Pet Pixels

I've finally got my Skype SourceForge project up and running. I sorted out SF's subversion setup too, and I've stuck some PHP classes in the respository - needs rounding out before a file release though. Installing MediaWiki on SourceForge's project web area was a little uncomfortable, so I submitted a patch to them to make that kind of thing easier.

Fantastic dinner party this eve, supposedly to review all our skiing photos - Paul, Marlene, Fraser, a very tired Adam, Sandeep & Pam, Mummy & Ian, and of course Henna and Charlotte. Sarah cooked 2 huge legs of lamb, a gratin Dauphinois, and chilli green beans. I made a giant Jaffa cake. We polished off a fair few bottles too, in particular the two Crozes Hermitage Di bought us, which were just wonderful. I made pancakes in the morning, which went down well. Tea at the Horniman museum (after looking at the rabbits, goats and chickens of course) rounded out a very enjoyable weekend. Should probably have done some more work on the hallway though.

Paul and I met up with Ander, Jolly, John and Fraser for a spot of biking around Leith hill. Managed to accidentally set the alarm an hour early and got up at 05:20. 20 mins later I realised my mistake and went back to bed for a bit... It was extremely cold, with snow and ice on the ground in the places that were not covered in mud! Some sunshine made it all very pretty though. Despite recent skiing, I just didn't seem to have much go, but it was good fun anyway. My bike is seriously grubby.

Clay Loveless has an excellent article on professional PHP development attitudes. I couldn't agree more about the rules, especially that last one. My own PHP coding (in pretty much the exact circumstances described!) has come on by leaps and bounces in the last year by learning svn and simpletest amongst other things. I regard the use of E_STRICT much in the same way as W3C validation of XHTML and CSS - it's vital. I encounter many designers that don't comprehend validation - the excuse that things don't work the same in IE seems to give them carte blanche to make a complete pig's ear of everything. Having said that, E_STRICT is hard to maintain with many external packages, particularly bits of PEAR. The forthcoming undeprecation of 'var' should clear things up quite a bit, though I don't know if we'll have to wait for PHP 6 or if it will sneak into 5.x. Lately I've been looking into PHP IDEs (again). I'm playing with PHPEclipse. It has some great features, but I really don't get how anyone can be all that productive in a single window IDE! I've been having a hard time making it do what I want, and there are just endless amounts of configuration to be done. Even when it's all working, it just seems much slower and more cumbersome than a few terminals and a copy of BBEdit. Ideally I'd like an interactive PHP debugger in the IDE, but DBG doesn't seem to want to play nice on OS X, and it doesn't support PHP 5.1 anyway. I might have to see what xdebug can do in that direction. Just to add to the error_reporting confusion, PHP6 is scheduled to change it again. From Derick's PHP 6 meeting notes (which seem to have mysteriously disappeared from php.net):

As we want to expose the language level warnings a bit more, and because of having all error levels in E_ALL, except E_STRICT is confusing we will be adding E_STRICT to E_ALL. As the current default is E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE we will effectively turn on E_STRICT by default.

In a reply to the blog entry, Xing Li said

To control peformance is to shed fat, use lean code, and control i/o follow from point to point and through every single line of code.

While I agree that it's the way to go for small-scale efficiency, it's often difficult to do in the large, and is prone to the 'early optimisation' trap. To deal with the larger scale issue, I'm surprised that more people don't seem to use profilers. xdebug's profiler pumped into kcachegrind is just a wonderful thing for PHP development, and runs great on OS X.

An excellent bash with a very nice venue. I've been to several PHPLondon gatherings and it was great to see it all come together. The 'meet the speakers' do the previous evening went very well - I had a good chat with Harry Fuecks. The speakers were pretty good. Pawel's Dependency Injection was probably the most underpresented, but had the best content, and had similarities to a talk given by Marcus Baker last year. Matt Zandstra presented his template path pattern well, but I was left with the feeling that it was way too specific to be of much general use. PHPLondon are a very comfortable bunch to be with!