and maintainer of the DBUnit port it yet to take any visible action as of yet. And as I used to work with Mike I may have to drop him a line to get his opinion.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who is also having this problem with MySql 4.

After reading about the new SplFastArry on Colder’s blog I started to get really excited about the possibilities and this could really give a boost in a lot of places. The thing to keep in mind is that SplFastArray will only increase performance when you add, remove, and generally access elements and you’ll see a decrease in performance when you are iterating or counting.

I was reading a post by Akash Mehta, on the fact the he feels that PHP is a half framework in its self. I think that’s a really interesting idea and it makes a lot of sense to me. I’m still a big believe in using frameworks on top of PHP but only because I believe it lets you focus on the real work of creating application and not because they are better then rolling your own framework.

After reading Tony Bibbs post on how he cut his usage of Zend_Log in half by taking

$logger = Zend_Registry::get('logger');

$logger->log($errorMessage,1);

And creating

MyLog::log('Kernel starting up');

While the benefits of abstracting the Zend code away from your code to allow you to switch to another logger at some other time are all well and good. If you just want to reduce your line count, surely simply doing the following would do the same.

Zend_Registry::get('logger')->log($errorMessage,1);

I often read blog posts and have heard the guys at work talking about the php.internals mailing list also with new PDO mailing list which is where all the PDOv2 debates will be taking place I decided it was about time I start following these lists.

So I started looking around for a way to do this. Here are my requirements. I don’t want to be tied to one computer and I want my reader to remember which posts I’ve read.

Try as I might I’ve not been able to to find anything that will let me do that with NNTP. I did find http://news.php.net/ this is a web based archive of the php mailing lists so I’d found my not being tied to one computer solution. Now I just needed a way for it to remember which posts I’d read.

For most lists support for RSS and RDF is available so I added a subscription to my feed reader (Google Reader if you care) and now I have tracking of what I have read.

Now I have a very different problem the content in the feeds is not what I need. I was expecting the title of each item to be the subject of the email with the autor directly after the subject and the descripton to be the body of the email possibly truncated. In fact what you get is the item title is just the subject of the email and the description is the author of the email.

To remedy this I created a Yahoo! Pipes application that would read the feed pull out the link to the full email page and then pull the contents of that page and set that as the description. I also took, with some regex, the author name that was in the original description and added it to the title.

I’d never used pipes before and it was not easy it took me a long time to get close to want I wanted and I still have a few niggling issues with my feed so I think I will write my own script to do the same thing so I can have complete control over the output. One it’s dome I’ll post it so other can use it if they would like.

I also have a very similar problem with DVD release feeds I just can’t find one that suites all I want. I’m starting to think that as time moves forward that feed providers need to add some level of configurability to there feed services so people can tailer them to what they really want.