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Evan Sims, a recent convert from Flickr to SmugMug, has whipped up a little something to help make getting to those SmugMug unfriendly URLs a little bit easier - SmugUrl:

one aspect I didn’t like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can’t fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online…much more readable. He’s even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.

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As promised, a couple of days ago the LV PHP User Group had its first meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to see what kind of interest there was and to gather some ideas for future meetings. We had a pretty good turnout for our first meeting. I think around 20 or so people attended and we mingled and talked amongst ourselves for around 2 hours.

We are going to be having another meeting in mid to late may. The current plan is that two of us will be doing a couple of short talks, I will be talking about testing and quality assurance. We also talked about getting involved in the PHP TestFest project. The last thing we decided is that the next meeting will be in a ‘quieter’ environment. PT’s Pub worked well for a meet and greet type of meeting but would be a tad loud for any kind of presenting. It also forcluded some people from attending due to the atmosphere.

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DevShed has posted the first part of a new series looking at benchmarking performance in your PHP applications.

If you’re anything like me, you have had your head spinning with questions […] these and other dilemmas (add your own to the list) sometimes make peace of mind a nearly impossible goal.

The tutorial talks about a few simple methods for running benchmark data including the use of microtime(), an OOP method and wrapping the call inside a method of their class.

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Listening to Joe Stump from Digg.com talk about SOA and MySQL and some PHP.  One key thing he’s repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously.  His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.  Services_Digg_Request is some code he’s written and published as a PEAR package to demonstrate a technique to help bundle your data requests asynchronously.  The package does a lot of low level socket management to various data endpoints that you want to requests data from (HTTP-only services I believe).

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Here is the presentation material I used for my “Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit” presentation at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA today.

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Vinu Thomas has proposed a replacement for the usual var_dump or print_r sort of debugging developers tend to do - Krumo.

To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable […] it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

It also supports output of other data in a “pretty format” like backtraces, included files and a listing of all constants. You can check out a demo of it in action here.

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In a new post to the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutzki talks some about the work he’s been doing on the code coverage analysis for the upcoming CakePHP release:

There are several different kinds of criteria to code coverage. The two most important ones are line coverage (or statement coverage as wikipedia puts it) and path coverage. […] So how is it going to work? Pretty simple actually. Whenever you run a CakePHP test case Cake assembles information in the background about which lines of your subject-under-test are called.

He includes a few screenshots of the code coverage being run and the end result of the runner with the percent covered.

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Posted by randfish

I was browsing on Technorati today (mostly because Google Blog Search has gone down the toilet in the past 3 weeks) and came across one of the first banner ads to have caught my attention in years:

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