PHP
Work, Play, GeekLife.
Apart from the curious lack of direction (virtual-solo projects and the FUDs thereof), there hasn't been too much worthy of interest in the last 3-4 months or so.
* Much ado about JavaScript:
node.js: Finally, JS outside all the pot-plumbing in DOM-land. It's been a tremendous journey discovering node all the way this far, and it looks like a project for the future.
Scaling PHP from the farside
[UPDATE]: Facebook plans to release a rewritten PHP runtime shortly. There was some speculatory report which made claims of a 10Ximprovement over mod_php.
Lately, I've managed to push myself to work on a new (and hopefully useful) pet project. For somebody whose constrained world-view of PHPLand was centered around producing or maintaining MVC frameworks that weren't full of shit bloat, It's been an interesting experience treading previously uncharted territory.
The most bitter truth is complicated
Let's accept it. PHP (for it's 33% share of the web, facebook, wikipedia, yahoo! and everything else included) is a tough nut to scale. The conventional way of scaling the PHP-layer for an application from scratch involves getting your hands dirty in the world of web servers, load balancers, opcode-caches and more.
Why most frameworks suck
You might call me cynical, but this is a ranty (and nothing new) list of complaints + FUDs against most web development / application frameworks. Seems like this is also a natural point of transition for believers in another (new) faith, that of self-help (albeit more self deception and vanity all the same).
You fit the bill, rather than the bill fitting you
So many times, it seems that the problem is with MVC as a concept itself. The inherently flat flavor most frameworks put MVC in action to makes it that much more difficult for large codebases. It can't be helped feeling that adopting an MVC design is in many cases, squeezing yourself into a car rather than walking into one.
Help Translate Drupal to Kannada
Help Kannadize Drupal and Drupalize Kannada! Please join the Kannada localization group on localize.drupal.org and contribute translations online.
If you are the casual contributor who doesn't like messing around with translation editors, You need none of that. All you need is an account on Drupal.org. Or incase you prefer to / have translations locally/elsewhere, Please import your .pos in one shot.
Why Drush rocks and why dreamhost sucks.
I usually find three major uses of Dreamhost: Firstly (and importantly), as a backup dump, Secondly for SVN (Oops, not any more since I switched to github for good), Thirdly as cheap and slow hosting for mostly personal / hobby-network / friends sites. Contrary to people's complaints about Dreamhost, I find them extremely value providing (for shared hosting) for the money you pay them.
Now Drupal, as resource hungry as it is, is a pain on Dreamhost servers. I've had repeated painful experiences of the {menu_router} table getting half-rebuilt (or lesser) when I visit admin/build/modules before Dreamhost terminates the script for memory overconsumption, resulting in broken pages (and the annoyance of manually regenerating the table externally)
Cool JS implementation of CouchDB
This really is super cool B-)
Useful Drupal Upgrade Snippet
Long time no post. Been really caught up: Tons of work, travel, Acads. Anyway, I happened to be upgrading some old Drupal sites from 5.x -> 6.x. Here's a little SQL snippet to disable all non-core modules first.
UPDATE `system` SET `status` = 0
WHERE `name` != 'system' AND `name` !='block' AND `name` !='node' AND `name` !='user' AND `name` !='watchdog' AND `name` !='filter' AND `name` !='upload' AND `name` !='tracker' AND `name` !='throttle' AND `name` !='taxonomy' AND `name` !='statistics' AND `name` !='search' AND `name` !='profile' AND `name` !='poll' AND `name` !='ping' AND `name` !='path' AND `name` !='menu'
HABTM and JOINS == Painful
This is terribly useful:
http://teknoid.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/habtm-and-join-trickery-with-cakephp/
Prepopulate Views Filters with args
Assuming that the argument is a node ID, being sent (say from a panel, under most circumstances)
// grab nid from referring node
$args[0]=arg(1);
if(is_numeric(arg(1))){
$nid = arg(1); //node id
$term = taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary($nid, 3); // 3 is the vid. Use your own Vocabualary ID!
$tids=key($term);
return $tids;
}$args[1]=$tids;
Useless, but...
function ripper($url) {
$page = appr_curl_function($url);
if ($page === false)
{
die("Something wack happened");
}
preg_match('/watch_fullscreen\?video_id=(.*?)&l=(.*?)+&t=(.*?)&/', $page, $match);
$match1 = "http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=";
if(!$match[1]){
