loop {
…
} until (condition);

tastes just the same as

do {
…
} while (!condition);

The reason is that the 1-parameter version tries to do it’s best to figure out what radix you are using for your string. So you can have 0xCAFE for a lovely hex number (that can also wake you in the morning ). Guess what 01234 is ? It’s an octal number because it starts with a zero.

If you want ‘08′ to be 8, you can use the second parameter of parseInt which is the radix for the conversion.

Good luck!

$something = array(
‘key1′ => ‘abracadabra’,
‘key2′ => “Some longer string, {$somearray['somekey']}”, $scalar,
);

All in all, there was a ghost item at $something’s index 0. Yep, in my case above, $something[0] == $scalar.

So here’s the lesson: if an item shows up at index 0 in a PHP array where you defined key=>value pairs, you probably have a value running loose somewhere in your definition…

Error SELECT stations.id AS id, stations.name AS name, stations.rating AS rating, if(stations_rank.id is null, 1000000000, stations_rank.id) AS rank FROM stations LEFT JOIN countries ON stations.country = countries.id and countries.languages_id= LEFT JOIN languages ON stations.language = languages.id and languages.languages_id= LEFT JOIN genres ON genre = genres.id and genres.languages_id= LEFT JOIN stations_rank ON stations_rank.stream_id = stations.id WHERE (name like ‘%electro%’ or description like ‘%electro%’ or location like ‘%electro%’ or genres.value like ‘%electro%’ or countries.value like ‘%electro%’ or languages.value like ‘%electro%’) ORDER BY rank ASC

Ok… so that’s why the website is moving soooo slow. Here’s a practical list of “don’t do this” from a single query:

• model logic in data retrieval: if(stations_rank.id is null, 1000000000, stations_rank.id) AS rank. You should avoid this. It’s much better to calculate this as an additional field and not to do an evaluation every single time you retrieve results (especially as this calculated field is probably required in looots of listings, what if you want to change this logic?). Also try to avoid SQL constructs specific to a database engine, in this case IF(cond, a, b). Well, if you’ll live all your life in MySQL you may use some functions, ok…
• order by calculated field: ORDER BY rank. Makes any query cache useless and is not properly indexed by most engines.
• field like ‘%value%’. Never use this on a table larger than 1000 rows that you care about. If on MySQL, try the fulltext indexes available on MyISAM. If not, use a solution for a similar fulltext search.
• condition_on_field1 OR condition_on_field2. Most likely it won’t be indexed.

Ok, so why would we care? Because of scalability. We want those tens of millions of users hit our application and browse those pages and do this and that. And we don’t want a datacenter just to handle their simple queries (which is the other solution for badly written queries).

And of course, we all want to sell. Roku has a couple of very good under-promoted audio players (SoundBridge and SoundBridge Radio are brilliant, probably except for a minor glitch with AAC streams). If I would have seen radioroku.com before the product, I’d think “neeah, that’s too slow”…

One of them is the double dot (..) operator. As in

myElement..subNode

This is an array of all “subNode” children below myElement. For a Canvas, myCanvas..Label will be an array of all the Labels in your canvas. Neat, huh?

How about the .@ operator? As in…

myCanvas..Label.@(thisXML.@id == “1234″).text

This will help you select directly the first Label with an attribute of id equal to 1234.

A part of my research (which has not reached a decision!) was to compare a list of languages and database engines. Starting with the latter, which I’ve recently tickled in this article:

Hmmm… descending trends overall… how about scripting languages?

Hummm… descending again.

Google Trends is limited to 5 items per graph, so I left Ruby out, it’s somewhere around Python, but the trend is just the opposite (it’s slightly over Python since mid 2006 - well done, Rails! - and it’s an overall growing search term). It’s not a boost though.

There is a descending trend for searches on all languages (just search your favorite!) and database systems. I can only see two possible reasons here:

1. people know all about them, don’t need to search (I will need 3 pints of Guinness to believe that)
2. people are less interested about them

Let’s see how PHP stands in comparison with a few popular applications written in PHP: Joomla, SMF and phpBB.

Is this what we’re missing? People are adding a new level of abstraction and being interested rather about frameworks and applications they can build on top of web languages instead of knowing the language itself?

If this is true, web programmers knowing the core languages will be fewer and fewer, there will soon be openings for “Joomla programmer” or “DJango programmer” or “Rails programmer” (Joomla has a framework too) and we will see a lot of unexperienced people doing easy routine programming jobs and finding a great challenge creating a simple database structure for a product listing site that does not run Rails or Joomla.

(which reminds me that I was bulkly invited earlier this year to become a SAP consultant for a company that scheduled 12 interviews in 2 hours, go figure what a coffee-drinking career I have missed!)

Well, the number one reason to dump PostgreSQL is the connection time (several times longer than a connection to a MySQL server). The number two reason may be the storage mechanism, complicating storage calculation for shared hosts (probably 95% of the sites use shared hosting!).

What’s Oracle doing in this article? Oracle is very scalable (although you pay a lot for it) and is probably an industry standard. Taking into consideration that most recent RIAs (folksonomy-based) need to manage a lot of data, scalability and high availability are very important.

MySQL has been catching up in this direction and is now very popular both among shared hosters and large application builders. Version 4.1 supports master-slave replication (which can solve your problems if you are doing many reads and few writes) and version 5 introduced the MySQL cluster which is so inefficient in terms of hardware (it puts all data in memory) but is very fast and, once again, scalable and redundant. You might feel deep pains when your core router or datacenter power supply fail (although improbable, such events happened a few times during the last year for major datacenters), because all your in-memory data will go bye-bye and you will have to pray that the weekly backup happened yesterday and not 5 days ago. Version 5.1 will support native horizontal partitioning which is another major step in scalability.

And MySQL is Open Source.

PostgreSQL still has a chance to learn from MySQL and maybe from Google’s database storage system which has been already described a couple of years ago in a few white papers. As scalable as MySQL is, using the master-slave replication will eventually need more hardware for the slaves; using the cluster storage is not 100% safe (please, prove me I’m wrong on this!).

The search button was probably the distance between Google Reader and the best news reader available. The truth is I was surprised to see a Google product without a search button when I started using the Reader, but I kinda got used to it.

If you have $499 in your pocket, that’s a very good way to spend them (I’d go as far as saying it’s better than buying 1.79 40GB Apple TV’s but that might depend on your spending pattern and of course, Mr. Steve Jobs might personally hate me for saying that).

However, if you don’t buy the Flex Builder, you’ll have to memorize the mx namespace by heart. There is no DTD for the MXML format and apparently, no alternative Flex IDE. Does the Open-Source community not really care about Flex or is it rather worth buying the commercial IDE and hoping that Flex Builder 3 will be Open-Source?

No O/S IDE for Flex? Except one. Which is in alpha state and hasn’t really been active in 2007, but has an interesting approach. Have a look at Flexible when you have the time. It’s a Flash-based Flex 2 IDE. Doesn’t do to much, but with the proper community attention it could be big.

Later update: You can see even more about FLEXible on its home page.

Before I find that out, I thought there is something good about this blog, this website and generally - about what I do, starting with the nice regular expressions and Linux tips that helped some newbies out of programming darkness… and going on through the web tips and tricks for those who stumble upon several issues…

We now agree that this website deserves something better. So until the new website is out (will I need to change it anyway?), let me just point out that we moved the blog to new software (switched to WordPress, please stop hammering this site with robots for Serendipity). Enjoy it

I have recently evaluated OpenLaszlo 4 for building such a rich website for the 2.0 world and there are some very good (yet limited) implementations of most common items: form controls, streaming audio/video support, etc.

OpenLaszlo can output your application in DHTML, Flash 7+ or J2ME (they call the first DHTML, I thought the D in DHTML was Dead for the last few years…; the latter makes OpenLaszlo one of a kind). I really plan to give it an in-depth comparison over Flex in the next few days, but for the time being here’s something that made me embrace Flex and leave OpenLaszlo for now:

NO REGULAR EXPRESSION SUPPORT

Although the scripting in OpenLaszlo is some sort of JavaScript (based on ECMA Script, with just a few extensions), not all functions and objects are available. For instance RegExp, that you might have to use for a thousand reasons.

However, there is a workaround to this: if you need to use regular expressions in an OpenLaszlo application, you can use the LzBrowser object. Except for the J2ME implementation, there is a method called loadjs that allows you to execute some javascript in your browser (you don’t really care whether the output is Flash or HTML).

Using this workaround you’ll have something like:
Your RIA using OpenLaszlo <=> LzBrowser object <=> Your browser executing some native JS code

… and yes, you will have RegExp.

Stay tuned, more to follow…

Ok, so I’m getting a Slice. And in the ToS I see: “Slicehost may cancel or suspend your access to Slicehost services at any time and for any reason without notice“. That’s a very friendly way to start a business relation, but let’s see where this takes us…

Here are the Script.Aculo.Us manual and the Prototype manual.

Lucky for us, it’s in English. Thanks, Kjell, your work is very much appreciated.

What can you do?

Look for /usr/lib/locale/* - in our case, an empty directory. Apparently, glibc-common must have installed something here.
You can now take the official RPM (I’m talking CentOS here, it’s probably ok for Fedora too) from a mirror and unpack it with rpm2cpio.

Then you can extract the files you miss from the cpio file. I extracted it with the Midnight Commander because I’m a fan of blue or you can even try to force install the rpm (which I did not do because I was not sure I wouldn’t break the bones of my VPS - read below for what you can do with an yum install ImageMagick).

This is something that should not happen, and then again - it happened to us.

Also - if you run CentOS on a VPS, I’d be very careful about installing something like ImageMagick. Apparently this creates a big chain of dependencies, leading up to udev. OpenVZ uses vzdev instead of udev, so if you don’t exclude packages like udev from your yum repositories, you might get with an almost-empty udev and some pains in the neck (such as your server running, but nobody being able to open a console).

This all happened on a CheapVPS account - their service is “cheap” (both in your pocket and in your user experience) and runs you through 3 or 4 sites before you set things up (the order page, a nice JavaScript order form where you can spy on their discounts, the a2b2 forum where you can discuss services, the ticket support website and finally the hyperVM control panel). I’m dizzy - where was I ? Oh, yes, they are kinda cheap, but they have an A+ from me for being able to solve problems and answer tickets VERY FAST. Their service seems to be much better than their website(s).

Yes, it’s true, that’s how you spell WebPRO Development. And yes, if you wonder, we are a Romanian web development team with a lot of experience and many happy clients.

It sounds unbelievable and people are running away.

It’s an unbelievable offer and the fact is you CAN use all that disk space, but I find it hard to have all that traffic - the watchdog robot will jam down your site when you have too many simultaneous connections or your requests raise the server usage too much. Well, it’s all marketing because the average Joe will not need more than 1-2 GB of space for the average site.

Apparently, this has labeled them as “oversellers” and in a veeery long blog post, they announce why they will constantly decrease the allotments for new users in order to have more people sign up. Existing users will not suffer any changes. It’s actually one thing that is very weird to implement, but apparently they explained it quite well. E-marketing come, e-marketing go…

Dreamhost now offers shared hosting plans with shell and FTP access, PHP 5, MySQL 5, Ruby and Rails, a full-featured proprietary web administration panel, unlimited number of DNS, web, mail hosts and unlimited mysql database. Plans range from $7.95 to $63.95, depending on the disk and bandwidth allotment and CPU usage pattern. Disk space and allowed traffic increase weekly for existing customers.

If you want to sign up to Dreamhost, you will receive a discount of up to $96 on any order if you use the Dreamhost coupon code WEBPRO.

Apparently there are a few news on this release. First, there is a new DTD to validate against. Second, you have to create a sitemap of your sitemaps if you have more on the same domain. Third, there is a standard PING URL (see http://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html#faq_after_submission) for each search engine that will agree on the sitemaps protocol.

As for the bad part, at the point when I am writing this article, Google probably got so happy about this that they forgot to do a little maintenance: first, the xsd files are missing, second - nobody respects the protocol’s stadard ping URL’s. But the paperwork is done…

If you use multiple worker threads (which would cost you an arm and a leg with apache anyway), the status module will not show you total figures (total number of hits, total number of processes, etc) - it will show you the stats of the the worker that has just responded. So for what it matters, this module goes useless when you increase the number of workers.
Yet if you don’t, you will find out that the threads are waiting for system resources such as file handles.

And now, that I’m considering the dark side of Lighty, I’ll add the no-htaccess issue. You can’t have a .htaccess file - which is a performance issue on apache, but it’s a no-no here. You might wake up happier in the morning when you see that lighttpd boots up in no time as compared to apache…

The main idea is though that on the next production server we install, we will give lighttpd a shot to be our new lighty friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you our CMS suite: WebPRO Creative. Now that we have a name, we’ll even sketch up a page for it, I’m sure. And we’ll even add more features to the pack. Oh yes, it did sound lewd to some of the first people we tested the name on, but we’re… oh well… intensely creative.