The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has released their latest episode of their show - episode #54, Three Devs and a Amiee with hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lews Cains and Edd Mann.

It is the first show of the new year! In this weeks episode we first reflect on how our holiday breaks went, and what happened to Edd's face?! Fraser's move up to Greenwich is next discussed, including how useful the taxi app 'Uber' is. We then move on to talk about Mick's experiences compiling Apache and PHP from source, along with CodeIgniter's decision to maintain 5.2 support. This leads on to conversation about the upcoming PHP UK Conference, along with tuning queries for the database query planner. Finally, we highlight the differences between Apache and nginx, along with their use of PHP-FPM.

Other topics mentioned include:

• Ed's Con lists and folds post
• Using EXPLAIN in PostgreSQL
• Ratchet
• isset() vs. empty() - Stack Overflow
• WhatsApp starts encrypting users' messages - BBC News

You can listen to this latest show either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 to listen whenever. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

T'is the season for snow and twinkling lights, and the PHP-GTK Community site has taken this to heart with their latest tutorial posted today showing the creation of a Drawing area with stars and blinking lights.

They start with an overview of the mini-project (three different parts) and quickly get into the code.

First it's the abstract class Object, then the BasicStar that extends our object (complete with the method for drawing the dots), and finally the "Christmas widget" that they all get pushed into. The result is a small window that has flashing "lights" and will run until you shut it off. Happy holidays!

T'is the season for snow and twinkling lights, and the PHP-GTK Community site has taken this to heart with their latest tutorial posted today showing the creation of a Drawing area with stars and blinking lights.

They start with an overview of the mini-project (three different parts) and quickly get into the code.

First it's the abstract class Object, then the BasicStar that extends our object (complete with the method for drawing the dots), and finally the "Christmas widget" that they all get pushed into. The result is a small window that has flashing "lights" and will run until you shut it off. Happy holidays!