Sep 29

PHP 5.3 introduced some new data structures. The talk of Jurriën Stutterheim on PFCongres 2011 on SPL structures and their performance triggered me to have a closer look at the performance of these structures. I was kind of fooled by two comments on the PHP.net page, so it was time to find out myself.

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Jun 07

Today I was unpleasantly surprised by a change in behavior when upgrading Propel from version 1.5.4 to 1.6. I frequently use zero dates in MySQL ('0000-00-00') and these dates are affected by the upgrade. As it was deployment time I had to find a solution quickly. This post outlines what the problem is and what I did to solve it. Continue reading »

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Jun 16

For quite some time I've searched for a way to start a command line script from within a page in PHP without using the crontab. Basically I just wanted to start a script which does some processing in the background. The solution is pretty simple, but it took me some time to find it. Continue reading »

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Apr 15

Not for the first time I've searched for a way to visualize a multidimensional array in a tree view in my web browser without directly using echo or print. I wasn't able to find a concrete solution for this previously. However, this time I was put on the right track by a post of Kevin van Zonneveld. Continue reading »

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Jan 14

Okay, I must admit: I'm a programmer and I know some commands. Because I want to use PEAR packages, I needed to install it. The installing command is quite easy to find, but I had a hard time determining the directory structure. Some searching on the internet and an IRC conversation (EFNet #pear, thanks davidc_!) later I was able to install PEAR in a quite reasonable directory structure. Continue reading »

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Dec 10

WampServer 2.0 is a nice tool to help you develop a new site on your local computer. However, you'll probably need more packages/libraries than those included with WampServer. This post is about installing extra common features which are mostly present at hosting servers, but not (directly) on WampServer.

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Jul 24

Today I faced a problem with FPDF and FPDI when trying to concatenate some PDF files. The only output I got was 'FPDF error: Unable to find xref table.' When I did a search on this error message, I wasn't able to extract the answer from it. After some searching, the problem was located.

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May 15

Multiple times I've been searching (too long) for a working IPv6 regular expression. There's a lot of crap out of there which doesn't take into account certain cases. Of course you only get to know which one works best if you test them all. I've tried A LOT and finally found the right one

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Mar 25

This post will show a simple example of how to interpretate a WSDL file and a very simple, yet quick example of how to extract information from this file through PHP.

Prior assumptions

In this example I assume that you've already have SOAP enabled in your PHP configuration because this is beyond the scope of this example. If you're not sure, you can check your phpinfo file. There should be something like this:

SOAP information

SOAP information

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Jan 22

Seeing the date of my last post I realize that it's been a while ago since I last posted a message, so here's an update.

The last couple of months I've been working on my research assignment for the TU Delft which was about data integration and semantics in the context of data warehouses. In that research I've analyzed some data warehouses with respect to the current evolving WWW. It seems that especially for the Web 3.0 vision Web Services play an important role for interoperability. Next to that online collaboration is a hot topic. As I am a bioinformatician, one of the most important things in this field is security. Currently there's no secure SOAP implementation for a Web service to first establish an SSL connection before sending data. Next to that SSL results in large overhead as it encrypts whole HTTP packages. When having a data warehouse with gigabytes of data this is not practical.

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