Jeremy's Blog

This was originally going to be kept private, but after reading it again, I want to make sure everyone knows how badly I’m hurting.

Read for yourself.

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that it’s over. Turns out things with Onyx didn’t work out as well as planned. To dodge the emotional crap that would ensue, if I sat on this topic for too long, I’m going to just drop it right here. I’ve got too much other stuff to worry about, and I can’t let this negatively affect my work performance.

I’m not a heartless bastard, but if I dwell on it to the point where I get screwed up for a while, I won’t be able to survive, out here. I should sleep, but I don’t know if I can, just yet…

For a good portion of the day, I’ve been working with friend and co-worker Steven Harris on some new PHP 5 code. We’ve uncovered a few “Gotcha’s” that I think it would be best to share with everyone so that you won’t be as infuriated as we were about this whole thing.

First of all, and this is completely unrelated, if you’re doing tests with cookies, don’t allow your cookies to be set with “localhost” as the domain if you’re testing locally. I wasn’t aware before now that this didn’t work as intended, so there was a lot of headache with some code we’ve been fighting with.

Update: By the way, another co-worker recommended Microsoft Fiddler to me for debugging HTTP Traffic, and that’s how I rooted out the above problem. It’s definitely a wonderful tool, and I recommend it to anyone who might need to see exactly what’s getting passed over HTTP. There is one downside to it, though. It only works with Internet Explorer.

Our first PHP 5 Gotcha: Removed the E_STRICT deprecation notice from “var”. (PHP 5.1.3 Changelog)

This one tripped us up pretty badly today. Of course, it’s probably our fault for not reading the changelogs, but this was a bit of a nuisance. For a good long while I thought our error handler just wasn’t catching or passing errors along like it should’ve been, because we weren’t getting the E_STRICT deprecation notices that we’ve all come to love and adore. I wish someone would do me a favor and tell me why this notice was removed. Logically, it doesn’t make sense to me.

Next PHP 5 Gotcha: If date.timezone is not set in php.ini, you get an E_STRICT notice

I know this is desired functionality, but let me take a moment to let you know why this “got us” … And it has a lot to do with the above Gotcha. (And honestly, I’m kind of glad this notice exists, because it proved that my code wasn’t broken. ) I’m going to just borrow Steven’s words here:

[23:07] Jeremy: Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t gmdate() NOT throw that timezone E_STRICT message?
[23:08] Steven: It would be stupid if it did, since there’s really only one timezone it should be concerned about, unless it needs current timezone info to get a difference (but that should already be handled by the OS)

Ways to circumvent this notice? Use date_default_timezone_set() if PHP >= 5.1. The date.timezone ini setting can also be changed at runtime, so use it if you’re on PHP < 5.1.

Our third and most annoying Gotcha: PHP bails out with class declaration nesting error when an error handler dynamically loads an error handling class during a class related E_STRICT warning. (PHP 5.1.1 Bug #35634)

Steven was testing on PHP 5.1.1 when we first started working on this code, and he caught this little gem. Luckily, the code we’re working on has support for text-only errors (it was loading the UI class that caused it to bail), so we may have to resort to that on PHP 5.1.1 (and possibly other versions, but I haven’t heard of this in any other version, so far), which would be a little annoying, but we’ll just have to deal with it, I guess. I’m also looking for an alternative work-around which I’ll share if I find anything.

Update 2: By the way, now that I’m looking over the code, it seems like Gotcha #2 is actually causing this problem for us. I’m going to see about fixing it to see if it fixes this problem, as well.

That’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll probably put some more together as we continue coding.

Note to self: Start reading the PHP Changelogs very closely and very often.

I’ve received a few requests that I’ve picked from to add to the works in progress page. I’m definitely looking for more, though! So, this is my call to all my readers. Got something you want to see an article on? Request it now! Just click the Request Articles link on the right and follow the instructions.

Over at Completely Unique, we needed a more efficient way to track bugs and feature requests. I tried to setup a number of different free systems like Flyspray, phpBugTracker, and Mantis, and none of them fit our needs. Some of them actually sucked pretty badly. So, we purchased a copy of Arctic from Olate, Ltd. It is by far the easiest to setup, use, and maintain as far as any “issue” tracker I’ve ever used. As you can see, our Development Team has already started using it. And it’s called an “issue tracker” because it is designed to already be able to track not only bugs, but features as well. And with some slight adjustments, it could also be used to allow us to assign tasks to developers as well. Adding new projects and versions to projects are a snap. Really simple and easy to do. One of Arctic’s biggest advantages, and I have already fallen in love with this feature, is the fact that it automatically generates changelogs and roadmaps for you. So, if you use the issue tracker like it’s designed to be used, then you don’t have to spend any time building up roadmaps or changelogs. It’s all done for you. The only problem I’ve had with it so far is it’s licensing system phones home in the Admin CP’s Home, which if it can’t hit Olate for some reason, it lags the Admin page pretty badly. Overall, I’d give it a 9 out of 10. Very solid product.

I’d like to take a moment to mention the sad loss the world has seen today. Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray while filming. It’s a sad loss, indeed. I watched his shows all the time, when I had a TV. He’ll be definitely be missed.

So, I got into this pinball game … The old SNES Super Pinball – Behind the Mask. I took some shots of the game for you all to see …

Warning: Rather large images (ZSNES only saves snapshots in Bitmap Format )!

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