Over time, the PHP DateTime object has become one of the best objects available to PHP developers. This object has grown since early PHP 5 into a robust class that has the ability to do lots of great things. Recently, I was exploring some of the functionality provided by the DateTime object as of PHP 5.3 (and wishing that Ubuntu had PHP 5.3 as a package distribution). Here are some of the new things in PHP 5.3 that are really cool.

He mentions the "add()" and "sub()" methods you can use on an object to get information about the dates/times forward and backwards, the "diff()" to get the differences between two dates and the get/setTimestamp methods to get the current time (or set it).

In the real world, communications pass through a hierarchy of people, escalating as necessary, passing from person to person up the chain. This means that, given enough time, any mailing list starts to have a large noise:signal ratio, at least for any given person's take on the list; they want to read what they want to read, and don't need to be distracted ignoring the stuff they don't want to read.

His solution involves defining a hierarchy for the lists and the karma attached to them (based on user CVS level or a timescale or other measurement) to allow the "more interesting" things to filter back up to the correct places. His examples use some of the PHP lists as a sample structure.

And here's the slackers:

• Joe LeBlanc
• Ed Finkler
• Greg Beaver
• Bill Karwin
• Terry Chay
• Aaron Wormus
• Graham Christensen
• Nate Abele
• Max Horvath
• Johanna Cherry
• Beth Tucker
• Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Marc de Visser
• Joe Stagner
• Ralph Schindler
• Wil Sinclair
• Barry Austin
• FoxyDot
• Eric David
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• John Coggeshall
• Stas Malyshev
• Gaylord Aulke
• David Coallier
• Joe Stump
• Josh Eichorn
• Harry Fuecks
• Jeff Moore

If you're one of the ones that hasn't posted yet and you get around to it or if I've left someone's post out of the list, let me know and I'll update the list.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

Firing up the CouchDb server on Windows is a breeze-follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new http extension which is most easily done on Win32 by grabbing the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules.

The interface between CouchDb and PHP is REST - XML + HTTP - you can also point your browser directly at the CouchDb server (default - localhost:8080) and get around with a little help from the CouchDb wiki.

So, if it's Just Another Database, why should we pay attention? Harry notes (with a code example) that it's more about how it stores the information and not just that it does. His example takes in a POST request from a form and pushes it (raw data) into the CouchDb functions. He also gives an example of where this would be handy - in a wiki (like Dokuwiki) where the files are currently stored on the filesystem instead of in a database.