Ken Guest’s online diary

Tomorrow is the last Wednesday of the month – the day the three PHP Users Group meetings are held:

• Dublin: At the Metropole Pub on Townsend Street [upstairs]
• Cork: Metropole Hotel on MacCurtain Street
• Monaghan: Contact Kae Verens for details.

Other details are available on the Irish PHP Users’ Group website.

Peter Goodman has written a quick blog entry on “15 Cool Things About PHP That Most People Overlook” at http://ioreader.com/2007/08/17/11-cool-things-about-php-that-most-people-overlook/.
It’s an interesting read.

The fifth meeting of the Irish PHP Users Group on Wednesday was a quite one with 5 people
present:
* Ken Guest
* Sarah Gleeson
* Eoin McLoughlin
* Glenn Strong
* Tim Gilmartin

Discussed that some other groups have talks and then retire to the pub – would there be a better turn out if we were to give talks on PHP [and related] topics, and where would these be held.

Mentioned the plush PHP Elephant [http://www.nexen.net/elephpant.php] – might be handy to have a few so we can be spotted more easily when having our meetings

Also discussed output buffering [ http://ie2.php.net/manual/en/ref.outcontrol.php ] and some uses of it; xdebug [ http://www.xdebug.org/ ] and it’s integration with vim and Eclipse.

It was mentioned that I don’t remind/announce these regular meetings soon enough – I’ll endeavour to remind people seven days before hand, rather than one or two.

The second meeting of the Irish PHP Users Group came and went last night – there wasn’t all that many of us there at all (a sum total of two!) . This has triggered a healthy discussion on the mailing list of what we could to do raise the awareness of the Users Group and what it should be about.

Join in on the discussion here.

The search engine for the website that I administer and develop is provided by a third party: query is made against their cluster, XML formatted data comes back, is parsed and displayed.

It stopped working this morning.

I traced the problem down to a PHP Sablotron/XML parsing error (“xml declaration not at start of external entity”). Seems the server that’s connected to now sends response headers back to the client and these headers were getting in the way of Sablotron doing it’s job.

A simple one-liner fix got things working again, as shown in the middle of this sample code:


$fp = fsockopen($queryhost, 80);
if($fp) {
    fputs($fp, $header);
    while(!feof($fp)) {
        $xml .= fgets($fp, 128);
    }
}
fclose($fp);

I discovered yesterday that the www.linux.ie website wasn’t allowing logins for Niall Walsh to add a news item to the system. After some investigation I found that the values set in the $_SESSION array weren’t sticking – through some update the session.save_path in the php.ini was left pointing at /var/lib/php4 while that directory was replaced with /var/lib/php5!
It seems not only does php not fall back to using /tmp if the directory specified in session.save_path doesn’t exist, it doesn’t raise an error regarding the problem.

Suffice to say a quick reset has resolved the problem – logins on www.linux.ie are back to normal.

While looking around for information on PHP workflow engines I found an absolute goldmine on all things PHP at Tony Marston’s website.

[other] Workflow engine specific information is at:

1. openflow.it (OpenFlow-OpenSource Workflow Management System)
2. Galaxia
3. workflowpatterns.com

Though I’m sure there’s much more out there.