This is nothing new for me. My blog is constantly hit with spammers trying to leave comments. THey have not succeeded because I am using the Akismet plug-in for wordpress. However I am starting to wonder if there is a better way to block these guys. I notice every time that they are coming from different IP addresses, so I cannot simply create a blocklist otherwise it would become huge.

I continue to have to monitor my spam queue and find things like this

birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_md@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 201.70.17.163
birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_yc@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 192.41.218.100

Akismet does a really good job so far it has stopped 13,813 spam comments from reaching my site but what I am wondering is if there is a better way to filter these guys out and not allow them to access the site using up bandwidth. If any of you readers know of a good method please share it with me in the comments below.

When you are working with remote data feeds it will definatly impact the load time of your site.  For instance if you are using multiple curl calls to reach out to Google and Yahoo to get search results and Google takes 1 second but Yahoo takes 3 seconds it takes your application 4 seconds to load.  Now this can add up very quickly if you are making several connections.  The load time for your site becomes the total load time of all sites you are reaching out to.

What about simultaneous requests?  Well this would make sense because the load time of your application would be as long as the call that takes the longest.  In the example above the load time would be 3 seconds as opposed to 4 seconds.

Stoyan Stefanov wrote a nice article with example code showing just how to accomplish thi.  I cannot wait to give it a shot and boost the performance of my apps.  Thanks for pointing this out Stoyan.

Over the past few days I have been digging through the job sites posting my resume to just about everything that is available.  This morning I came across this posting on craigslist that caught my eye.  In the post the person is looking for a PHP Developer position and links to their online resume.  Their resume is located at http://www.php-mysql-developer.com/.  It is not odd that someone would put their resume online.  I have mine right here.  The part that really makes me laugh is highlighted in yellow on their resume and also shown below.

Even if you’ve never worked with a telecommuter before, I am so confident that you will not only like working with me but also start depending on me for all your programming needs. So if you have a requirement for a long term programmer, I would like to give you 2 weeks risk free trial! After 2 weeks, if you don’t like my speed, knowledge, efficiency, communication or anything else, just don’t pay for anything. I’m confident, after the trial period, I’ll be your programmer forever -:)

It seems that these days everything comes with a free trial.  By looking at the persons name it seems as if they are from overseas.  This is just too funny.  If you dont like me after 2 weeks don’t pay for anything lol.  What is the world coming to?

I am still actively looking for a full-time PHP development position with a local company or a company which will allow for remote work.  If you have a position available or know of one please let me know.  I am also looking for some sub-contract work to fill the void while searching for a job. 

I am currently looking for a PHP Developer position at a company that is local to my area or something that will allow remote employees.  I am interested in contract positions as well as an on the books employee.  If you know of anything please feel free to contact me.  All of my information is located on my resume.  I have 8 years of experience with PHP/MySQL and I am a Zend Certified Engineer with PHP 4.

Before I begin you must know that I do not mean any disrespect to any woman who are out there working in a field that is saturated by men.  I too agree that women can do anything a man can and that there should be more female programmers.  The following is not geared only towards phpwomen.org but at others as well.  Ok time to start my rant.

When it comes to sexism and racism why must everything be segregated?  Women have been programming for years, in fact I know a few (yes i know i used the few word and not many).  We now need a site geared only towards women who are programming PHP?  If you want to be equal to men, why not join them rather than segregate yourself from them. 

Running into this site made me think of a conversation I had a long time ago about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Granted it did have it’s time and place, back when the arrogant white folk would not let a black man be in movies or on TV.  Today however is it just as common to see a black person on TV as it is a white person so what is the need for a tv network like this, or an awards ceremony for this?  What do you think the response would be if some white guy started White Entertainment Television (WET).  Oh all the sudden we would be racist etc.  Recently my roommate stumbled across a forum post where someone called a black person articulate and they were tagged as a racist.  The explanation given was that because the black person was called articulate it implied that black people are stupid.  This thread made me wonder where things are going, what can you call someone without being racist?

Back to women programmers.  I understand the need to unite with each other and improve the female presence in the php community, I just do not understand why you feel the need to segregate yourself from the guys.  I see what you are doing trying to "unite" the women together to form a group, but why not unite with the guys rather than separating the two?

As I said before this is not meant to be directed solely at phpwomen.org but rather at today’s society.  Forget about race, gender, etc and unite as a whole.

For those of you out there who don’t want to learn yet another language but still want to develop for the OS X platform you are in luck.  Wez Furlong has been working on some code that will allow you to consume the frameworks that you can use with Objective-C.  With this bridge you can use PHP programming to develop applications.  This is a very neat accomplishment by Wez.  They have cooked up a small ping class with a GUI front-end.

While it is still in the early stages you will most likely need a fair amount of C and Objective-C knowledge to make things work.  I look forward to seeing how this evolves as time goes on.  You can read more about this and see the example images on Wez’s post.

Back in the days where I used Windows for my primary OS I used to use PhpED as my web development IDE from time to time.
When I finally made the switch over to Mac OS X I found that I could not run PhpED under OS X and had to find an alternative. I started to use Zend Studio and even with the low level of support I continue to use it.

Parallels Virtual Desktop enables our Mac and Linux users to take the full advantage of PhpED features, including the latest additions.
From drag and drop of the Macintosh PHP file to PHP Editor as shown on the picture

Today I received an e-mail that stated that you could now run PhpED under OS X, it seems a lot of people have been asking for it. I was so disappointed when I went to their website and found out that you can only run it on Mac OS X / Linux while running under Parallels. Now Parallels is Virtual Machine software which will allow you to run different Operating Systems in a virtual window. While they do take it a step further with coherence mode you still have to run windows in order to use it.

The main question on my mind is if you use PhpED as your primary development software why would you run OS X in the first place. Not to mention why would you do your development under a virtual server.

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Recently i switched jobs, going back to eFashion Solutions. At eFS we remotely mount our user directory to our local machine using SMB. On OS X it just mounts as if it were a local drive on the system. While using Zend Studio it works great for the most part, all except for one little issue. It causes the Samba install on the server to use 90% of the CPU. I tried to use Eclipse however it wont work with the SMB drive at all.

We believe the issue with Zend is that it sees the SMB drive as a local drive (which in many ways it is) and does not cache the directory listing. Without caching the directory listing it is constantly transferring data between the server and my client. The IT dept told me that using SMB with Zend Studio is not an option due to the increase in CPU use.

I contacted Zend online through their online chat (Sales) to find out if there is a phone # that I could call to get this question answered or possibly report a bug in their software. They insisted that they do not have phone support. Hey guess what, you want to buy a license you have live chat on the site and or a phone to call. Once they have your money though, you are screwed. You have to wait upwards of 24 hours for a response to any support ticket that you submit and no way to contact anyone at all for immediate support issues. I’m sorry but if it is keeping you from being able to work they should assist you almost immediately.

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Since I have started at my new job we have been looking into several different PHP frameworks to use for the new development. We pondered doing a custom framework for the site but in the end we opted to go with CodeIgniter. I have to say that overall CodeIgniter is a really nice framework. It saves us a lot of time and code when we want to do simplistic things. The best part about CodeIgniter is that it is based on the MVC design pattern.

MVC is a really nice method to use for object oriented development. It keeps things well organized and keeps the code clean, organized and easy to manage. The framework is also very easy to extend. You can extend core classes or you can replace them with your own implementations. It also gives you the ability to create your own libraries and helpers. A library is a class which you can load into CodeIgniter. Below is an example of a controller that will load a custom library and put it to use.

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