PHP has a couple DNS functions you can use to perform record lookups. Most of us are familiar with the two basic ones - gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr(), both of which perform a single function '" returning a hostname or IP address.

She also mentions the gethostbynamel and dns_get_record functions that can give you even more insight into the current DNS of a given domain (even returning only record-type specific information).

Geographical information integration is rapidly becoming an integral part of many websites. People use geographic data for a wide variety of applications. From location based content targeting, censoring information by geographic areas to analyzing website traffic by region. It is surprising how much free geographic information is available on the web. GeoNames is one such service.

The database is released under a Creative Commons license, so it's available to all and getting the libraries installed to use it is a single "pear install" command away. He includes code showing how to make a sample search for cities, countries and "neighbors" as well as just performing a generic search off the data. He also throws in a method for accessing the information via jQuery (an ajax call)

I drew attention to two things. The first is that there are Validation packages in PEAR, including the main Validate class and all the Validate_xx subclasses such as Validate_US, Validate_CA and some 22 others). The second item I drew Jamie's attention to is that his validation code counts a zip code of "00000' as valid, when the USPS zip code look up tool correctly (and they should know!) identifies that code as invalid.

He wholeheartedly opposes the "Not Invented Here" syndrome that developers (with a hefty dose of framework developers included) seem to have.

There are several ways to improve the performance of your CakePHP application. [...] Any performance improvement that does not effect how data is retrieved, stored and cached is welcome. If it affects your entire site and not only parts of it, it's all the better.

The performance boost comes in the form of an update to CakePHP's reverse route lookup functionality. Normally a lookup would have to be parsed and resolved back to their original location. They figured a bit faster way around it though - breaking the reverse routing feature for the sake of speed. The code for the hack is included in the post.

4 years ago I wrote a small program called phpm that I used for php function lookup when coding in vim. since then I've crossed over to ZendStudio and I'm now using that for my everyday work. But: every now and then I've had requests regarding phpm and if I can't digg up the sources, and I've said: "sorry, but those are lost". Until today: I went through a old HD, digging through backups and files: and suddenly phpm resurfaced!

He's included the links to the three things you'll need to get it working - the phpm file itself, XML required by it and an optional phpdocumentor template to create the output file.

cURL is one of the most powerful PHP extensions. It stands for Client URL, and allows you to communicate with other servers using a wide range of protocols. Perhaps that sounds fairly uninteresting, but give it some more thought.

As food for thought, they give a few examples of the use of this handy library - a script to look up the meaning of a word, how to access password protected pages, getting the information about a file from a remote server, posting to a remote script, and FTPing a file to a remote server. This flexible library allows all of these without making things overly complex and unmanageable.

You can check out the full list of features for the extension on this page of the PHP manual.

The only problem I see is the code won't work in PHP5 since introspection will return the method name as GetQuote instead of getquote.

He gives the code changes you'll need to make to get it all working in your PHP5 installation, and includes another option as well - registering all of the functions you want to use instead of just automagically using them.