As is mentioned in this post to the PEAR blog the server hosting the packages and website has been fully restored as of December 11th and should be 100% functional again.

Our server sponsor eUKhost quickly provided us with a new machine after we told them the old had failed, and the last two weeks were spent setting it up to provide the same functionality as before.

This includes not only the pear.php.net site but also the bug tracker, manual and downloads handling. They share a bit about why it took so long to correct (mostly having to do with technological difficulties with the server provided by the host). While backups did exist, they were only for the packages themselves and XML file structure. Unfortunately this did not include the website and blog database or patch files in the bug tracker. The remainder of the post lists several other smaller things that went wrong in the process, all adding up to plenty of difficulties for Christian as he battled to get the server (and services) back up and running.

In a post to his site Ross Tuck shares some of his experience and some helpful hints around formatting exception messages and how doing so effectively can make life for fellow developers much easier.

Over the last couple years, I’ve started putting my Exception messages inside static methods on custom exception classes. This is hardly a new trick, Doctrine’s been doing it for the better part of a decade. Still, many folks are surprised by it, so this article explains the how and why.

He shares his tips as a part of a "refactoring" in a simple example, a CSV import where there are failures during the import process on certain lines. He starts with the basic Exception and works through the logic to customize it and make it more useful. He shows the inclusion of additional details in the message, abstracting out the formatting to custom methods based on the error type and using static methods for the more complex message formatting. He also suggests the creation of methods to handle specific error cases with more details than a simple single-line error in a normal exception being thrown.

When you co-locate the messages inside the exception, however, you gain an overview of the error cases. If these cases multiply too fast or diverge significantly, it’s a strong smell to split the exception class and create a better API. [...] Sometimes we underestimate the little things that shape our code. [...] Creating good environments at a high level starts with encouraging them at the lowest levels. Pay attention to what your habits encourage you to do.

From the WaxJelly blog today comes a handy bit of code for anyone out there looking to scrape details from just about any MySpace page out there (quick and easy).

It's amazing how just a little optimization on the part of myspace makes crawling their site so much easier. We're going to scrape the user detail (name, age, sex, etc..) from a profile, using the header info...

The script grabs the contents of the given URL, loops through, pulls out the meta tag information and uses that as a key to grab the rest of the user's information (including name, age, city, state, etc).

From the WaxJelly blog today comes a handy bit of code for anyone out there looking to scrape details from just about any MySpace page out there (quick and easy).

It's amazing how just a little optimization on the part of myspace makes crawling their site so much easier. We're going to scrape the user detail (name, age, sex, etc..) from a profile, using the header info...

The script grabs the contents of the given URL, loops through, pulls out the meta tag information and uses that as a key to grab the rest of the user's information (including name, age, city, state, etc).

Continuing in his series of interviews from this year's OSCON, Cal Evans has posted this new interview he did with Andrei Zmievski.

This is another entry in the series of interviews I did at OSCON 2006. This time, I was privileged to sit down with Andrei Zmievski and talk about Unicode, Yahoo and other PHP topics. Andrei is a native of Uzbekistan and came to the US to study when he was 16 years old. He now works at Yahoo on their Infrastructure team and is pursuing a Master's degree in Linguistics.

They talk about Unicode for PHP6 (Andrei's big push), the status and some specifics of the project, his work wth Yahoo!, a look towards the future of PHP, and some of Andrei's personal background - including how he came to the PHP community.

Continuing in his series of interviews from this year's OSCON, Cal Evans has posted this new interview he did with Andrei Zmievski.

This is another entry in the series of interviews I did at OSCON 2006. This time, I was privileged to sit down with Andrei Zmievski and talk about Unicode, Yahoo and other PHP topics. Andrei is a native of Uzbekistan and came to the US to study when he was 16 years old. He now works at Yahoo on their Infrastructure team and is pursuing a Master's degree in Linguistics.

They talk about Unicode for PHP6 (Andrei's big push), the status and some specifics of the project, his work wth Yahoo!, a look towards the future of PHP, and some of Andrei's personal background - including how he came to the PHP community.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

PHP-GTK users can now rejoice (or even those that want to become PHP-GTK users)! According to Scott Mattocks (the author), the PHP-GTK book is now available.

PHP-GTK users can now rejoice (or even those that want to become PHP-GTK users)! According to Scott Mattocks (the author), the PHP-GTK book is now available.