Some things still wonder me, after 10+ years of web-development. Todays wonder is here:

RFC2821 (SMTP) tells: The maximum total length of a text line including the is 1000 characters. In real world, most MTAs default to 990 characters per-line, which means, that if you will try to dump longer line on them, they would split it by putting ”!\n” after 990-th byte. This is mostly harmless for plain-text, but can easily break html.

Actually, there is even a PHP-bug reported, regarding this, but PHP obviously can’t do anything to help the situation

The solution is really simple: if there is a chance, that lines of your emails would be longer than 990 bytes encode body using base-64. The easiest way to do it for emails without attachments, in php is to use mb_send_mail() function instead of mail(), as it will apply encoding automatically.

The shortcut to switch tabs is…

TextMate:

Command + Option + Left/Right

Skype:

Command + Shift + Left/Right

Adium, Firefox:

Command + Left/Right

Colloquy, Firefox:

Command + Up/Down

Opera, Safari, Terminal:

Command + Shift + [/]

Dear Santa, please, bring me Mk 41 next christmas, so I can fix this world.

I’ve just released syck for php 0.9.2 (a parser and emitter of YAML documents. If you don’t know anything about YAML and why it is good: check my previous posts on the subject). A lot of new and tasty features ;)

First, and most important: a lot of stability and consistency fixes (previous release wasn’t properly dealing with some kinds of number-like strings and with mixed-keys arrays). This release is HIGHLY recommended to anyone who uses syck-php in production. I was using this version for several weeks as a server-to-server exchange format under heavy load and coudn’t be satisfied more.

I started to dive into object-serialization and unserialization topics. Any object which implements Serializable interface can be dumped into yaml-document now. It will be stored using !php/object::ClassName signature. And, of course, you would be able load the object afterwards. Important: at the moment of loading yaml-file, all of the classes mentioned in it have to be either declared, or be available to php’s autoload mechanism.

I also implemented loading of objects with !php/array::ClassName and !php/hash::ClassName signatures. These have to implement ArrayAccess interface. Unfortunately, I didn’t implement dumping of such objects yet. That is planned for the next releae.

As always, I am open to hear any of your comments and bug-reports.

Looks like almost every planet-php blogger mentioned that FastCGI for IIS thingie. I wonder: was it really that bad before it came? The thing which disturbes me in all this hype is that people will tend to think that fastcgi is something iis-specific. Hope they won’t, because fastcgi is a good (and really powerful) way to run PHP applications even if you use apache.

Top reasons:
1. FastCGI process can be run using the actual uid of user who creates the files (no need to allow group-readability of files)
2. Apache2 can be run in multithreaded-mode (aka ”worker mpm”)
3. It is much easier to switch to any other server (fastcgi is an industry standard and works with any web-server software I know of)
4. It is much easier to scale — fastcgi-application can be moved to another physical server and http-server will still be able to talk with it

FastCGI is about flexibility and it deserves a lot of good words not only in IIS context :)

Ok, the transition is over and DNS is propagated. Both web-site and blog are on a new server now.

I guess I can put a badge “Powered by OpenSolaris” somewhere around ;)

It is a common practice, to use ip2long() function for getting integer-representation of ip-address (for database-storage).

Problem:

on systems with 32-bit integers, ip2long() returns values from -2147483648 to 2147483647

on systems with 64-bit integers, ip2long() returns values from 0 to 42949672945

Which means, that if you were using INT as a storage type on 32-bit server, you will need to change that field to be UNSIGNED INT (or BIGINT) on 64-bit server.

There is no simple migration, sorry.

p.s. similiar problems can appear in other intger-related functions too

Regarding syck vs. spyc debate which seems to appear again and again:

al_n @ [link]:

I re tested syck and it does make a BIG difference. I tested with a yaml file of about 200,000 lines which I killed after an hour while using spyc. The same file was loaded with syck in about 5 minutes!!!

p.s. I hope to find some time, to release an updated pecl-package of syck really soon. Please, remind me to do it ;)

Vikram Vaswani wrote an article for Zend Developer Zone about the Syck extension in PECL. That is, actually, a very nice introduction to YAML in PHP and I encourage everyone to look at it.

On the other hand, it reminds me, that I should release the new version…

Alligator Eggs!

This is the funniest introduction to lambda-calculus ever. (saw it at #d channel at freenode)

Fink project has launched the new Package Database (aka PDB) interface. Looks neat :)