Johannes Schlüter

In my blog post for the 5.3 release I already mentioned it and some others posted it, too: We're planning a release party in Munich, currently we have around 60 people who registered. That's the official announcement:

We like to invite you to the PHP 5.3 release party on Friday, the 17th of July in Munich. The release party offers a chance to talk to other PHP enthusiasts and enjoy that PHP is alive and kicking. If you just can't resist a decent barbecue together with some beer and other drinks you are also welcomed.

The happening will take place at the Waldwirtschaft beer garden irrespective of the weather. We will meet at 19:00 o'clock - open end.
The location is famous for its huge beer garden (2,500 available seats, a children’s playground) and its typical Bavarian but also international food. On sunny weather you may even enjoy live-music and listen to the sounds of Jazz, Blues, Swing or Dixi.

Catering will be provided and as a special delicacy you may enjoy a suckling pig!

If you like to join the event please register at PHPUG-Munich Wiki and follow it for updates.
Alternatively you may register at Facebook as well and follow this for updates.

For any questions please visit IRC channel: #phprp on irc.uni-erlangen.de.


The PHP 5.3. BBQ release party is sponsored by:

   
 

Supporters for the PHP 5.3 BBQ release party are:

• Sun Microsystems
• PHPUG.de

Yesterday we held our PHP BBQ event at Munich, well it was no BBQ as the weather forecasts predicted rain,which came in the evening, but a nice evening in a beer garden.

We had more than 30 people there, some leaving early, sme arriving late, covering quite different kinds of participants: PHP core developers, professional PHP users, people doing PHP stuff as hobby, friends and PHP community veterans like Till Gerken. Many people didn't know each other or didn't see each other or some time so we had lot's of discussions, and most of them even weren't about PHP and even many non-IT things were covered, which I find always great. If you want an impression check Ulf's photos. I really hope this makes a good foundation for more regular PHP meetups.

There will be a few more events of this kind this week in Germany, so go there if you can, don't be shy and have fun.

PHP BBQ dates:

• Tuesday, 16.06.2009: Frankfurt
• Wednesday, 17.06.2009: Karlsruhe
• Thursday, 18.06.2009: Berlin
• Friday, 19.06.2009: Dortmund
• Saturday, 20.06.2009: Hamburg
• Sunday, 21.06.2009: Kiel

More inormation on the exact location and information about registration can be found on the MySQL Forge Wiki.

Wolfram|Alpha is a nice technology, unfortunately it is missing lots of possible knowledge so it can't compete with offerings like Wikipedia in most cases. But it still has some interesting facts. Did you ever wonder how far God is away from Earth?- 5600 kilometers!

Since Kore, Lars and Marcus forced me to write this:

• Sebastian's first foreign language was Latin, for me Latin was the reason to start programming (by trying to hack the vocabulary trainer my brother wrote, so I learned Basic instead of Latin)
• I started PHP since I was too dumb to get my Perl CGI scripts working after our home server crashed
• I still have more Perl books than PHP books
• Compiling PHP 4.0 on our Pentium 90 home server took a night or so - and often forgot to activate some extension I used
• I learned SQL using the university notes from my brother, and I soon learned that MySQL 3.23 doesn't support "CREATE VIEW"
• I used my unicycle to ride to the office where I had my first job application ever (that trick worked!)
• Sometimes I am tour guide in Munich, but only for friends, like Kore

And now I have to tag seven more people ...

• Ulf Wendel
• Scott MacVicar
• Helgi with the untypable last name
• Hannes Magnusson
• David Soria Parra
• Lukas Smith
• The elePHPant

Sometimes one has weird ideas, or am I the only one? - This specific one is at least a year old, now, during the Christmas days, waiting for New Year's Eve I had the time and mood to finally try it out: MySQL 5.1 has a plugin interface to easily add storage engines. PHP can easily embedded into other applications.  So why not combine these two things? - Writing a MySQL Storage Engine which reads data by calling a PHP script.

Let's start with a simple example first:

<?phpfunction create_table($table, $data) {
    return true;
}

function open_table($table) {
    return new ArrayIterator(array(
        array('id' => 1, 'dat' => 'foo'),
        array('id' => 2, 'a' => 'bar')
    ));
}
?>

This is the bare minimum storage engine my plugin supports. create_table() is called for creating the table, open_table() to access it, the later one then returns an iterator which is used for a full table scan. This example uses an ArrayIterator, which implements the SeekableIterator and the Countable interfaces, the first one provides a seek() method, which is called to read specific rows after sorting for instance, the later provides a method count() which gives the optimizer a hint.

Let's use this table:

mysql> CREATE TABLE php_test (id int, val CHAR(3)) ENGINE=PHP;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM php_test;
+------+------+
| id   | val  |
+------+------+
|    1 | foo  | 
|    2 | bar  | 
+------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Ok, of course that's nice and shiny but well, it's read only. To solve that you can implement a few interfaces provided by the plugin to handle writes:

<?php
class Test extends ArrayIterator 
implements MySQLStorage_Writable, MySQLStorage_Updatable, MySQLStorage_Deletable {
    public function write($data) {
        $this[] = $data;
    }

    public function update($data) {
        $this[$this->key()] = $data;
    }

    public function delete() {
        unset($this[$this->key()]);
    }
}

function create_table($table, $data) {
    return true;
}

function open_table($table) {
    return new Test(array(
        array('id' => 1, 'dat' => 'foo'),
        array('id' => 2, 'a' => 'bar')
    ));
}
?>

Again, we can test it:

mysql> UPDATE php_test SET val = 'baz' WHERE id = 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

mysql> DELETE FROM php_test WHERE id = 2;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO php_test VALUES(3, 'bar');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM php_write;
+------+------+
| id   | val  |
+------+------+
|    1 | baz  | 
|    3 | bar  | 
+------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As a reminder: This is calling PHP for all these operations.

So what might real life use cases be, once the major issues in the code are fixed? I have a few ideas like

• A live-logfile query tool, not sure that's really need, see the primitive Apache httpd access_log parser which is provided with the code as an example
• Combine it with the embedded MySQL server and use this storage engine for your unit tests, "mock tables" ...

Any other ideas? - Leave a comment

Oh, and like most MySQL stuff nowadays: There's a launchpad project for this plugin.

DTrace is a damn cool debugging tool, unfortunately only available for Solaris and different BSD flavors. If you want to learn about it watch the quite entertaining video (well, I guess you should be a true geek to be entertained, ...) from Bryan Cantrill's talk.

The reason for me writing this is that I had some problems with the PID provider and wanted to note the solution for myself:

$ dtrace -n 'pid1005:::entry { printf("Hello"); }'
probe description pid1005:::entry does not match any probes

The reason is that my user only had the dtrace_user, not the dtrace_proc right. Setting the attributes correctly solved the issue. Time for more DTrace'ing.

As one can see on the frequent updates on this blog I don't have much to say, now there's this twitter thing, until recently I didn't understand it. Whenever I visit the site I see mostly pointless (imo) stuff like "preparing my pizza", "eating my pizza", "done with my pizza". The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself, instead of that I wrote a little PHP extension intercepting the error handling and sending the error messages to my twitter profile. While doing that I found out that this saves a whole lot of monitoring infrastructure as twitter then can send you a SMS telling you your app broke, great no? (Disclaimer: I won't use it on a production box as it makes the error reporting way slower and twitter seems, from what I've heard, to be down quite often)

While browsing through the net I often find pages I like to share, but well, I don't want to spent time writing a blog article neither do I like putting the link without comment in this blog. Therefore I've created a small tool which helps me with publishing links to my new Link-Blog with a single click from my web browser. On that page you'll find any kind of stuff - I guess most of the content will be German.

So why did I create my own system instead of using del.icio.us or some service like that? - Well there are two reasons: a) It's my system and I have full control and b) in future I'll add some code which will automatically extract teasers from the linked page and add these to the list - like I already did for YouTube videos.

Siemens hat doch die besten Jobs:

Over the last two weeks I had the chance of going to concerts of three of my favorite music acts. In chronological order:

• August 25th: For the first time I went to see Seeed (Wikipedia) at Berlin: A really great show and a really good sound system which made it possible to hear every single percussion stuff while also having a good bass. Really great show even though one could feel that they were looking forward to their one year break. If you have a chance for attending one of their concerts and like dancehall music: Go for it!
• September 1st: For the third time I visited a concert of Dendemann (WP), the second time with his Die Pfütze des Eisbergs program. Therefore there wasn't new stuff for me but still a nice show (and for free )
• September 4th: For the second time I was at a Kinderzimmer Productions (WP) concert. Since I didn't have the current album, Asphalt, yet (I bought it after the show) there was really quite some new stuff for me. Inside the concert hall it was quite hot which led, in combination with my dancing, to a quite wet T-Shirt unfortunately I wasn't able to buy a Kinderzimmer Productions T-Shirt since they were sold out. Damn. (While I'd prefer a sweater but they didn't even offer them...) _{(And I'm sure that concert was way better than NIN where Thorsten was)}

I had no YouTube video on this site, for a long time, maybe even for a too long time. But great stuff is here:

Due to a recent discussion on IRC I just found out that it's now exactly three years since I first wrote a mail, including a patch, to the PHP internals list. The patch tried to use STDERR instead of STDOUT for error messages with PHP CLI. As you can see in that thread the patch was way from being perfect and wasn't accepted and somehow I didn't improve it - even so I got a few good hints... Instead of such a, possibly, useful feature the next thing I did was implementing things nobody really needs in PHP: Operator overloading. The main idea behind that was to learn about PHP internals. That patch got some attention from Marcus who later on helped me by answering my stupid questions about PHP internals and meanwhile became a good friend of mine. Since then I created, with Marcus help, the -a-readline-mode, improved the reflection API and did some other tiny things. My newest toy project, related to PHP internals, is a lua extension - more information will follow when the first release is being published.

This night I came back from a trip to Kaunas (Lithuania) where my friend Johann and me gave some security consulting. Although I didn't see much of the country (basically I just saw the Hotel, some office building and a shopping mall) it was a nice trip which also produced some media attention in the Lithuanian press.

Just swim 5,572 km through the Atlantic to drive from Hamburg to New York:

(Via Zeit Google Blog)

From Monday till Wednesday I've been on a short trip to Barcelona and had quite some fun while my feet hurt from walking all day.