One thing I really liked in Python is the data structure set, which is built into the language core. A set in Python is defined as known from mathematics and beside mathematical use cases, it is helpful in everyday programming live. In this episode of my series on Python, I give you a short insight into how sets work in there, how you can achieve similar results in PHP and why I like the Python approach.
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Every programmer should learn a new programming language once in a while. Be it for inspiration or just for fun. After some homework in C# some years ago and quite some Java at university (again), Python was my language of choice. This is the first article in a series I plan to write about what I like in Python, what is disturbing but works out and what is really evil. In this article I give a short overview on my motivation to dig into Python and start with a first topic: The missing braces. [Read full post…]
phpDocumentor for VIM (PDV) is a project which resulted from my efforts to create a comfortable programming environment for PHP in the VIM editor. Since the server which hosted the SVN repository is to be switched off the next days, I finally moved development over to github.In addition to that, I seized the chance to rename the project itself to VIP (VIM integration for PHP). The repository does not only contain the PDV script iself, but also a filetype plugin for PHP, some useful color schemes, a PHP skeleton file, settings for other (related?) programming languages and more. [Read full post…]
I recently had the problem that I wanted to retrieve the smallest items from a stream of data. When talking about a stream here, I refer to a data set that I do not want to load into memory completely, since it has quite a few elements. The best way to process such data is a stream approach, where you work always on a single item at a time, iteratively, without loading the full data set.In my special case, I had a database with 140,000 records. The processing of these records could not happen in the DB, since I needed to create vectors from text and perform calculation on these. Basically, I needed to check each vectors distance to a reference vector and keep only the k closest ones.So, what is a good approach to solve such a task? I decided to implement a custom data structure based on a max heap to solve the problem. In this article, I present the solution and compare it to two different other approaches in terms of a small benchmark. [Read full post…]
Yesterday the latest stable release of the eZ Components project, number 2009.2, was rolled. For this release I worked on support for OpenDocumentText (ODT) in the Document component. In this article I show you how you can import OpenDocumentText documents and convert them into any of the supported formats of the component, how to export data into ODT and how to apply styles to the generated documents. You will also see how ODT and PDF can be exported with the very same styling information to make them look almost identical. [Read full post…]
The IPC 2009 was amazing, even if it's still running while I write this blurb. Find my slides in this article, as well as a small resume of the conf. Thanks for the great event! [Read full post…]
Attention: This blog post is in German, due to the fact, that the book is also in German. In short: Kores and my book about eZ Components can now completely be found online, for free. Das von Kore und mir verfasste eZ Components Buch, gibt es jetzt als Open Book komplett online zu lesen. [Read full post…]
Ilia recently brought up the topic of scalar type hints again. I would love scalar type hints, but a sensible implementation is not easy. I summarize some approaches in this post and talk about the problems they raise. [Read full post…]
On Friday, June 19th 2009, the PHP Barbecue Tour 2009 will visit Dortmund. The idea behind PHP BBQ is to bring PHP usergroups from the seminar room to the grill. We'll have special guests from the PHP/MySQL community attending and will have a great evening with lots of dead animals. If you want to join, don't hesitate, it's free! Just bring your own food and drinks. [Read full post…]
Derick was always bitching at me when doing releases for the huge amount of time needed to process the Webdav components sub directory. We always supposed, that the Subversion performance issues here resulted from the Webdav test suite, which consists of an awful lot of small test files and some sub-directories. I finally found the time to refactor the tests and the performance improvement is astonishing. [Read full post…]