a blog involving philip olson

don't type source .bash_history in shell

nospam@example.com (philip) — 2008-04-20T02:44:00Z

Just wanted to mention that typing the following in shell/bash/terminal is bad:



  source .bash_history

A geek might ask "why would you type that?!" well that's a good question but I meant to type the following:



  source .bashrc

So, it was bad, and executed a lot of commands... all the commands in my bash history to be specific. Ugh. So unless you feel like executing every shell command in your history, don't do this.

listen to php conferences online

nospam@example.com (philip) — 2008-04-15T21:34:00Z

I stumbled upon a nice source of PHP information today (I've apparently been hiding under a rock) and think other PHP geeks will be interested. The audio version of the Zend Conference Talks are online, meaning, you may freely listen to them at your leisure. So go there now, download the talk slides, then press play and enjoy. Kudos to Zend for making these 2007 talks available! Their 2008 conference is coming up so hopefully this means more online talks here soon.

And now a mild rant. I'm bias against all conferences because they are expensive and geared towards small groups. People spend time writing talks for hundreds instead of, for example, writing documentation for millions. If you ever see me holding a sign that reads "We want docs, not talks!" outside of conferences, well, you now know why. ;) And slides by themselves are no substitute but each to their own...

Now back to the topic of this blog post. Go check out those talks and have a listen and who knows, maybe one day other conferences will follow Zend's wonderful lead. Or maybe some already do and I'm just not aware. Also I wonder if there is software out there that can take the slides, some audio, and allow humans to easily sync the two for other humans...

code monkey is everywhere

nospam@example.com (philip) — 2008-02-29T03:24:00Z

Sean pointed out the song code monkey the other day (today if you're reading this within hours of posting) and... it's good :) Quite a following too, including several videos. It's especially enjoyably entertaining if you're a geek, or know one, and I'm a geek.

Jonathan Coulton singing 'Code Monkey' himself:

acoustical (unplugged)
in person with friends and alone and in seattle
at the PAX 2007 Expo - (penny arcade)

There are seemingly a million renditions of this song on just youtube alone... pretty wild! So this post is not complete. I enjoyed many this past hour so will hurry and post this now before I go crazy:

Other peoples versions of the song

anime-ish
humans singing a cappella style
with WoW scenes (a video game)
humans acting it out
a human dancing it out
a slide show view
a guitar hero

What's a Code Monkey?

Wikipedia talks about it, and the term has been around for a long time. They are programmers who write code in caves... well, something like that. They are and can be a lot of different things.

Also, it's well worth mentioning that he sings baby got back too. The official code monkey page has lyrics, and all music is available online within his site. He blogged about it a couple of years ago too.

A brief history of PHP logos

nospam@example.com (philip) — 2008-02-23T23:13:00Z

PHP Logos

Welcome to the [almost complete] history of PHP logos. There have been a few changes over the years, so let's explore them now:

How this was created

PHP 4.0.0 added main/logo.h which contains the logos themselves (as text (a bunch of numbers (magic))) so I checked out every version of this file from CVS, parsed them to create the images, sorted by version/size, then wrote this blog post. Since this file (or logos) do not exist in PHP 3 sources, I scoured the web to find those. Well, the PHP CVS repository attic at least.

The PHP logo

Not a lot has changed here because PHP is still PHP, and the logo clearly shows this. From PHP versions 4.0.0 through 4.4.6 the size is 2962 bytes. However, PHP 5 altered the logo a few times. It went from 4644 bytes in versions 5.0.0 through 5.1.2 down to 2524 bytes from PHP 5.1.3 to today. So, these are officially the PHP logos from 22 May 2000 onward because as they say... the source never lies!

The other PHP logo

Good 'ol Thies and his pencils or breadsticks or magic PHP wands or... do you remember this? If you do you're old, like me. This logo was around from PHP 4.0.0 through 4.2.3. Then along came Stigs dog Nadia (4.3.0-4.3.10), Zeev's dog Scotch (4.3.11-4.4.6), Sterlings rabbit Carmella (5.0.0-5.0.3), then Scotch reappeared (5.0.4 - 5.1.2), and now we see a trippy PHP logo. Oh what a long strange trip it's been, right? Yes it has! You may see this logo at the end of March, or beginning of April, or intentionally using a secret function.

Older logos, before PHP 4

Several other logos exist too, namely from PHP 3. Although these aren't from the PHP sources, they exist and most were restored from the PHP CVS repository attic. PHP almost had a Web 2.0 look way back in 1997... almost. Others were found too, but not all are shown here. I could not locate PHP 1 or PHP 2 logos.

Credits

Colin Viebrock created most of these PHP centric logos way back when. Colin is old school PHP at its finest. And Derick remembered Sterlings rabbits name Carmella.

The future

What's next... an elephant? When will php.net receive its next facelift? How many bytes will the next logo be? PHP is Open Source, so everyone in the world is capable of answering these questions.

About 8 reasons why you should write for the php.net manual

nospam@example.com (philip) — 2007-10-16T11:58:00Z

In response to a recent post by Hannes Magnusson titled "8 reasons why you should not write for the php.net manual", I offer about 8 reasons why you should. Although at times subtle, Hannes shares good points regarding some of the frustration that comes with working on a successful (and old) Open Source project like PHP. How do we appropriately credit the kind souls who seemingly work anonymously within the php.net CVS repository? Not sure, but here are about 8 reasons why you should write for the official PHP manual:

You'll make your mother and friends proud
You'll own a cool @php.net email address
You'll get to see and use your own work online for later use, and allow others to help improve upon it
You'll be happy to know that millions of developers benefit from your work daily
You'll gain experience using DocBook and the related tools to create documentation
You'll gain real karma by contributing to an Open Source project
You'll make new friends
You'll increase your Ohloh coolness factor
You'll be able to say "I write documentation for PHP, the most popular web scripting language on the planet"
You'll end up learning PHP, especially the quirks and changes that it goes through. 5.3.0 has what again?
You'll add the experience to your resume
You'll have an excuse to tell people... "It sounds fun but I promised to document SPL tonight so can't go"
You'll help make something better, something you use. It's good to use things that get better, right?
And lastly, it'll give you something else to blog about

There are plenty more reasons but eightish is a good number. It's worth noting that Hannes does an incredible amount of work for PHP as a webmaster, documentation geek, and php-src guy. See also the Documentation HOWTO for how to contribute.