I beat my head against this one for hours. A recompiled version of PHP 5.1.6 on OS X was simply not loading my php.ini, even though a valid file existed in the place specified by the –with-config-file-path configure setting (/etc), and no other php.ini files existed on the system.
Eventually, after many rebuilds, I downloaded a clean copy of the source, rebuilt from scratch and voila – it worked. however, changing it and recompiling prodiced the broken results again. make distclean and a rebuild made it ork again. So, if you’re seeing this problem, a clean recompile (don’t forget to use config.nice) should make it all work again.
I’m not sure if this is a PHP bug or not – is it meant to work?
MS has a big spanner
Microsoft are, yet again, releasing a feature that’s probably going to be pushed as some kind of improvement, but will be to the detriment of 99% of its users: In Outlook 2007 they are removing the IE-based HTML renderer and substituting Word’s HTML renderer instead, you know, the one that makes Netscape 2 look good. Admittedly, IE in Outlook has historically been the vector for the vast majority of viruses (hence the ‘Outbreak’ nickname), but that’s mostly untrue in recent versions. Microsoft are touting IE7 as the most secure version ever, yet it seems to be too insecure for Outlook? They might come up with some kind of lame antitrust-compliance excuse, but they could instead simply open their internal protocols and use pluggable renderers, just like Linux and OS X do. I suspect it will have zero effect on spammers, most of whom don’t use HTML significantly any more, and they don’t care anyway. Erstwhile competitor CampaignMonitor has an excellent take on the situation.
So what does this mean? Probably the end of HTML email marketing as we know it. It will cost the industry millions in lost revenue – not that MS costing industries millions is anything new. OTOH, it might just usher in a new age where marketeers have to remember how to write decent copy.
If they wanted to make a real difference, they could perhaps fix their SenderID spec to talk to SPF correctly, or perhaps get Exchange to send bounce messages that actually contain useful information, like (and I don’t think I’m asking too much) the address the message was originally sent to.
Marcus Baker’s Agile Presentation
As requested, here is a hefty 15Mb PDF download of Marcus Baker’s "Is Agile right for you?" Presentation.
XDebug talk at PHP London
Last night I gave a talk at the monthly PHP London meeting all about XDebug and kCacheGrind – I only just noticed I made an earlier post on here which lamented the lack of awareness about these excellent tools.
The talk went OK after a late start, and took rather longer than I though it would. I didn’t have a very well defined end point so it kind of petered out, but it seemed to go down OK, and there were some good questions. The MacBook worked great after I remembered to pick up the right kind of video adapter…
You can download a PDF of the presentation here.
Marcus Baker’s talk on “Is agile development right for you?” was entertaining and thought provoking.
I had some great conversations beforehand, and I completely failed to talk to Demian after he kindly bought me a beer!
Having two Marcus B’s around can get confusing too…
Somehow I didn’t get home until about 2am.