there is a fine line between agile and fragile
Sourceforge has just opened their 2008 Community Choice Awards nomination process. I've nominated both of the Open Source projects I'm involved with, and I would love it if my kind readers would help out with the nomination process.
Nomination Category: Best Project
Nomination Category: Best New Project
Go forth and nominate!
Being directly involved with two open source projects, Gallery and Habari, I sometimes get to witness some rather esoteric problem solving. I would never call myself a great developer,
probably not a developer at all, but sometimes people present code that just leaves me wondering if some people come from other planets.
Most of the time this involves some rather heavy regexp trickery like the one below:
/(translate|i18n)\(\s*(((\s*\.\s*)?
('((\\')?[^']*)*[^\\]'|"((\\")?[^"]*)*[^\\]"))*)\s*\)/s
Thats from some kind of language related code in Gallery 2, at least it was in 2004 when the quote is from, that Alan Harder created an insane Regular Expression statement for.
I can't even begin to try and understand what it matches and I'm pretty sure my head would
explode if I did. For some reason regexp seems to constantly elude me.
My other example is more current and from the #habari irc channel. A recent code commit in the svn trunk caused this site to bail out with a sql related issue.
Thanks to Jay Pipes it was a fairly easy fix, involving some simple SQL statements:
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE dup_slugs SELECT tag_slug, COUNT(*) FROM habari__tags GROUP BY tag_slug HAVING COUNT(*) > 1; SET @row_count:= 1; UPDATE habari__tags INNER JOIN dup_slugs ON habari__tags.tag_slug = dup_slugs.tag_slug SET habari__tags.tag_slug = CONCAT(habari__tags.tag_slug, (@row_count:= @row_count + 1));
I still can't read that properly, but it did indeed fix the problem I had with a recent change to the tags table in Habari resulting in duplicate tags. Or something similar.
My only conclusion is, good developers are in fact aliens. No doubt about it.
Gallery 2.2.4
is now available for download.
This release fixes critical security issues, no new features have been
added. Due to the severity of these issues users of all previous
Gallery 2 versions are strongly encouraged to upgrade
to version 2.2.4 as soon as possible! All issues addressed in this
release were discovered through an extensive internal security audit.
Since 2.2.4 is a security release, it shares the same installation
requirements as 2.2.3. If you haven't upgraded to 2.2.x yet, please
review the Gallery 2.2 release notes for highlights of changes and the requirements. Read the full release announcement for more details.
Datamation
As Bharat tells it, the project has a spiritual aspect. “You’re basically building up a tremendous amount of good karma. The fact that it’s there, the potential – that’s what makes me happy. Having users show up in the Forum, and our IRC channel, and send me e-mail that says, ‘I’m really happy with this project,’ that’s worth much more to me than the small amount of money I would get from charging people.”
Microsoft has just released FastCGI for IIS6. For Microsoft and the PHP Community this is important, as this enables hosting companies and PHP developers full support for reliable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.
To quote Eric Woersching from Microsoft (Technical Product Manager IIS):
I think this is a big step for Microsoft as it symbolizes how we’re trying to start doing more for the PHP community.
Gallery is one of the PHP applications that has been given it's own walkthrough on the Microsoft site check out setup instructions for Gallery. Who would have thought we would see Gallery 2 setup instructions on a Microsoft site?
This comes after both Chris Kelly and Jesse Mullan represented Gallery at the recent Microsoft Web Developer Summit. Chris has also done his own writeup about the FastCGI release. Another thing that Microsoft has agreed to provide the Gallery team with, is testing resources. Details are still being worked out, but Microsoft has made it very clear that they intend so help the Gallery team develop and test their applications on the Microsoft platform including IIS and MSSQL. It will be very interesting to see the final testing setup and what kind of support we will be receiving.
So far it looks very promising.