According to this post on the PEAR blog, the first PEAR bug triage is now over:

PEAR's bug tracker hit the 600+ open bugs mark a month ago. [...] So with 600+ open bugs (not including the feature requests), we had to do something. [...] The logical step was to hold our own bug smashing event and see how it works for PEAR.

Back on March 22nd and 23rd (Easter weekend) they hunted for bugs. Several developers showed to help out and many bugs were fixed and they managed to bring the number of open bugs for PEAR down to 547 with the two days of work. There were some milestones reached too:

Thanks to the triage, we are close to reaching two important milestones: Closing bug reports with lower bug ID than 1000 (1 bug left!) and 2000 (5 left).

John Walsh got to thinking about performance when it comes to the MySQL functions versus MySQLi in PHP - this quick post is the result:

I've decided that a little investigation in weather it can connect,query and close faster than the MYSQL function I prefer the MYSQLi version as the _connect function is a lot more organised with the DB select in it.

The code used for the benchmarks is simple - just a connect, query and close (no fetch). The results of running each 1500 times shows that, by a pretty narrow margin, the MySQL extension comes in around 92 milliseconds faster than MySQLi.

After having some issues with spam comments over on his blog, Ryan Malesevich decided to do something about it. So, being the WordPress fan that he is, he implemented a new plugin to help things a bit - removing the ability to comment on a post older than 21 days.

I'm using a plugin called Auto-Close Comments. Whenever you write a post, edit a post, or anything similar to that, it will go through the database and close any comments for posts older than three weeks. I'm going to try it out for a while to see how my spam comments are altered.

You need to install it manually since there's no official packaged plugin for it, but it's a pretty simple matter of cut & paste to get it working. Then, you just define the number of days that you want the cutoff to be and you're all set.

If you work with streams in PHP, Dotvoid has a tip that just might come in handy some day in the future. The tip deals with the difference between HTTP 1.1 and 1.0.

I have a class that I wrote some time ago that is called URLImporter. It's simple, does what it is supposed to do and thus makes my life easier. Essentially it helps me fetch URL resources - mostly dynamically generated data from password protected extranets that require me to use HTTP POST.

Up until recently this class have only been used behind an http proxy. The other day I moved it to another machine - that is not behind a proxy and suddenly it stopped working.

He realized the problem after a bit of research - HTTP 1.1 automatically performs a "keep alive" on the connection, not timing out after the transaction's done like 1.0 does. His solution? Passing another HTTP header to the stream connection: "Connection: close".

Derick Rethans has a new post on his blog today with some great news about the eZ components software he (and many others) have been working on.

Just a couple of hours ago we released the first release candidate of the eZ components. The components are the first step in porting eZ publish to PHP 5.

In this release we overhauled the way we are using Exceptions and implemented them consistently in all the Components.

eZ components is an "enterprise ready general purpose PHP platform" that work like building blocks to speed application development...