The PHPUgly podcast, hosted by Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon, and Thomas Rideout, has posted their latest episode - Episode #114: 3D Printed Puns.

This month the team discusses Customer Reviews - PHPUgly on Apple Podcasts

Other topics mentioned include the ruling allowing the 3D printing of guns and recent Facebook censorship/ban issues. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

In a new post to his site Christian Weiske shares his interaction with the Open Source group at Apple concerning his Structures_Graph PEAR package. While they were interested in the package and its functionality but with one issue.

Fact is that Structures_Graph is used in the PEAR installer, which is shipped as part of OSX's PHP packages. Apple simply wanted to continue their current setup without changing anything

Unfortunately, Apple had issues with the package being under the LGPLv3 license. They had a concern that, in certain circumstances, the license could allow the owner access to other potentially sensitive information from the user. He lists out his options - bascially either changing the license, asking Apple for compensation or just tell them "no". Unfortunately, if they decide that having it under that license isn't acecptable, they may drop PEAR all together (as the package is a part of the installer itself).

The Laravel Podcast, hosted by Matt Stauffer (with regular guests Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way) has posted their latest episode today - Episode #30: Trouble, Trouble, Trouble....

In this episode, the crew discusses architecture driven religious wars and the recent drama surrounding Apple Music.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and future episodes as they're released. Be sure to also follow them on Twitter for announcements when new episodes are released.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create digital tickets using PHP and the Apple Passbook service.

Why should we PHP warriors care at all about Apple’s Passbook? Well first because Apple made this technology open (well, sort of…), second because it can be used outside iOS devices, and third because it involves a lot of well-known and loved technologies like JSON and RESTful APIs. I’d also add that it’s a very interesting piece of technology, but that’s my personal opinion. In this article I’ll show you how I built a sample web application that creates and distributes passes in the form of a “PHPMaster Membership Card”. It is not a full-featured product, but it’s a nice base to build on for more serious real world uses.

He talks about the concept of a "pass" (a digitally signed document that can be easily distributed) and the types that the Apple service lets you make. His example (sample code here) is Silm based and Idorim & Paris for the data handling. He talks some about the certificate handling that's involved and the structure of the application including the certs, application code, templates and images. He then works through the code step-by-step and explains what each part does and how it connects with Apple's service to generate the pass.

The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode co-hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler - "Episode 12: Irish Eyes Are Always Smiling".

Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it's episode 11 when it's actually episode 12, but hey!

They talk about the Apple vs. Android functionality gap, Rackspace's recent issues and the definition of "guiding principles in an open source project". They also mention another PHP community member Brian Deshong who has volunteered to help out with an iPad app for the show.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed (or on iTunes).

David Walsh has a new post to his blog today with some code snippets that can help you detect iPad users when they come to your site.

The hottest device out there right now seems to be the iPad. iPad this, iPad that, iPod your mom. I'm underwhelmed with the device but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to account for such devices on the websites I create.

He includes three ways to get the job done by matching against the User Agent sent by the browser - Javascript, PHP and with an .htaccess file for an Apache server. As one commenter points out, though, you need to be sure if you already have a redirect on the word "mobile", the iPad's User Agent contains that too.

Ivo Jansch of Ibuildings has taken a look at a different sort of spin on Apple's iPad device and asked what potential it has to affect the PHP companies out there.

I see the iPad (and the non-Apple alternatives that already exist or are on the way) as a game changer. It brings new ways of consuming content and will reach audiences that the laptop has never reached. [...] In any case, the iPad is a game changer. What does this mean for the web and for tech companies such as us? First, it's nice to see that Apple is pushing open standards heavily with the iPad. [...] Second, the typical architecture behind most iPad apps (and other mobile applications for that matter) is to have a thin client on the device, and a rich API as the backend.

Ivo talks about the one of the key pieces of technology behind it all - the API that your service provides for iPad/iPod applications too hook into. Without a well-built, solid API to interface with, your application can be world class but not be very useful at all.

David Kent Norman has posted a new guide for those Drupal users wanting to get your favorite CMS up and running on the latest version of Apple's OS (Snow Leopard). The real issue comes with the stock Drupal install and the PHP 5.3 Snow Leopard comes bundled with.

Drupal 6 probably won't ever work right on PHP 5.3.0, which is what Snow Leopard packs by default. My feeling is that since Ubuntu LTS still runs PHP 5.2, Drupal 7 won't work at production level on PHP 5.3.0 either. For that reason, here is my PHP 5.2.10 install instructions for Snow Leopard. It will trash your built-in Snow Leopard install.

He includes links to the various packages you'd need to download and the configure command with a hefty helping of parameters to get things set up correctly. Also, as mentioned in one of the comments, there is a patch that can be applied to make the system work correctly with PHP 5.3.

A little while back Scott MacVicar wrote some thank yous to some of the larger and corporate groups involved with PHP and enhancing it as much as they can, both on their own hardware and for the community in general. Unfortunately, there seems to be one company that doesn't want to pay nice - Apple.

So if you've ever tried to compile PHP on OS X, you'll most likely have problems using the default system libraries and in the end you'll use macports to install libxml and iconv. If you're not trying to compile your own versions of PHP and want to use a PECL extension then you'll find that the binary has had all the symbols stripped. Mid last year I tried to get some of these resolved, and filed a bug report with Apple but was informed these weren't bugs.

He goes on to talk about the reception he got from the Apple Developer Connection and the brush-off he seemed to get when he tried with the same questions a few months later.

What was essentially asked for was help to improve PHP on OS X, but this has fallen on deaf ears. Apple are happy to take PHP but don't seem as keen to contribute anything back to the project. Yes they are perfectly entitled to do this, PHP is open source after all. But is waiving a $499 charge too much to ask?

Juozas Kaziukenas has reposted a video created by the RailsEmnvy.com folks (one of several, check out YouTube for more) that does a "Mac vs PC" Apple parody commercial of Ruby and PHP.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

Other videos include Ruby on Rails vs .NET, Ruby on Rails vs Django and, of course, Ruby on Rails vs ColdFusion.