I use git on my projects - but they're not similar enough just to be branches. Recently I came up with a way to patch one or more commits from a project to another easily. Here is a simple shell script I wrote to handle the task.

Simply put, you can use it either by fast-patch.sh /z/my_project to patch a project with the latest commit from the project in the working directory or with an optional paramater, specify a number of commits, eg fast-patch.sh /z/my_project 5

Also, it will generate a patch log to ~/fastPatch.log which I generally use directly for my commit message by way of git commit -F ~/fastPatch.log

Any comments on how I could improve it, or questions are quite welcome.

There are two main ways in PHP to go about implementing GZIP. The first is ob_gzhandler.  Basically all that is really involved in setting this up is adding ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); anywhere before headers are sent, and it will blindly handle this for you.

The second is zlib.output_compression which while entirely transparent and Zends states that using zlib.output_compression is preferred over ob_gzhandler().

This method can have a huge downside for users.  It can for instance greatly exacerbate the sluggishness of an already slow page or even site. Right now your probably saying to yourself "What? I thought GZIP made everything faster. This guy is crazy.". Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you have a site with no all encompasing output buffer.  As PHP works its way through your script it occasionally flushes out its internal buffer to apache, which in turn flushes it out to the browser, allowing the browser to begin rendering the incomplete document. Also, let’s say as an example you have a hold up slowing down your page in the footer of your site. The user would already have the rest of the content and could begin reading and enjoying the site.

Now let’s compare to a site GZIPed with an output buffer callback, e.g. ob_gzhandler. After the output buffer is started, your code begins to execute.  Everything echoed is held in the buffer until the page is completely done and the output buffer closes, at which point it is GZIPed and flushed out to the user.  The user recieves less bits, but that hold up in the footer we spoke of before halts up the entire rendering process, and the user cannot see anything until the footer completes.

For your viewing pleasure, a demonstration:

Take Note

I am not stating that all GZIP is bad. To the contrary, GZIP can be very beneficial and I absolutely sympathize with google wanting to cut down on their bandwidth. If you have Firebug or something similar you can note that the request for the Non-GZIPed example is a whopping 100 kilobytes, whereas the GZIPed examples request is a measily 323 bytes! The reason for this is I did not have enough content to get Apache to flush so to get around this I added the following line.

echo str_repeat(' ', 100000); //This creates 100kb worth of data, enough to trigger my copy of Apache to flush;

Not only does this trick cause Apache to flush, but it exagerates the positive effect of GZIP. Simple patterns, or in this case large amounts of whitespace, will compress quite wondefully.

Uncompressed static files, JavaScript and CSS being two of the best examples compress quite well. The best way to do this is on an Apache server is with

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

Looking for a Solution

I've posted a number of questions to Stack Overflow [1] [2] researching this writing and actually found very limited help.

It appears murky whether or not the protocol even supports the functionality of chunking GZIP results into separately compressed blocks, as would be required to decompress portions before the page is done – you can chunk a complete GZIP response, but the advantage of this is limited.

Lastly I have seen “promises” of ob_gzhandler caching the results leading to a speed boost on a number of blogs – this is purely fiction and not to be trusted.

Moral of the Story

Understand what you’re doing before you do it.  Blindly using output buffering for GZIP can have adverse effects on your site. 

Simple Calendar is a very simple PHP calendar class.

More Details Soon

Click here for the Github repository.

JDZoom is a MooTools powered hover detail zoom

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Click here for the Github repository.

For a very long time I was a Windows guy, I was once a DOS guy. I switched nearly exclusively to Mac for my home use about 4 years ago. I’ve been very happy with it. Its stable, well engineered, and - my favorite part of all - consistent. Yet, in this time there remain a few applications I cannot seem to replace.

Nusphere PhpED

I am a PHP Developer by trade, and PhpED for my money is by far the best development environment for the serious PHP developer. When I do develop on the Mac platform it is usually split between two applications – Coda and TextMate. They are fantastic text editors, don’t misunderstand, but when you are developing highly classed applications a strong IDE becomes highly desirable. PhpED’s IntelliSense style PHP auto completion is on par with and in some ways surpasses Visual Studios.

Applications like Dreamweaver, Coda, TextMate and Espresso by comparison provide very basic auto completion. Zend Studio, Aptana Studio and other Eclipse based solutions have varying qualities of auto completion, but are awkward due to Eclipses generality and slow and visually out of water due to being built on Java. Komodo comes the closest, but can be very slow at times. Weighing in at $299 its pricetag is also heavy.

To give you in an example, in my CorpusPHP Framework the user class is built specifically to be extended for the sites particular needs. The login class therefore has a member instance of whatever type of object extending user you might have. This member is dynamically set as an instance and therefore type cannot be determined by most editors and auto completion will not work.  PhpED on the other hand has a solution. This brings me to my favorite PhpED feature - deep phpDocumentor integration.

class Login {

    /**
    * Object that holds the user object, brought over from the session
    * @var User
    */
    public $user;

    … … …

}

The above code snippet shows the user member of the login class. It can be any type of user, for instance admin or limited. It will though be inherently be something that extends the user object.  Using phpDocumentor syntax here we imply that the type is a user and since PhpED is smart, it auto completes based on this.  If you are unfamiliar with phpDocumentor syntax you should read up on it, and begin marking your PHP up in this standardized syntax.

PhpED takes this integration further and will show descriptions of methods and functions as well as their parameters and return values based on their inline phpDocumentor documentation.

While auto complete is the PhpED killer feature in my book, it has many other excellent features.

 Its internal debugger  is second to none, and requires no setup unlike other debuggers. It installs its own copies of Apache and PHP 4 & PHP 5.2 or 5.3 which it uses to debug. The debugger can output to an internal version of IE or Mozilla or any external browser. Its quite configurable, everything you would expect like ability to set $_GET, $_POST, etc variables, break points, runtime analysis.

Some smaller features I personally enjoy are for instance:

• To-Do list shows you all the todo’s throughout your project.
• Continually improving, high quality CSS/HTML auto completion.
• The ability to set a default character set on a per-project basis
• Non-Ascii range characters show up dark blue in variable and function names, making them obvious – which is particularly helpful when working on code from a Cyrillic coder whereas Α (Alpha) and A are visually identical but entirely different characters.
• Great support – Support will work with you to fix a problem.

CorpusPHP is setting out to be a world class PHP Framework. The aim is simple, to provide encapsulation, modularization, and helpful tools, all without changing the way you write PHP.

Project Information, documentation, and a timeline for the first release available availble soon

Nightly's available at GitHub, or download the latest milestone below.

Build	Date	Message
v0.98 Download	Aug. 31, 2010	Arial Replaced with Vera, references to helvetica removed
v0.92 Download	May. 14, 2010	Basic SSL support added
v0.9 Download	Feb. 18, 2010	Repository Restructured -Working Corpus now in Source Folder -`Scripts` folder added, includes database dump batch, and README.md HTML viewer -`Local` folder added, for testing use with local database connections, etc Documentation -Finally! Created an initial README.md -TODO moved from includes folder into root
v0.85 Download	Feb. 8, 2010	Cache.php -Major rewrite of cache handling - now requires an instance Configuration.php -Added module option to constructor to interface Corpus class and module namespace Corpus.php -New __premeta function pulls the first scans data into the module namespace -$_cache and $_config added to the __load function, vis-à-vis the module namespace Modules -Updated for new 'name' meta attribute, 'call' depricated, 'callable' boolean added --Button.php --Crux.php --FlashLoader.php --FlickrFeed.php --LastFM.php --TwitterFeed.php -Configuration options added --FlickrFeed.php --LastFM.php --TwitterFeed.php
v0.7 Download	Feb. 3, 2010	functions/general.php -Updated nempty for PHP 5.3 compatibility (Weird casting bug) -Removed some unused, commented out, functions
v0.1 Download	Dec. 2, 2009	Initial CorpusPHP Alpha Release

]]> http://donatstudios.com/Andrew_Gross noreply@donatstudios.com(Donat Studios) Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:21:09 CST http://donatstudios.com/Andrew_Gross http://donatstudios.com/Donat_Studios_Launches noreply@donatstudios.com(Donat Studios) Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:45:28 CST http://donatstudios.com/Donat_Studios_Launches After much ado, Donat Studios is finally live!

There are a few things left to complete. Eventually setting up the documentation and public git repository for CorpusPHP will certainly take up a fair amount of time. I'm still not quite sure what to put in my portfolio, I was thinking of for the time being just throwing a bunch of my sketches in there.

My reasoning and goals behind this site are slightly different than my other sites. More than anything I wanted a place where I could rant about everything web related. I have strong opinions on many topics, and where Oasisband.net is good for movies and politics, and PHPStandards is pretty much just raw anger directed at Zend, and my live journal is for my personal life. Donat Studios on the other hand will allow me to express my thoughts on web development, databases, html, php, ajax, design, basically everything I do at work.

Where does the name "Donat Studios" come from? I was getting some photos printed by a great place in St. Paul, "White House Custom Color" and they needed to know the name of my studio. I didn't have a studio, so I quickly made up "Donat Studios". Later, I realized I liked the name, and it stuck.

Here's wishing my newest domain luck!

While building this site I was trying to bring in images from my Flickr account, as you may have noticed. Building the module in PHP, I basically ran file_get_contents on the feeds url and passed that directly into json_decode. On print_r’ing the results, it was null. It had failed.  As a test I echoed the result of the file_get_contents to see what was up. It was succeeding at retrieving the feed, and at a glance it looked like JSON, yet it was failing to parse. I knew something was up.

Here is an example result set:

jsonFlickrFeed({
                "title": "Uploads from donatj",
                "link": "http://www.flickr.com/photos/donatj/",
                "description": "",
                "modified": "2009-05-31T08:24:46Z",
                "generator": "http://www.flickr.com/",
                "items": [
           {
                        "title": "STP81353",
                        "link": "http://www.flickr.com/photos/donatj/3581174864/",
                        "media": {"m":"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3568/3581174864_be1a44764e_m.jpg"},
                        "date_taken": "2009-03-30T19:10:34-08:00",
                        "description": "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/donatj/\">donatj<\/a> posted a photo:<\/p> <p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/
photos/donatj/3581174864/\" title=\"STP81353\"><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3568/3581174864_be1a44764e_m.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"240\" alt=\"S
TP81353\" /><\/a><\/p> ",
                        "published": "2009-05-31T08:24:46Z",
                        "author": "nobody@flickr.com (donatj)",
                        "author_id": "30444376@N08",
                        "tags": ""
           }
        ]
})

On further examination I noticed, as you should have noted, the data is wrapped in a function.  My first thought was that this violates the JSON Specification, so I immediately tweeted about how silly it was for Flickr to have an invalid JSON feed when their parent company Yahoo employs Douglas Crockford, the creator of JSON. I soon received a response from a colleague informing me that this was JSONP. He explained what it was, and how to use it in jQuery.

It basically comes down to this:  XMLHttpRequest will not, for cross site scripting protection, work across domains.  Therefore, JSON cannot be directly retrieved nor parsed via JavaScript across domains.
This is where JSONP comes in.  JSONP is essentially a regular JSON result set wrapped in a function.  Rather than using XMLHttpRequest to retrieve the document, you dynamically attach a script tag to the page pointing the the JSONP document, which evokes a function call passing your JSON object to whatever function the JSONP is set to pass the data to, forgoing the need to eval anything.

I have a number of criticisms of this approach.

• First and foremost, JSONP is at its very heart remote code execution.  You must have absolute faith not only in the intentions of the site you are bringing the feed in from, but the security of said site as well, because the code is in fact being executed by the browser with no chance for putting regular expressions or other such safety mechanisms in place. This makes your site and visitors wide open to any and all malicious code a hacker may plant in the feed.
• JSONP is a language specific data type. What I mean by this is that JSONP is designed for JavaScript, and even then strictly in the context of a web browser.  There is no need, none, for JSONP anywhere else or in any other language (PHP, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails). Making a feed in a language specific format is inherently in bad form.
• Adding to the last point, other languages currently cannot naturally parse JSONP. As I ran into in PHP, it is not valid JSON and json_decode will not handle it.  My colleagues answer was to write a regular expression to remove the function, but this is at best a hack.
• Mixing function and data goes in the face of separation of concerns. You’ve got logic in your data, you’ve got data in your logic.  Bad form, good sir, bad form.

JSONP is in many cases an unsafe practice, and more over its just evil. It is a necessary evil in some cases, but evil none the less.

There is at least one safe alternative to JSONP, and I’m willing to wager more. The simplest solution provided you have access to server side code is to download, sanitize, optionally cache, and finally pass locally any remote JSON to the client rather than having the clients machine directly load the feed. Yes, this is added overhead on your side, bur for much added security.

If nothing else, it is up to you to weigh the risks and benefits before blindly using JSONP.

Current available for download at GitHub as part of CorpusPHP here the class is in no way dependant on any other part of Corpus.

The files generated will work with versions of Office 2003 and up. It is considered production safe, and is currently in use in a fair number of production sites.

Known bugs:

• Office 2007 barks about XLS file extensions despite refusing to open XML file extensions downloaded from the internet.
• DOMDocument incorrectly converts several non-printed/low range characters (eg: 
).

Limitations:

• File Format is not supported by:
  • Open Office
  • Google Documents
  • Microsoft Office Live

More Info Soon