Alex @ Net

I've been asked on the forum about my preferences in frameworks and I wrote a few thoughts about it. In short:

• 80% of the code I have written do not operate with frameworks.
• Language constructions, right tools and good methodology are more important then frameworks.
• ZF style is more flexible and allows you to write faster code and its learning curve is not as high as it is for declarative frameworks (PRADO/ASP.NET).

I have about 5000 photos in my archive. About two days ago they were on two computers, in different folders, some of them had wrong names or creation date and some photos are copied multiple times. They occupied a lot of space and it was hard to backup all of them.

So, I decided to change the situation and create a few simple rules that make my photo collection better organized and apply them for existing photos. And these rules should not be complex (I'm very skeptical in my ability to label each photo with tags) and allows me to quickly navigate over the collection and find photos. And here they are:

I've just published an article about Zend Certification. As you may know, I've passed it a year ago and since then have about 5-7 email each month with questions about it. So I've summarized my answers in article.

If you are a ZCE and wrote some words about it, just drop me a mail or leave a comment and I will add the link to your post in the article. Thanks.

My ISP is not as reliable as I want it to be. From time to time it happens that I cannot upload files using FTP, have enormous number of dropped TCP packets or have some other interesting surprise. Of course, there are alternative ISPs but there are reasons to not replace my current with another one.

During looking on "Request time out." produced by famous ping I realized that I need something similar but for Web requests. And I want to check my download speed, and upload, and... Stop. It may be a good idea, it may be bad idea but I want create a nice and simple software that shows me how reliable my internet connection is. I can test other ISPs, show problem to my ISP, etc. And this only requires a few Ajax requests.

The result comes quickly and you now can test it too. http ping does exactly what I need. It does almost the same what ping does: sends the request, receives the response and shows amount of time the request takes. It does it four times and shows report. That's all.

I wonder, is it a good idea to create a PHP implementation of the JSR 286 - Portlet 2.0 specification?

The questions I want to ask:
1. Do you know about portal/portlet technology?
2. Do you like it?
3. Is it a cool idea to create a PHP analog of javax.portlet?
4. Do you want to participate in such project?
5. Will you use it in your projects?

PHP is a good language, but there are always surprises. And today I've seen an interesting approach in Arnold Daniels's blog. He talks about temporary variables in PHP. This tip is useful to "lazy" developers who do not even think about variable names. They may prefer magic names like ${0} and 0 is good enough variable name, why not...

But I'm even more lazy then Arnold and sure that when there is no variable, then there is no problem. So here are a few tips that can make your code shorter and harder to read :-)

In his recent post Travis Swicegood is talking about the "Fluent API". This kind of API is very popular in scripting languages and I use it during my work with Zend Framework or jQuery projects. Another good example of such technique is Document Object Model API.

photomatt says about paid links become penalized by Google. It becomes interesting, because from my point of view the original story contains a lot of links that I consider paid.

It looks like if I'm selling an advertising space on my site and place a few links to my sponsors, it will drop my site from Google's search result because I'm using "paid" links. It is nonsense. For me it looks like Google penalized sites for using other ad systems instead of AdSense.

I think that paid links may affect a site PR and it may be one of the 250 or even more parameters Google use to calculate it. But it never can be a "major" parameter.

I want to tell you about the quiz, created by Gareth Heyes. You need to decode text from sequence of numbers like "38 35 120 50 53 59 38 35 120 51 53 59 38 35 120 52 51 59 38 35 120 51 49 59 38 35 120 51 49 59 38 ..." It took me about 20 minutes to successfully decode the text and I find that PHP is quite useful for such sort of things. Please do not spoil in comments! :-)

Stu's recent post Microsoft’s First PHP Extension: SQL Server 2005 Support contains a few thoughts on why PHP requires improved driver for SQL Server 2005. I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment.