Paul Skinner

This sort of thing drives me bonkers:

PHP:  instanceof operator

The instanceof operator was introduced in PHP 5. Before this time is_a() was used but is_a() has since been deprecated in favor of instanceof. Note that as of PHP 5.3.0, is_a() is no longer deprecated.

See also get_class() and is_a().

To deprecate or not to deprecate?  Why depricate a function that is very useful is the question I suppose.

I assume this is back in full effect in PHP 5.3.  Thank god.

Rock Out with PHP on Windows! (Track 3)
Today’s application developers have an incredible variety of technologies that allow them to create rocking web solutions. While that variety provides choice which is a very powerful tool in of itself, the complexities that arise from choice make it difficult to pick the right technology to implement a web solution. PHP is one of the most popular technologies to implement web applications. Up until recently, Windows was not a good platform choice for hosting PHP web applications for a variety of reasons. With the advent of the FastCGI component for IIS7 and PHP development tools by Microsoft, Windows has become a veritable stage for PHP developers to build applications that “go to eleven”.

Join us in the PHP on Windows track for a rocking series of sessions that will provide you with an overview of the benefits the Windows Server 2008 platform for PHP solutions, how to build PHP web applications on Windows and how to build user interfaces for PHP applications that pop using Microsoft developer and designer tools.

I am standing here beside myself.

Microsoft has actually acknowledged PHP?!? See Technical Tracks here for more info.

- P

P.S. This whole thing smacks as though Ballmer himself “rocked” his P.R. prowess all over it.

Looking over the referrer stats, it seems that many people reach this blog through Google searches more or less aligned with “How do I install PHP on IIS?”. I think XAMPP might be a better, and easier answer for many about to embark on a frustrating journey.

I can appreciate the need to install PHP under IIS for some purposes. For instance you need your application to co-exist in an environment where you are subject to the existing infrastructure, ranging to the more rudimentary “It’s what the client wants” concerns.

For the most part, I think we can all agree that few, if any visitors to this page would actually be building a web server to be deploy in a data-centre for production/mission critical purposes. I’d hazard that the vast majority of these visits are more interested in learning about PHP, dealing with configuration mysteries or just want a sane development environment in which to code, debug and test.

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I’d just had it. That wretching financial pain that comes with the prospect of having to buy another “on-contract full-price” phone to replace an HTC Touch that replaced a Motorola Razr that my dear wife lovingly laundered no more than 2 months ago. Then again, I’ve not had much luck with phones since about 2004; averaging one every year or two, so this really sucks… again.

The human mind is a wonderful thing. It’s also the most rambling, dynamic, worry-wart of an affair that conjures up all sorts of scenarios and what-if situations.

So I start wondering…

Wondering whether or not some jerk is out racking up a massive long distance toll to “Burkina Faso, Disputed Zone”.

Wondering if I should drive back to the office just to find it staring at me, mocking me for the worry, wasted time and fuel.

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Someone get a mop!

Digging through the FC8 available package list, what do I see but a long list of Asterisk components and features! This is fantastic news for both Asterisk and the Fedora Project. This will vastly simplify things for anyone interested in giving Asterisk a try as it’s no more than a few clicks away requiring no compiling and related complexities.

Was all this in FC7 and I didn’t notice??!

I couldn’t wait. I jumped ahead and installed some of the basic Asterisk packages:

• Asterisk
• Asterisk-voicemail
• Asterisk-conference
• Asterisk-voicemail-plain
• Asterisk-curl

This is my first taste of Asterisk 1.4 so I’m going to keep this really simple. I’m going to setup this Asterisk install as a SIP peer to my existing 1.2 installation. For the most part, default installation files will be used on the FC8 side of things.

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I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.

FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.

The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…

A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.

Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).

The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.

The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.

The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.

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I purport no expertise in web-marketing particularly because I find the concept abstract and a voodoo/pseudo-science of sorts. From my perspective, it’s in the same realm as astrology. Both make for interesting stories. What works here may not work there… for reasons that usually escape me completely. It’s all very emotional which by nature makes it unpredictable and subject to interpretation.

Some of my experience has been applying web marketing concepts that others have developed. I’ll avoid the delving into the various requirements and solutions as they’ve varied over the years, and aren’t really the point of this but rather all centre around spending money in some form or another to get the right traffic to your site to eventually sell something to someone.

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Things have been quiet for me on the blog front, namely my “phplinuxandthelike” hosted with WordPress.com has been idle since October and desperately needs some attention. Though the idea of “phplinuxandthelike” is great, it’s also very niche and doesn’t lend itself well to other topics I find interesting.

So, with that in mind, I’m moving all my content to this, the Official Paul Skinner blog.  This will allow me to post about anything without being constrained by a “themed” blog…

The never-ending quest to put a bullet in the Microsoft Exchange server has just chambered another live-round in the form something called Zimbra. To be fair, the Exchange server I manage is very stable, and runs great. I just loath the price of licenses and dread the obscure solutions to seemingly easy tasks.

I don’t know where this product has been hiding, but it caught my eye last week as a result of a Stumble! click. It seems Yahoo! has spent some coin and bought out Zimbra but is continuing to offer the code and binaries under a variety of licensing models. This is all good news for IT departments and service providers everywhere!

There are a number of How-To documents on the Internet that describe implementing various services to support an Exchange’esque environment. I’ve tried it, it works, but it’s ugly and a devil to maintain. Zimbra provides all the necessary technologies in one suite and centralizes the configuration in a uniform interface. The clever folks at Zimbra did it RIGHT. Both the authentication and directory Services are user configurable and 3rd party supported. This means that Zimbra can leverage your existing directory systems such as Active Directory or any other LDAP server for that matter.

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One of my first blog posts, PHP Installation: A myriad of options asserted that Windows and PHP 4 in ISAPI mode was a frustrating affair. I hereby offer a partial retraction in this regard as PHP 5 is MUCH different.

The folks at PHP recently announced the retirement of the 4.x version slated for December 2007. After which PHP 4 will continue to receive critical updates until August 2008. If you still run PHP 4, now is the time to starting thinking about getting everything up to version 5.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to upgrade all our development environments to PHP 5. Our standard development machines aren’t really all that fancy; 2 year old Dell P4 H/T based desktops running XP. Being a small group of developers, we’re liberal with the choice of IDE; some use PHPEdit, while I’m drawn between Zend IDE and Eclipse.

Our previous run-ins with PHP4 in ISAPI mode were not good. While PHP would usually run to some extent, we were often faced with segfault error message at the top of the output and often IIS would space out. Yes, we’d followed the lengthy install read-me on the site and still could not get PHP and IIS to play nicely. We pretty much gave up on PHP in ISAPI under IIS and settled with PHP in CGI mode for development purposes.

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