Derick Rethans - tag: travel

CodeWorks and ZendCon

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:46:00 +0000

CodeWorks and ZendCon

Monday, October 19th 2009, 05:46 BST

CodeWorks was a blast, I recorded a few talks that I will be publishing through Vimeo. As teaser I have a recording of Scott MacVicar's PECL picks talk. I also have recordings of Brian Moon's Memcached talk, Chris Shiflett's Security-Centered Design talk and Sharon Levy's Web-Based Retrieval Demystified talk. With all the other random video material I am creating a compilation as well, but that will have to wait a bit more.

At the moment I am on my way to San Jose where I will speak on Xdebug and PHP's DateTime support. Xdebug 2.1 is now feature complete, and I will be working on getting all the open bugs resolved. A release before the end of the year seems likely.

Good bye Norway, Hello London

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:32:00 +0000

Good bye Norway, Hello London

Skien, Norway

Sunday, June 21st 2009, 02:32 CEST

Today, at the longest day of the year at the summer solstice , I am making a bit change to my life. If you're following me on twitter you probably already know what I'm up to. For everybody else, I am going to say good bye to Skien in Norway, and move to London (the one in England, and not the one in Ontario). Norway has been my home for the past five years, and I've had a great time exploring the nature as well as working at our office in Skien . Skien is a nice place, but ... not the most interesting of cities in the world. From today I will be living in London to see what life will bring me there. I am both sad to leave Norway, but I am also excited to live in a cool new place like London. I'll have awesome house mates (Hi, Mr. Þorbjörnsson, Ms. Cherry and Mr. Ray!!), and something new to put my energy in. I will continue to work as project leader for eZ Components for eZ Systems and continue to make great software with Alexandru, Tobias , Kore and Sebastian . If you are about in London, let me know! We could go for a pint or something. See you there!

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:45:00 +0000

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

London, UK

Friday, April 10th 2009, 01:45 CEST

The above mentioned conferences all have one thing in common: I'll be speaking. At the first conference, pfcongrez I will be talking on implementing Test Driven Development as a model for software development. A modified version of this talk I will also give at the next conference, P2P Конференция (P2P Conference) in Bulgaria. At this same conference I will be talking on using PHP as development language for GSM based applications on mobile computing platforms running Linux, where I will use the pecl/dbus extension to talk to the interface framework available on the OpenMoko platform. This same talk I will also give at DPC in Amsterdam. In between however I will go to Chicago to speak at php|tek on search technologies in my "Haystacks and Needles" talk and on simple architecture in my KISS talk. Before DPC I will also go to Leuven for PHP Vikinger , an unconference that I'll be organizing for the 3rd time. This year it is no longer in Norway, but instead we moved to Leuven in Belgium. It is also de-coupled from the eZ Conference and Awards which will be in Paris.

PHP Vikinger 2009

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:36:00 +0000

PHP Vikinger 2009

London, UK

Monday, April 6th 2009, 12:36 BST

I'll be organizing PHP Vikinger again this year. It will not be in Norway, but instead we'll be moving to Leuven in Belgium. It will be held on May 30th, very close to Leuven's central station at Café Sport (known from the PHP Belgium meetings). For the full invitation, see the website .

PHP's two-pass compiler

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:55:00 +0000

PHP's two-pass compiler

Istanbul, Turkey

Saturday, January 24th 2009, 20:55 EET

On my way to Istanbul I was looking at Xdebug bug #422 . For some reason Xdebug was crashing while doing code-coverage analysis, in the part that analyses which code was dead (ie. opcodes that could never be reached). The crash occurred with a JMPZ (jump-if-zero) instruction, that suddenly saw a jump-to position of 572222864. That position resembles more a jump-address.

Xdebug uses the same branch analysis implementation as VLD so I used the latter tool to find out why it would crash. Unfortunately, it was working just all nice and fine with VLD. After digging around some more, I saw from the back trace that the crash in Xdebug only occurred when a user-defined error-handler was called while parsing a file. The latter gave me the insight of looking at which phase the compiler was in. I remembered that PHP has a two phase compiler. The first pass is quick and dirty, and only records the opcode line number to jump to. Xdebug however was expecting an memory address as jump target. Because a memory address is a much larger number than an opcode number—the latter usually not being much higher than a thousand—Xdebug was setting the "visited" flag in a part of memory that wasn't allocated. And writing to unallocated memory makes a process die with a segmentation fault.

The compiler in PHP is two-pass. During the first pass, it will find out to which opcode it needs to jump in the jump instructions. However, the PHP engine (and Xdebug) expects a memory address to jump to while executing your script. In the second pass, the compiler will then go over the generated opcodes and calculate the memory address to jump to from the jumps to opcode numbers. It will also do a few other things, such as collapsing sequential EXT_STMT opcodes, calling Zend extension's functions to finalize the opcode arrays—Xdebug uses this for caching whether an opcode array has been scanned already—and re-allocating the opcode array itself to save space.

Now, the thing is, that usually VLD and Xdebug kick in after the whole opcode array has been created, which includes running the second pass of the compiler. However, Xdebug also tries to analyze opcode arrays while executing them. In the case of a user defined error handler, that happens before the second pass has been run. Preventing the crash was therefore as easy as making sure that the compiler's second pass had been run while scanning the opcode arrays for executable code.

Conferences in Winter/Spring 2009

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:47:00 +0000

Conferences in Winter/Spring 2009

Skien, Norway

Tuesday, January 13th 2009, 10:47 CET

In the next five months I've lined up quite a few conferences. First of all, there is Web Programcıları Platformu in Istanbul, where I will be giving the closing keynote to inspire Turkish talent on January 24th.

The week after that I'll be traveling to Barcelona for the eZ International Winter Conference to give a tutorial to the new MvcTools component.

In March I will speak at PHP Quebec Conference on searching with PHP , simple application design and eZ Components .

In April I will travel to Veliko Tŭrnovo in Bulgaria to speak at the WebTech conference on PHP-on-DBUS and Test Driven Development.

The line-up ends with a trip to Chicago to give a talk on searching with PHP , simple application design .

Microsoft Web Developer Summit wrap-up

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Microsoft Web Developer Summit wrap-up

Redmond, US

Wednesday, December 17th 2008, 15:56 CET

About a month ago I visited Microsoft's Web Developers Summit to come and talk with many other people from the PHP Community on how to get closer together and make the PHP experience better on Windows and with other Microsoft products. Although I was quite skeptical about the whole event and was slightly worried about it having only marketing and brainwashing sessions I set off just after php|works to Redmond (or actually Bellevue).

The first day started with Sam Ramji introducing the event, and Microsoft's strategy and "dedication" towards Open Source and open standards. Of course as part of this, OOXML was mentioned which caused some small discussion about the standardization process of it. Also mentioned was the grant to the Apache foundation as well as that Microsoft (or at least parts of it) now see that being open about things could mean growth in revenue. Some of the feedback that he got included making sure that it's actually easier for Unixy people to remotely maintain a Windows server — for example by providing the set of Unix tools from the /bin directory as well as providing built-in SSH support.

The OOXML thing got a follow up later in the day, where a member of the Office team tried to debunk the myths that the OOXML standard process was all messed up. Instead however, we were more interested in seeing how we could get a C-library to deal with office documents. Unfortunately we didn't really go into that specific topic.

Lauren Cooney introduced the Microsoft Web Platform and installer that can install a whole web stack. At the moment PHP isn't part of this yet but it will come soon. One of the things we discussed here was which extensions should be bundled. To which the obvious answer should be: "at least everything that PHP has enabled by default". Besides the installer, they're also working on a Web application installer with which also PHP applications that can be installed. This could also be something that we would like to see eZ Publish in for example.

IIS now also features a "mod_rewrite" extension that can also import Apache mod_rewrite rules from .htaccess files. It would also be nice if php_value settings could be imported and applied as well through this extension, just like the mod_rewrite rules.

The SQL Server team was demoing the new SQL-server driver for PHP. However, they got sort of grilled about not listening to what the users want. At the moment, there are the following "irritating" issues: There is no PDO driver, UTF-8 is not supported and it only works on Windows. The first two are definitely deal-breakers for us if we'd want to support MS SQL Server properly in our software. We discussed those issues later and it seems mostly a resource issue. Let's hope they can prioritize those points soon.

Juan Rivera introduced a Visual Studio plugin for editing PHP: VS.Php . I had spoken to Juan before regarding Xdebug that he integrated into VS.Php.

There were many other talks, but they didn't qualify for writing notes about. What I found most interesting were the interactions with the developers, and the least interesting where the attendee show cases. I think it was very worthwhile to see what kind of direction Microsoft is going, especially the parts where they want to be part of the community. There's still quite a road to go, especially because of legal issues, but they're at least on the road. Contact has been made :)

Upcoming conferences: php|works and PHP Northwest

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:01:00 +0000

Upcoming conferences: php|works and PHP Northwest

Skien, Norway

Monday, November 3rd 2008, 11:01 CET

In the upcoming two weeks I'll be embarking on a little trip, where I'll be speaking at php|works in Atlanta on Test Driven Development and on Date and Time handling with PHP. The latter subject is also the topic of a new book that I've been working on in the past months. Before going home and after visiting Redmond I'll head to Manchester to give a keynote titled "K.I.S.S." at the PHP Northwest conference. Looking forwards to see all my PHP friends again!

Fall Conferences

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:30:00 +0000

Fall Conferences

Skien, Norway

Thursday, September 11th 2008, 09:30 CEST

Fall is coming up, and the means plenty of conferences. Next week there is ZendCon , where I will be speaking on search solutions for PHP and Test Driven Development.

On September 27th I will be speaking on Debugging with Xdebug at the Barcelona PHP Conference .

At the International PHP Conference (no longer in Frankfurt^WMörfelden, but in Mainz) I will be speaking on PHP Myths Defused and Xdebug -- I will also give a keynote on the "K.I.S.S." principle.

At php|works in Atlanta I will speak on Test Driven Development and Xdebug, and at the last planned conference of the year, PHP North West I will also give a keynote on the "K.I.S.S." principle.

Scotland Holiday

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:58:00 +0000

Scotland Holiday

Scotland, UK

Friday, August 29th 2008, 21:58 CEST

Edinburgh, August 9th and 10th, 2008

I had a good flight through Amsterdam to Edinburgh, the real nerves started when my luggage did not appear on the baggage belt. Apparently I had missed it and it had fallen off in the back, out of sight. After being reunited with my bags slightly later and getting the car I made the arduous trip to the "hotel". The "hotel" was the Heriot-Watt campus, which was neither sign-posted or easy to find. After making a few circles through the neighbourhood, I managed to find it. However, finding the campus wasn't the only issue -- 30 minutes later I finally had found the reception in a pitch black night. Sleep commenced very soon after that.

I got up early in the morning for a light breakfast and unhappily discovered that it was raining. Not something you should be surprised about in Scotland. I took the bus into town to meet up with Lorna and after a cup of tea Scott as well. Without any real plan we wandered around the city and taking in the views. This quickly turned into looking for food. While having some drinks over lunch we chatted a bit more, and more walking occurred in the afternoon. We got tired, had some more drinks and by that time Lorna had to leave for home again.

Scott and I dropped of our gear at his room and went looking for a comedy show to go to. The Edinburgh Fringe festival was happening, so the biggest problem was to which of the 640 shows we wanted to go. We settled for "Des Clarke - Desire" at the Pleasance Courtyard. After a cup of tea in a café full of loonies, we left for the show. We had a great time, although his accent was sometimes a bit hard to understand for me. A cab brought me back to the "hotel".

After sleeping in a little bit, I took the bus again to downtown Edinburgh. I took a quick bite to give me strength to visit the Edinburgh castle. I took the long route through Princess Gardens up the hill. The queue for tickets took a little over hand an hour. The tour at the castle itself, was interrupted by the occasional shower, but the weather had improved a lot since the previous day. The castle is a must see. I liked the "prison of war" exhibitions best, and the crown jewels where the anti-climax.

After visiting the castle I was quite hungry and went to have a lunch of stir fried scallops at the Mussels hut. With the new found energy I climbed Caston hill. The last hours in Edinburgh I spend at the various street theaters of the fringe. After a light dinner at "bar One", consisting of swordfish and an apple/carrot salad I left back by bus to the Heriot-Watt campus.

Edinburgh to the Isle of Arran, August 11th, 2008

I started the day with a simple though hearty breakfast at the newly opened Mensa. From the hotel I travelled first slightly south to visit Roslyn's chapel. Unfortunately the chapel is mostly hidden by a roof to protect it from the rain. Inside photography was not allowed, so I didn't manage to take any pictures. In the church I listened to a guide explaining all the interesting art from the chapel. From pagan green men, the apprentice pillar and the Hollywood circle, the church appeared to house much more than I expected. From the church I left for Falkirk, home of the Falkirk Wheel.

The wheel replaces many locks between the Union and Forth and Clyde canals, and is quite an engineering feat. For some time there was even some blue sky which made watching the wheel turn more pleasant. I continued my journey after a quick lunch towards Glasgow and to Ardrossan where I would take the ferry to the Isle of Arran. I was a bit early and wandered about the really windy harbour. They also tried to fool me that my ferry would be two hours later, but that I didn't go for. The trip of the Firth of Clyde was windy, bumpy and slight sunny.

When I got the Brodrick on the other side, I shopped for essential energy suppliers for the upcoming walks around the island. I was staying at the Catacol Bay hotel on the northern point of the island, where I had breaded haddock for lunch. The wine that came with it "forced" me to walk around a bit along the windy coast. The heavy rain that had plummeted down when I arrived was gone. Before I went to bed I prepared a bit for the hikes of the following day.

Isle of Arran, August 12th, 2008

Hiking on an empty stomach doesn't work, but a full Scottish breakfast might be a bit too close to suicide. Way too much artery clogging goodness for me. Of course, the rain had returned but that was not going to stop me from a little hike around the "Cock of Arran". From my "parking place" I spotted a few seals, but they were obviously not sun-bathing. I didn't walk the whole planned tour as there was simply too much rain. In the end I was happy that I didn't continue, as I would have missed some many other things during my really short stay on Arran.

The next stop on my tour around Arran was a short walk to the standing stones and stone circles of Machrie Moor. During the two mile hike it was of course raining still. The last hike of the day was to the King's caves. I was silly and went the wrong way for nearly half an hour, but it finally stopped raining. After some dry period I finally ended up at the caves. There was even some sunshine. The rest of the day I merely drove around the rest of the island thinking I had no water with me. Back at the hotel I found six bottles in the trunk. I had dinner in the hotel's bar and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy brought and end to the day.

Isle of Arran to Isle of Skye, August 13th, 2008.

A heavy Scottish breakfast started the day. I left quite early to catch the ferry at Brodrick back to the mainland. The day consisted of a lot of driving over narrowish roads. I stopped for a late lunch at a café overlooking Monty Python's castle Stalker. The weather was getting better the close I got to Skye. After the Skye bridge beautiful scenery appeared but I stopped only briefly to take some pictures as it was getting late too quickly. I didn't really settle in at the lovely B&B "Roskhill House" until after dinner at Hotel Dunvegan's bar.

Isle of Skye, August 14th and 15th, 2008

A nice breakfast at the B&B started the day. It was beautiful weather and excellent for my plan to hike to the Quiraing. A quick drive later over surprisingly good roads--although the last part was a one-file road--brought me to the parking place at the start of the hike. From there I walked for ca. 2.5 hours over the maintain range. Very strange rock formations and beautiful vistas. From there I drove on to walk to the Cave of Gold but was met by some bulls in a field that I had to cross. I gave up in fear of my life, and instead drove to Neist's point and enjoyed the view there in the setting sun.

I had dinner at "Old School" restaurant. Actually, I had dinner twice. For some reason my starter--duck--was misunderstood as another main course by the totally cute, but clumsy waitress (it could have been my accent of course as well). Both dinners were excellent; if you want to eat here as well, make sure you book on time, one, if not two days before hand.

The second day I was woken up by a little rain shower, but luckily the rain was gone before I was out of the shower. As the weather on the east coast of the island was supposedly going to be a bit better, I opted for climbing up to the "Old Man of Storr". A really nice walk with excellent views -- which got even better when the sun broke through. From the Storr I traveled up the coast and stopped a few times to enjoy the views and take some pictures. I ended up doing a walk to a lock, which was boring. With threatening rain I aborted the walk -- I got back to the car just before the shower would have soaked me. I had dinner at the Dunvegan hotel as my first choice, the "Loch Bay Seafood Restaurant" had no space for me.

Isle of Skye to Edzell, August 16th, 2008

Lots of driving again this day. I started off after brekkie for Scotland's east coast. I took a few compulsory pictures at Eilean Dohan castle and then drove along the shore of Loch Ness towards Invernness. I made a quick stop at Urquhart and but not manage to spot Nessie. I continued my way south from there through beautiful Aberdeenshire where all the heaths were blossoming. I was staying in a small village, Edzell at the Kelvingrove B&B. I had dinner at the Panmure Arms Hotel, which has an interesting setting. The food however was excellent.

Angus, August 17th, 2008

Breakfast was early at the B&B which meant that I had some time to kill before all the attractions opened -- it was a Sunday after all. So I decided to drive into Glen Clova, the supposedly nicest of the Angus glens. Unfortunately there was not much too see in the mist. I then proceeded to Glamis castle, said to have been the set for Shakespeare's MacBeth. It is very nice, with gardens all around. I found it a bit too commercial. From there on I visited the Pictavia museum in Brechin followed by a quick visit to Aberlemno to see a few of those Pictish stones. It was a bit of a bummer and lame. As last activity of the day I wanted to walk a little bit along the coast. But at the moment I started to walk, the rain started to pour down as well. So I aborted and went back to the B&B to eat, pack and watch a movie. The following day I was going home again.

Final notes

I should definitely have spend more time on Arran and Skye - both beautiful places of which I've not even seen half.

The food is mostly great in Scotland, as long as you stay away from Haggis.

My best accommodation was Roskhill House , there were also lots of other hikers there, which added to the atmosphere.

I had the least amount of fun in the last day in Angus.

It always rains in Scotland, so bring waterproof gear.

My pictures from the trip are on flickr .

Location for PHP Vikinger

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Location for PHP Vikinger

Skien, Norway

Friday, May 2nd 2008, 10:54 CEST

We've now found a definite location for PHP Vikinger . It will be at one of the old factory buildings here at Klosterøya , close to eZ Systems' offices. The room has about space for 80 people, and has a nice view over the river southwards. About 20 people from Norway, Iceland, the UK, Germany and Denmark have signed up so far. This means there is still plenty of space for you! See http://phpvikinger.org for more information, and the invitation .

PHP Vikinger unconference open for registration

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:38:00 +0000

PHP Vikinger unconference open for registration

Skien, Norway

Sunday, April 27th 2008, 10:38 CEST

The PHP Vikinger unconference, to be held in Skien, Norway on June 21st is now open for registration . You can find the full invitation and announcement here , but I will repeat the highlights.

First of all, this is a free event, but we do require you to register for it to see whether we would have enough space. Places to sleep, and getting to Skien should be arranged by yourself. We made a information page with some suggestions though. The Norwegian PHP User group has reports and videos from last year . The unconference open for all, from beginners to advanced PHP users. At the moment there are about 12 registrations, from people from Norway, Germany, Iceland and the UK. Hope to see you here!

Announcing PHP Vikinger 2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:13:00 +0000

Announcing PHP Vikinger 2008

Vancouver, Canada

Friday, April 18th 2008, 20:13 CEST

The PHP Vikinger unconference will be held for the third year in Skien, Norway . Just like previous years it follows directly after eZ Systems conference which puts this year's PHP Vikinger on June 21st, the longest day of the year.

Flickr features some pictures from previous years . And PHP Norge has a report from last year . Let me know (through the e-mail on the PHP Vikinger website) if you're interested, and if you want to suggest topics.

British date format parsing

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:25:00 +0000

British date format parsing

London, UK

Sunday, March 2nd 2008, 20:25 GMT

During the PHP London conference (slides are here as usual), a number of British people were "complaining" that PHP's strtotime() and date_create() /new DateTime() functions do not understand the British date format "dd/mm/yyyy". Historically, the "English" text to date parsers in PHP only accept the illogical American format of "mm/dd/yyyy". Having seen this problem before, I recently added a new function/method to PHP's Date/Time support to address exactly this issue. From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse. To parse a British date string, you would for example use:

format( 'd/m/Y' ), "\n";
?>

In case the passed string does not match the format, the function will return false. With the also new function date_get_last_errors() method you then can request more information about which part of the string could not be passed. The following example illustrates that:

The $errors contains a list of errors, indexed by the position in the string where the error was found. The above script would produce:

array(3) {
  [2]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [5]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [8]=>
  string(13) "Trailing data"
}

The format specifiers are mostly similar to the ones used for the date() function. Documentation on the new functions should make it into the documentation soon.

Speaking in Oslo and London

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Speaking in Oslo and London

Skien, Norway

Tuesday, January 22nd 2008, 15:45 CET

On a rather short notice (from myself), I will be speaking the coming Thursday at PHP Norge 's user group meeting in Oslo on PHP 6 . PHP Norge organizes a bi-monthly gathering with once in a month a talk on a specific topic. Attendance is free.

On a somewhat longer time frame I will be speaking at the phplondon conference . On leap year day (February 29th) I will provide the closing keynote. In this keynote I will go over the last 12 years of development of and with PHP. I will especially focus on how people perceive development with PHP, and in the mean while share some insight knowledge of specific events during PHP's development.