phpied.com

You can ignore this post, it's just my contribution to an effort to outlink a comment spammer. Lately I've been continuously deleting comment spam messages and spam trackbacks on this blog, about 5-10 a day. So if this effort will help even the slightest, I'm in. If you have a blog, you can join too.

Alternatively, if you're interested in texas hold'em, click to visit a Wikipedia article on the subject. Personally I didn't have an idea what texas hold em was. I just briefly looked at the texas holdem article, and saw that it's something to do with cards and poker. They lost me right then and there

A nice refreshing posting about the power of the small company.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/06/small_is_the_ne.html

And the poster didn't even scratch the emotional part of it...

A co-worker of mine installed a Wiki last week so that we can try to replace the Word docs as the method of creating documentation. Once I learned how to create new pages and the most basic formatting commands (bold, italics, links, lists and headings) I liked the idea so very much that I started documenting stuff as I code, something like documenting as a break from coding.

I liked the idea so much that I started a Wiki for that community site for which I'm helping with the administration. Sure, phpBB that powers the site's forum is great for discussions, but when it comes to organizing a multi-people proofread content - Wikis are the best bet. And it's just so much fun.

And finally, today I posted a big 5+ pages article on AJAX at Mozilla's Dev Wiki. It's just so much fun!

I've always loved to write. In the primary school, to begin with, then in the high school, I just loved blank notebook pages. Sometimes I had notebooks, sometimes just random pieces of paper for writing my stuff -- mainly short (very short) stories and lyrics to heavy metal songs-to-be Then came the love letters and lyrics to grunge songs. Well, I'm not doing this anymore. Instead, at some point there came phpBB, I love to post in phpBB. Don't you just love phpBB's icons, especially Mr.Green? . Then WordPress, I like WP's interface a lot, it usually makes me write longer posts than I intend to (just like this one, I never meant to post about love letters )

And now - Wiki! I love it. It has this great ...er, thing, that you can create new pages just like that. And these pages are already connected with the rest, as soon as you've created them. And the auto-table-of-contents created from you heading? Lovely.

For now I've only used that MediaWiki that powers WikiPedia and the other related projects. But I know there are other good ones, like DocuWiki for example. Here's a pretty comprehensive list to get you started. For documentation or as a personal organization or whatever - just get yourself a Wiki!

Today Blane Warrene posted in his SitePoint blog about Packt Publishing, the publisher of my book. It's about their initiative of paying a percent of the royalties of each open-source book to the open-source project the book is about. In the case of my phpBB book, the creators of the software, the guys from phpBB group will get some money for each book sold. Great initiative, I think. It's not that somebody's getting rich or something, it's just a nice way to say "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

• Blane's posting,
• the announcement from PacktPub...
• ... and while you're on SitePoint, don't forget to take a look at SP's re-designed homepage

BBC announced the existence of a BBC open source site some 3 hours ago on the BBC mailing list.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/

Personally I think it's great that big organizations is contributing to the open-source community. I find it fair - at times they have benefited from open source technologies, it's good that they contribute back. In fact, BBC are using open-source technologies all the time (and who isn't?), since they have their web sites powered by "Apache/2.0.51 Unix" (Source: NetCraft).

This reminds me of another organization that I recently found is contributing to the Open Source community. Everybody has probably heard about this organization - it's misspelled as "Google"
http://code.google.com/projects.html

BTW, BBC also offer their content as RSS feeds, Podcasts and APIs (not ready yet) -- http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/

An alternative spelling to Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World".

hmm, it sounded funnier in my head

Often when you post code (in WordPress for example), you need to manually convert your >s into >s, <s into <s and so on. It can become tedious at times, so today I created this tool to help me out: HTML entities converter. (http://www.w3clubs.com/htmlentities.php) So I simply paste the code there and I get the converted text, ready to be used in a WordPress-powered posting.

In terms of implementation the tool is nothing more than a handy way to call the PHP function htmlentities(). The source code is also available for anyone curious enough to look under the hood.

Me and the whole family went to a pro photographer a couple of weeks ago. It costed us an arm and a leg, but the results were unbelievable. Here's a small preview.

• Nathalie as a present
  
  
• Nathalie on my hand
  
  
• Zlatina surprised
  
  
• Zlatina-ballerina
  
  

Since this monday (May 16th) the book I've been working on is now out! It's pretty exciting, I can't wait for my copy to arrive so that I can touch it. I have to admit, although I consider myself being pretty web-savvy, doing the daily readings, banking, communication and whatnot online, sometimes the tangibility of the material world is ... hmm, well, tangible

Okie, back to the book...

• My previous posting about the book, containing some background information about it and its collaborators, here »
• The book's official page »
• The publisher - [Packt] Publishing »
• phpbb.com »
• The book on Amazon »
• phpBBHacks.com's forum announcement and a special book page »

Click for a larger view of the print certificate That's the ZCE logo / sticker

Wo-hoo! The printed certicate found its way to my wall Technically I received it on Tuesday (May 17th), which is about 6 weeks after the exam (March 31st), but being kinda busy I didn't have time to go to the post office and pick it up until yesterday.

The surprise was that it even came in a frame and with a ZCE sticker (still wondering where to place it...).

If the above doesn't make sense to you...

• I took the exam to become a Zend Cetrified Engineer which basically means that I know my around some PHP coding (to say the least). More about me taking the PHP certification exam here...
• I was blogging while preparing for the exam, just in case somebody else is preparing for the same exam and my thoughts can be of any help to them

Welcome to my PHP Certified.com blog

Nathalie, the beautiful baby girl, my second daughter, was born this Sunday.

Some data:

Will post pics asap, gotta... bathe... the baby... now

Good news today! I got an email from my editor saying that the phpBB book will be published soon.

Yes, I've been working on a phpBB book for some time, it's written and completed now and undergoing final proofreading. So it means that in a few weeks it will be published! It's pretty exciting...

Here's some more about the book. The publisher is Packt Publishing, great guys, publishers of books such as the phpMyAdmin book, the one about eZ publish, Typo3 and other great titles.

I'm not the only author; there are two other great guys. Jeremy is a team member of phpbbhacks.com. He's known as Thoul in phpbbhack's forums (if you didn't know it, phpbbhacks.com is a great site), he has written a lot of great tutorials for the phpBB community. He wrote two chapters and a few appendices for the phpBB book and was really helpful reviewing my chapters.

The other author is Mike. He wrote the chapter about designing your own phpBB theme, which is probably my favourite. It starts from coming up with the idea about the design and goes through all the steps. Check out his phpBB templates - Ad Infinitum, Conundrum, NoseBleed (the one that the his chapter is based on) and NoseBleed2, which powers his own community.

Here I should also mention Mr. Patrick O'Keefe. He is the creator of phpbbhacks.com and other sites that are part of his iFroggy network. He's a SitePoint author (just like myself, only with greater number of articles and experience) and SP forums Advisor. He did a great job reviewing our work and he also wrote an intro to the book.

So, the book will be out soon, meanwhile you can see its page, download a sample chapter and preorder with 25% off. There's also another nice surprise about the book coming up but ... it's a surprise, isn't it?

Finally, did I mention that my publisher is great? Yes, and if you're thinking about becoming an author yourself, check them out as a potential publisher. The details are here.

The Alexa stats are described in this posting here. I just wanted to share the code if anyone's interested.

< ?php

?>

Here's an SQL dump that contains the `sites` table definition and the data. The data contains all the 499 top Alexa URLs plus the results from the server test.

I've read this SitePoint blog post today where the author wonders about the popularity of IIS vs Apache as server software. There is Netcraft as a reliable source of course, but the question was more of "How about the big sites?" and examples of big sites are those in the Alexa ranking.

So I took this as a challenge and hacked a quick script to get those stats.

The Methodology
I took Alexa top 500 sites from here and made a request to each of them. I logged the "Server" header response. The top 500 sites are actually 499 - from 1 to 500.

The execution
Slow and painful. Some sites didn't respond at all. Some didn't want to show their server software either sending a blank "Server" header or none at all. To my surprise Yahoo! and Geocities send blank server headers.

The analysis
I take all the 499 sites, subtract N/As (non responding or blank server headers). Then I make a select on all servers matching "Apache" and all matching "IIS", as well as some of the others. Then I admire the percentages.

The results

Some more raw data
This is the result of a simple count on the different server header responses. Just as an idea how different they can be. It's available as a CSV and XML file.

Many thanks!
... to PEAR Its HTTP_Request and DB packages made the coding possible in no time.

Yep, it's a fact. Here's the proof.

I took the exam almost a month ago but waited so that most of the details are erased from my memory, so that I don't accidentally violate the exam's rules which state that you should not reveal information about the exam.

So I took the exam at a discounted price - just about a 100 Canadian dollars (1 CAD < 1 USD). There was a PHP conference in town , guys from Zend were attending and as part of the conference, Zend were offering the exam at such a price. I even get to speak to the guy himself, I mean Daniel Kushner, the guy responsible for the certification and the education at Zend.

There were a few surprises during the exam, both in terms of the exam questions and the administration of the exam.

The first surprise was that the test was paper based. My guess is that this was because the exam was administered as part of the conference, in a hotel, and not in a specially designed VUE test center. Well, actually there was another surprise before that and this was that one had to have a zend.com account and a registration ID in order to take the exam. I don't know if that has something to do with the fact that the exam was not administered in "normal" test center. Anyway, Daniel gave me his laptop so I was able to register pretty quickly.

The actual exam surprise was that I didn't have enough time! I've always been a fast test taker and have always completed the tests well before my classmates and I've always wondered why it takes them so much. It's either you know something or you don't. Well, in most cases. Well, it's actually either you think you know it or you don't. Or you don't remember. Or something Whatever. Then in addition to that, I've read a blog posting about this guy who said he completed the test in no time and then had enough time to go back and change most of the answers. So I expected to have enough time and I decided to play it safe and just "pencil" my answers on the answer sheet with a small dot and then to go back and review the answers. Well, the time was passing and I still haven't completed all the questions, so I gradually started filling out the circles completely when I was sure about my answer. In any event, I spent the last 5 or 10 minutes of the exam just filling out circles. I didn't have time to review any of my answers. I thought it's either the exam questions are too difficult or I'm just getting old. There was a total of 70 questions and I had hour and a half to complete the exam. So this makes a minute or so per question. In the last 10 questions you were expected to write down the answers as text, they were not just multiple-answers.

So my overall impression is that the exam should not be underestimated and some questions were a bit time-consuming. Not that you need to do calculations or something, but when it comes to regexps or several string functions combined... OK, I've said enough. In any case, I don't think there were trick questions (or I was tricked so I didn't notice) but there were a few occasions when I was sure a spotted the correct answer and I was finding even more correct ones

Good luck to everyone who is preparing for the exam! I'll keep on blogging on exam-related topics, I even have some unfinished blog entries from back then when I was preparing for the exam. And when I come across an interesting php tidbit that looks "examie" I'll make sure I drop it here. In case you haven't read my previous blog entries from back then when I was preparing for the exam, here's the PHP certification category.

So again good luck to everybody who's preparing for the exam! You can do it!

My article on highlighting source code with PHP was published at Sitepoint.com today. It's a sequel to the previous article about using BB code.

Happy reading!

URLs:

• Highlight Source Code in Your PHP Application [published in the PHP & MySQL Reviews and Apps section]

  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/highlight-source-code-php

• Use BB Code in Your PHP Application [it's filed under the PHP & MySQL Tutorials category]

  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/bb-code-php-application

• SitePoint.com - it's one of my favourite sites

  http://www.sitepoint.com

Some time ago I've created a phpBB mod/hack to use on a bulletin board I manage. Recently I decided to make it available for anyone interested to install it on their boards.

I've posted it some time ago on phpbb.com but it takes a while for the phpBB team to review all the mods/hacks they receive.

Yesterday I posted the hack on phpbbhacks.com and today I noticed it was approved and published. Here it is: the lat2cyr transliterator.

Good job, phpbbhacks.com!

Just a suggestion to phpbbhacks.com - consider sending an email to the author when their download is approved.

» More info and a demo of the hack is available here.

A new version was just released, containing a security patch.

Unfortunately Kredor, the company providing the transliteration service I was using for this hack, is no longer providing the service (either that or they have changed its URL without announcing the new one), so the hack is currently unusable. Let's hope that they'll release a new version.