Yesterday I've discovered an "interesting" implication of using user input inside var_export() and print_r() functions. To those who have never used the two, a brief overview of their functionality. The var_export() function takes a variable and represents the data found within as a valid PHP string. By default this string is dumped to screen, but if you want you can have it be returned as a string, by passing a 2nd optional parameter as boolean TRUE. For example if you wanted to put an array creation code into a file, you'd do something like this: [php] file_put_contents("my_file", var_export($array, 1)); [/php] The print_r() function is similar in function, except the returned data is intended for debugging and not storage. As with var_export() by passing a 2nd optional parameter you can force the data to be returned as a string rather then dumped to screen. Herein lies the problem, when it comes to storing the data, this is done by enabling output buffering of the content without a set buffer size limi...

About a year ago when gas prices in Canada have started to rise rapidly my friend and I were trying to guess when they will exceed the $1 per liter mark. After some discussion we've mostly agreed it would not happen till 2006 at the earliest. Alas our predictions were proven false, as the picture below shows today, August 13, 2005 the $1 mark has been surpassed. Given that $1 for a liter is a physiological marker for many people, it would be interesting to see what impact it would have on the quantity and type of cars seen on the road. Perhaps it would finally reduce the need for city dwellers to purchase giant fuel guzzling SUVs and similar type vehicles, but only time will tell. One thing's certain however, fuelling up your car will be much more of a hit on your wallet, just a month ago I could relatively easily fuel up for mere “0.80” cents a liter. A 20% increase in such a short time is highly noticeable and most unwelcome. NOTE For those of you who don't use the metric system or don't know late...

My article on performance has just been published in Oracle Technology Network, you can read it at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/deployphp/alshanetsky_deployphp.html The article has some Oracle and Oracle httpd (variant of Apache) specific optimization, however for the most part it can be applied to virtually any PHP installation. To those interested in improving the speed of their PHP application it should (I hope) prove to be an interesting read.

Finally got a semi-stable internet connection, a pretty amazing thing during a convention of this size. So, while George is serenading the audience with the wonders of DBXML, I get to do a bit of blogging :-). The conference so far is a great deal of fun, had a chance to meet with many developers from other non-PHP projects, which is quite neat as most conferences I have a chance to attend to be PHP specific. The brief talk on performance I gave yesterday went rather well, with probably one of the largest audiences I've had at a conference and seemed to have gone rather well. The slides, to those interested are now available online (just click "talks" link at the top of the page and scroll down). While for me OSCON is almost over :-(, I got an early flight back to Toronto tomorrow the next two conferences are already in the works. I will be speaking at php|works Conference in Toronto around mid-September and I will be giving quite a few talks at International PHP Conference in Frankfurt in early Novembe...

Came across a rather interesting article by IBM on how to convert IE specific web apps to work with Mozilla. Aside from the obvious, by listing the different approaches each browser adopts it serves as an excellent resource for making a web app cross-browser complaint. I hope they will update article with the other two commonly (relatively) used browsers, Konqueror/Safari (KTHML Engine) and Opera.