Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

As I already mentioned earlier, I recently bought a brand new Nikon D80 and started with a new hobby: Photography. :) With this entry I'd like to share some first experiences in this direction. The D80 seems to be a very good camera, I'm really amazed about its poissibillities. It is the best non-professional Nikon camera, AFAIK, and might be even a bit oversized for a photo beginner like me. Until now I only had experiences with compact cams and the D80 is my first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera. However, I'm very interessted in photography so I'm sure I will grow with this camery quite fast. The source of my interest are inspiring photographers in my surrounding: Derick, Sebastian, Marcus and most recently also Kore and Jakob. In addition, I love great photos and always wanted to be able to take those on my own. The final clincher was the experience with Kores D70s in Berlin.

To get started with started with the subject, Jakob recommended a great book to me, which I want to recommend to you now. The book is only available in German, AFAIK, so sorry to you English only readers. "Nikon D80 - Das Buch zu Kamera" does not only give a much more valuable overview on the D80 than the instructions manual does. It also gave me some good hints on what to pay attention for in photography and some technical background. Combined with practical use cases and helpful suggestions for custom settings and equipment, I'm still getting started with a great now hobby. If you like to get more info on this book, please take a look at my recension on Amazon (as soon as it is online).

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

After I already recommended a software tool in my blog yesterday, I'd like to continue recommending good tools. This time it is Exaile, a greate music player and collection management tool.

In former times I used Amarok for that purpose. A nice tool, too, but I had several issues with it: First off, I use Gnome and pretty much dislike the way KDE handles things. I don't find the Amarok UI much intuitive and it never looked really Gnome like to me, no matter which tricks I used. Next, it had some really annoying behaviors, which I (thankfully) don't remember anymore. Finally, after an upgrade, it killed my iPod database so I needed to re-collect all the songs I had on it by hand.

However, this was the point where I looked again for alternatives and decided that Banshee looks like a good one. Being written in C# and using Gtk controlls it looked much more Gnome like than Amarok. Beside that, it also offered a large ammount of the features I used in Amarok. Still, I missed some (like the good song recommendation stuff and cover download from Amazon). However, Banshee worked for me... until last week, when I determined that I had another player on my HD: Exaile. I had tried that once, when it was in a very early stage of development, and missed to uninstall it afterwards. So I had the most recent version already installed (0.2.12beta) and gave it another try.

I have to say: I love it! :) While Bashee looks only gnomish and still has some drawbacks in usability, Exaile really looks like Gnome and already offers me almost every feature I need. It even can make use of libnotify to integrate its OSD (which can also be deactivate) fully into your Gnome desktop. Its collection management is damn fast, although it is written in Python and also using SQLite the back end. Nothing against SQLite, but Amarok and Banshee were both much slower with my collection of 15.000+ songs. Exaile offers "dynamic playlists" out of the box. You just need to activate a check box and it looks up recommended music from your collection on last.fm and adds it to your playlist. It also has a rating system and provides playlist like "most played songs" and stuff. An "info" button allows you to gather additional info about a song from Wikipedia and other sources. Exaile supports internet radio streams and has a plugin that integrates shoutcast. It also has support for podcast and can be used to provide iPods and other MP3 players with music. Covers are either available in the directory where a song resides or are automatically searched from Amazon, while you still have the chance to change or remove a cover. Last but not least, Exaile is written in Python and has a wonderfully comfortable plugin system. I think this will be my chance to finally deal a bit more with Python... ;)

Exaile also still has some bugs (hey, its beta!), but all in all I'm really satisfied with it so far. So I recommend: Give it a try! :)

Via James Pic I just got to know the fantastic tool irc it (short ii). ii is a very simple and slick designed IRC client, that works on the Linux / Unix shell. ii simlpy uses the file system to structure IRC connections, channels and queries and offers FIFOs to communicate with the server. It allows you to write IRC bots in bash (or any other language that allows file access) with a glimpse and my mind already imagines a huge ton of possible applications. My first test showed that it works really cool! Amazingly cool tool and therefore in the sense of BitlBee (yes, I skipped a year ;) my tool of the year (so far).

Some example output of the filesystem structure ii creates:

dotxp@tango /tmp $ ls -l -R irc/
irc/:
total 4
drwx------ 5 dotxp users 4096 2008-03-06 22:40 irc.freenode.net

irc/irc.freenode.net:
total 24
drwx------ 2 dotxp users  4096 2008-03-06 22:40 #ezcomponents
drwx------ 2 dotxp users  4096 2008-03-06 22:25 freenode-connect
prwx------ 1 dotxp users     0 2008-03-06 22:40 in
-rw-r--r-- 1 dotxp users 10321 2008-03-06 22:40 out
drwx------ 2 dotxp users  4096 2008-03-06 22:39 #test

irc/irc.freenode.net/#ezcomponents:
total 4
prwx------ 1 dotxp users  0 2008-03-06 22:40 in
-rw-r--r-- 1 dotxp users 75 2008-03-06 22:40 out

irc/irc.freenode.net/freenode-connect:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 dotxp users 92 2008-03-06 22:38 out

irc/irc.freenode.net/#test:
total 4
prwx------ 1 dotxp users   0 2008-03-06 22:39 in
-rw-r--r-- 1 dotxp users 128 2008-03-06 22:39 out

To use the client, simply do a tail on an out FIFO and echo your commands and chat messages into an in FIFO. That's it, have fun! :)

In the past years privacy issues have increased more and more in our civilisation. Sometimes under the hood of "fighting against terrorism", but in many cases simply straight forward, authorities and companies start violating our privacy more and more. In Germany the "Payback" (German link) card is a more or less harmless example for tracing customers, where the "Bundestrojaner" (German link) is a really dangerous one.

I have to admit that I sometimes even understand the intention (would I behave different if I had the chance to realize "Payback"?). Anyway I'm really shocked how few people realize the problem and see the affection of their own life and privacy. In fact the only group of people who seem to understand and act against it are geeks and other technology affine people. The everyday user (of those I know) does basically not care. Answers like "So what, I have nothing to hide!" are most common, if you try to inform and sensitize them. I really get the feeling, that most people just don't care. No idea if they are too lazy to deal with the (indeed mostly technology related) topic, if it is pure ignorance or if they simply don't understand.

For the latter case I found a really good Flash video (German link) that tries to explain the whole issue in a way that non-technical people can also understand it. So, please, if you have no clue about what I've been talking before, please take a look here (German link). Thanks!

Update: I just found this animation of a pizza call which goes into the same direction and is in English language.

James Pic wrote a little article on how you can import the eZ Components SVN into your local GIT installation. This way you can stick to your favorite version controll system and don't need to use SVN much if you want to try out the latest features in eZ Components and use GIT as your favorite version conroll system.

I recently migrated my server to a new maschine and a new provider. After supporting Kore today with installing spamdyke on his maschine, too, I seized the chance to update my Spam Filtering with Spamdyke in front of Qmail howto on the wiki. The howto describes how to install the most recent version of spamdyke on a Gentoo system, explains the most important configuration options and gives some practical hints for such setups. You can ask Kore, it only takes about 10 minutes to do so ;) and saves you a huge lot of spam. Comments and addtions are very welcome.

I just watched Charlie Wilson's War in cinema and can only recommend this movie to anyone out there. The plot tells the story how a US congress man covert dealings in Afghanistan in a very ironic and sarcastic way. While having some really good jokes this also gives you a good view behind the scene, how the US raised their own nowerdays enemies. I never saw a movie before that had this crazy mixture of elements: Highly politically bitchy, killingly funny and with a high-grade cast (including Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts).

After my server was close to wasting all its CPU time for checking email messages for potential spam using Spamassassin I decided that it was time to investigate. My friend Arne, who helped me a lot with Qmail problems earlier, recommended to install spamdyk, an SMTP spam filter that is placed in front of Qmail and does not require specially patches for the MTA itself. Spamdyk can filter mail by blacklisting, whitelisting, greylisting and using several other options.

Thanks to Arne for this great tip! Spamdyk is up and running now on my maschine and my load is now constantly below 0.40, while spam receival seems to be reduced drastically. Since I did not find much information about Spamdyk on Gentoo, I wrote down my experiences as a little howto in the Gentoo wiki. Maybe someone finds it helpfull. Any feedback welcome!

Yesterday I received "PHP Design Patterns", the new book written by Stephan Schmidt, a well-known PHP community member and creator of cool library packages, like most of the PEAR XML section. I seized the time on the tram yesterday night to take a look at it and I have to admit I'm quite impressed. Stephan managed to write down a lot of practical experience in respect to the implementation of OO patterns with PHP.

The book is really well structures and I can only recommend it to everyone who wants to learn more on good OO development with PHP. Stephan first presents the new OO features of PHP 5 (based on 5.1), including overloading and some SPL stuff. The second chapter introduces basic OO design concepts to the reader and makes him familiar with basic UML. After that, Stephan starts the real topic. Chapter 3 deals with generation patters like Singleton and Factory. The following part has structural patterns as the topic and contains patterns like Composite, Decorator and Proxy. For each of these patterns Stephan explains the sense behind it and its purpose. Additionally he gives a practical example of how an implementation could look like, for a specific use case. Chapter 5 deals with behavior patterns, as there are Subject/Observer, Visitor, Iterator and some more, in the same way. The next section is named "Enterprise Patterns" and consists of 2 chapters. The first of those (chapter 6 "Data View and Business Logic") introduces the tier model for application and presents patterns used on the data level, like Active Record and Registry, as well as for implementing business logic (Domain Model). The second part (chapter 7 "Presentation Tier") goes into detail on e.g. Front Controller, Event Dispatcher and Template View.

All in all I really enjoyed digging into the parts I already read and I expect the rest to be as well as those. While some books only touch the theory of design patterns and avoid giving practical examples to the user, Stephan manages very good to combine both.

I want to recommend this book to everyone who is not absolutely familiar with OO development in PHP or who comes from another OO language into PHP development. It can really give you some highly important knowledge on object oriented design patterns and on good OO development in PHP. Beside that, it can give every OO developer from other languages a nice overview and reference on how the well-known patterns are implemented in PHP in contrast to e.g. Java or C#.

Great work, Stephan!

Kore just returned from his Canada vacation and gave me a hand-signed copy of the book he co-authored, "Exploring PHP" - "Von Insidern lernen". Although I did not read it, yet, I'd like to recommend it to you, since I think to know the authors good enough to believe they write good books. The book is (beside others) written by my friends Markus Nix, Sandro Groganz, Kore Nordmann, Stephan Schmidt and Christian Wenz, all of them well-known experts from the PHP community.

In short, "Exploring PHP" is a roundup about advanced PHP programming experiences, covering different topics like:

• Event driven programming in PHP
• Generation of 3D graphics
• Testing with SimpleTest
• Refactoring and Migration
• PHP 6

If you are actively developing with PHP and don't have the time to read cutting-edge news and latest techniques, the book should give you a good roundup on the named topics.

I'm really looking forward to digging into it. Thanks a lot to Kore for the nice example! :)