On the php[architect] site they've shared the contents of one of their regularly published columns - "The Dev Lead Trenches", written by Chris Tankersley - covering burnout of developers from their day-in and day-out work.

The tech industry is a double-edged sword. On the one side, we (generally) have well-paying jobs with nice perks, but on the other, we can easily slip into not only boring, repetitive work but figurative death marches. The former is used by most companies as an offset to the latter, but that rarely works out well. This leads many developers to come face-to-face with burnout.

He starts with some suggestions of ways to detect burnout in your own life including lack of motivation, sleep, and other emotional types of signs. He then makes a list of suggestions of how you can avoid burnout in your own work:

• set working hours
• use vacation time
• take 15 minute breaks
• take up hobbies outside of development

There's several others in the list too, so I'd recommend checking out the full article for more information about each.

The TutsPlus.com site continues their "Building Your Startup" series of tutorials with the latest in the series covering automatic timezone detection based on the user's local time.

For the alpha release of Meeting Planner, I provided people the opportunity to change their time zone in user settings. However, for anyone outside of the western United States, they may have been wondering why their calendar appointments were at the wrong times. You have to know to look for the settings page.

As I approach the beta, I realized I needed to fix this as soon as possible. So I began to reflect on how best to resolve this. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through my approach to automatic time-zone detection and how I integrated it into the user experience.

The tutorial starts off with a look at the current state of timezone detection, linking to two options that do mostly the same thing. Eventually, however, he decided on the jsTimezoneDetect library as it fit best with the needs of the application. He covers some of the thoughts that went into designing the user experience and the code required to integrate the Javascript library with his Yii2-based application. He ends the tutorial with a few additional considerations worth keeping in mind including timezone representation in ical exports and virtual meetings.

In a new tutorial posted to PHPMaster.com today, Lukas White talks about using the Browscap functionality to do server-side device/client detection in your applications.

An alternative solution to the problem is to use server-side device detection and then take certain actions based on that information. One possibility is to simply forward requests for a mobile site to a different URL. Another possibility is to adapt the layout – or indeed content – programmatically as it’s generated on the server. Taking a server-side approach is the basis of this article, which looks in detail at the Browser Capabilities Project, or Browscap for short, to provide the information on which to base these decisions.

He starts with some of the basics - User-Agent strings that most devices will send to your site and their structure. He then talks about the Browscap project and the PHP support for its use. He shows how to get it all installed via Composer and how to use the "browscap-php" library to get the current browser information. He includes an example of the output and shows how to use this to redirect the user to a mobile site if needed. He also adds in a bit at the end about using it for layout switching or for showing the user the correct download links based on their client.

In this new post to his site, Cameron McKay has posted a bit of interesting code - functionality that detects the number of syllables in words and checks for rhyming in phrases.

The simplicity of the rules got me thinking: how hard would it be to write a program to check if a poem stanza is ottava rima? In this article, we will write a simple ottava rima detector in PHP.

His code takes in the content and performs a few checks, one simple (length) and two custom - "is_iambic_pentameter" and "is_abababcc_rhyme". The code for these two checks are included in the post as well that, in turn, use some other functions to count syllables and vowels and use Arpabet phonetic transcription and monophthongs/diphthongs to detect iambic pentameter and rhyme.

Henry Hayes has a recent post to his blog looking at a the change for the user agent support for the browser detection functionality in the Zend Framework.

Recently it has come to light that Zend Framework are dropping support for the WurflApi Features Adapter in the Zend_Http_UserAgent component. This is due to licensing issues. As of version 1.12 Zend_Http_UserAgent_Mobile constant DEFAULT_FEATURES_ADAPTER_CLASSNAME now specifies that Zend_Http_UserAgent_Features_Adapter_Browscap is now the default mobile adapter.

He shows you how to get the browscap support set up and configured for your PHP installation and what needs to be done to a pre-1.12 ZF release application (using this library) and in a post-1.12 application (almost nothing).

In a new post today C. Sadeesh Kumar has a quick tip to help your script detect file types without having to rely on the extension to be correct.

In most web applications today, there is a need to allow users to upload images, audio and video files. Sometimes, we also need to restrict certain types of files from being uploaded – an executable file being an obvious example. Security aside, one might also want to prevent users from misusing the upload facility, e.g. uploading copyrighted music files illegally and using the service to promote piracy! In this article, we’ll look into a few ways in which we can achieve this.

The trick to his example is in using the Fileinfo PECL extension. With the help of this extension you can look inside the file and pick out the "magic bytes" (the first few bytes of a file) and see what MIME type the file really is. He includes a simple example of using the extension on a file and a file upload script that checks the type and handles the file accordingly.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Boy Baukema looks at PHPIDS, the PHP intrusion detection system and how it can start to help protect you and your application feel a little safer.

Just a reminder to everyone who is interested in WebAppSec and hasn’t done so already to try PHPIDS, the Intrusion Detection System. [...] Installing PHPIDS is easy. Just download the latest version in your preferred format and then review the the FAQ for sample code on how to install it.

He does warn on one thing though - the system is a basic intrusion detection system and is not as complex as other detection tools. There were some complains he had about what it thought were intrusions and recommends that you only have it pointing to the external side of your application to cause less hassle in the long run.

Maurice Svay has a new blog post that includes a script he's developed to perform facial recognition (detect faces in images) with PHP without the need of the Open-CV library.

OpenCV seems to perform well but you need to be able to install it on your server. In my case, I wanted to have a pure PHP solution, so it can work with most hosts. So I started to think about implementing it myself. [...] I kept searching and finally found a canvas+javascript implementation of face detection at http://blog.kpicturebooth.com/?p=8. The code looked fairly compact and simple. Shouldn't be hard to port to PHP.

The class takes in the filename of an image (just JPG, but could easily be adapted) and a data file to use to run the image through the GD image library and output a JPG similar to this with the face highlighted by a red square.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a recently posted article about using the IDS tool for PHP to help with intrusion detection for your website.

This tutorial explains how to set up IDS tool on a web server with Apache2 and PHP5. PHPIDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System) is a simple to use, well structured, fast and state-of-the-art security layer for your PHP based web application. The IDS neither strips, sanitizes nor filters any malicious input, it simply recognizes when an attacker tries to break your site and reacts in exactly the way you want it to.

They show the steps you'll need to get things installed and working as well as some of the configuration changes you'll need to add/make (including the creation of an auto-prepend file to make using it all over easy).

In one of his latest entries, Sebastian Bergmann answers a question from another blogger about the future of software metrics and project mess detection as a part of the PHPUnit project.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.