ilia alshanetsky

In a new post to his blog Ilia Alshanetsky takes a look at PHP's output buffering feature and some interesting things he found when testing some recent code (hint: it has to do with PHP's "interesting" management of the buffer).

On the Zend Developer Zone, Kevin has posted the latest episode of their ZendCon Sessions podcast series - Ilia Alshanetsky's talk about memcached.

The 0.9.1 version of the Excel extension was released and is now available for download. This is mostly a bug fix release, with a number of contributions by Rob Gagnon.

The 2 main fixes are related to detection of custom formatted numeric fields, that were incorrectly detected as dates and readRow()/readCol() methods that had a bug when 2 and 3rd parameters are supplied, causing the last row/column not to be read.

Additionally a getSheetByName() method was introduced that allows locating a sheet by it's name in either case sensitive or insensitive form.

The past two information gathering runs showed that GoDaddy is the world largest ISP, but I was curious who else falls into the “Top ISP” category as determined by consumer shopping habits.

To do this I’ve used my resolved IP database of 124 million domains and an ISP database from MaxMind.

The results are pretty interesting, and it clearly shows that a small number of ISPs are definitely doing something right, which is causing many consumers to vote with their dollars in those ISPs favor.

Ilia Alshanetsky has started to gather more and more information about PHP usage on the web as a whole (that was started here) and has been extended with some additional statistics he's done on the location of the domains he's collected.

Ilia Alshanetsky has a suggestion for those setting up PHP and Apache2 for the first time - beware of the default configuration!

About a week ago, I was doing some upgrades on my development machine and came across a rather nasty issue when it comes to how .php(s) files are associated with PHP in Apache.

It seems that a number of distros including Gentoo (which is what I was using) are using the following configuration directive to make the PHP module parse PHP files:

<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
</IfModule>


The 0.8.5 version of the Excel extension was released and is now available for download, it contains a number of small build fixes, which makes it possible to compile it against all versions of PHP (5.2,5.3,trunk).

The Win32 compilation was also fixed and thanks to Kalle, PHP 5.3 win32 binaries are now available for download as well.

GitHub: http://github.com/iliaal/php_excel/

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• PHP & jQuery: Calendars
• Content with Style: Custom Zend Form Image Upload Element
• PHPFreaks.com: 10 Signs of Crappy PHP Software
• PEAR Blog: PHP 5.3 Windows and PEAR (go-pear.phar)
• PHP.net: PHP 5.3.0 Released!
• DevShed:

Ilia Alshanetsky has created a simple script (that uses curl) to make a backup of your Google Docs to keep you and your data a bit safer (since Google provides no backup capabilities).