Pragmatism in the real world

Viewing PHP errors over the network when using IIS

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I thought I'd spend a little time sorting out how to connect to MSSQL server using PHP on my Windows 2008 box. I now have my system set up in VMWare Fusion and use SMB to map the wwwroot directory… continue reading.

Women in open source communities

An incident occurred at a Rails conference recently where pictures of scantily clad women were used on slides. The attitude behind the use of the images disturbs me. To be clear, this is not a Rails issue as I aware of a similar issue in the PHP community and it is prevalent in the the entire IT industry. Martin Fowler has summed up pretty much how I feel about it: The nub is that whatever… continue reading.

Zend Framework Tutorial for ZF 1.8

Zend Framework 1.8, has been released! To celebrate, I have completely revised and updated my Zend Framework tutorial to support the new Zend_Tool command line tool and Zend_Application for bootstrapping. Let me know what you think :)

Zend_Loader's autoloader deprecated in Zend Framework 1.8

Zend_Loader's autoloader has been deprecated in the upcoming Zend Framework version 1.8 and so you now get a notice if you use it: Notice: Zend_Loader::Zend_Loader::registerAutoload is deprecated as of 1.8.0 and will be removed with 2.0.0; use Zend_Loader_Autoloader instead in /www/zf-tutorial/library/Zend/Loader.php on line 207 Notice: Zend_Loader::Zend_Loader::autoload is deprecated as of 1.8.0 and will be removed with 2.0.0; use Zend_Loader_Autoloader instead in /www/zf-tutorial/library/Zend/Loader.php on line 186 Notice: Zend_Loader::Zend_Loader::autoload is deprecated as of 1.8.0 and will be… continue reading.

The EuroWinPHP application

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. So.. I've decided on a name: SuccesSQL! I can almost hear the groan from here… What can I say? The name appealed to me :) The plan is to write a web based management interface for MS SQL Server databases… continue reading.

Finalising installation

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I finally had some time to finalise my Windows Server 2008 installation. Firstly I fixed a couple of annoyances. I turned off the very stupid "Hide extensions for known file types" option in Explorer. It may make sense for the… continue reading.

Installing PHP on Windows Server 2008

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. Installing PHP on IIS is easy once you have download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0. I had a slight hiccup in that all I got was a blank page with a little yellow triangle at the bottom with "Error… continue reading.

Installing Windows Server 2008

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. One benefit for Microsoft with this competition is that all the participants have to blog about their experiences. This should gain MS some exposure, though I wonder how much will be negative from those of us more familiar with nix.… continue reading.

WinPHP Challenge

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. For some insane reason, I decided to enter the WinPHP Challenge and having been accepted, I now need to actually write an app! It's not like I'm not already way too busy or anything… The main reason that I decided… continue reading.

Shorter Link: A rev=canonical WordPress plugin

Hot on the heels of my No DiggBar, I've created another extension for WordPress! Shorter Links provides a <link> tag in the <head> section of your page with a shorter url and appropriate tags for use with the new revCanonical system. Further details can be found at laughingmeme.org, shiflett.org or benramsey.com. The link created looks like this: By default, the shorter url is simply {your domain}/{post id}, but the plugin also creates a custom field… continue reading.