The /Dev/Hell podcast, hosted by PHP community members Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes, has posted their latest episode - Episode #81: It Feels Good to Be a D-List Internet Superstar.

This time around Chris and Ed attempt to shame you with their D-lister activities and ability to purchase things they want but don’t need.

We cover PyOhio, the long-anticipated php|cruise, and some useful gadgets they’ve incorporated into their work flows.

You can listen to their latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to follow their feed for more information about when future episodes are released.

The /Dev/Hell podcast, hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode #80: Lifestyles of the Moderately Privileged and Internet Famous

This episode, Chris remembers his feline companion and Office Manager who passed away recently. Then we get into an insanely long discussion of travel tips and horror stories.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too and get the info on the latest shows as they're released.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Leidago Noabeb that looks at implementing internet protocols - in this case FTP.

PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.

His examples uses PHP's FTP methods to create a simple frontend to a remote FTP server. Included is the code to get the basics of it working - listing remote files and displaying them out in a styled list.

In this new post to his blog Paul Jones points out a set of slides from a coworker of his (Theo Schlossnagle) based around his book "Scalable Internet Architectures".

This is not strictly PHP, but it is about scalability, and every PHP programmer *ought* to be thinking about this stuff. Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI (where I work as a web architect) has this slide deck posted about Scalable Internet Architectures.

Paul points out some highlights of the slides:

• Slide 7: "Lack of awareness of the other disciplines is bad."
• Slide 29: Know the difference between "premature optimization" and "necessary optimization".
• Slide 59: "Scaling is hard, performance is easier. Extremely high-performance systems tend to be easier to scale, because they don't have to SCALE as much."
• Slide 63: Combine this with slide 59, and you have the reason why you need to know your application responsiveness.

In a new post on his blog, Christian Wenz mentions the latest results of the SANS Institute's Top 20 Internet Security Attack Targets list which both includes a new entry ("Users") and several mentions of PHP and PHP-related applications.

Of course you can debate how such a Top list came together and what the real value behind that is, but there are two specific points in this year's list that I found quite interesting.

There's two targets for the PHP community to worry about - sysadmin/hosting and things developers need to keep in mind. Items on these lists include:

• Always test and deploy patches and new versions of PHP as they are released
• Use Intrusion Prevention/Detection Systems to block/alert on malicious HTTP requests. Consider using Apache's mod_security to block known PHP attacks
• If you use PHP, migrate your application to PHP 5.2 as a matter of urgency.
• Encode all output using htmlentities() or a similar mechanism to avoid XSS attacks

In a new post on his blog, Christian Wenz mentions the latest results of the SANS Institute's Top 20 Internet Security Attack Targets list which both includes a new entry ("Users") and several mentions of PHP and PHP-related applications.

Of course you can debate how such a Top list came together and what the real value behind that is, but there are two specific points in this year's list that I found quite interesting.

There's two targets for the PHP community to worry about - sysadmin/hosting and things developers need to keep in mind. Items on these lists include:

• Always test and deploy patches and new versions of PHP as they are released
• Use Intrusion Prevention/Detection Systems to block/alert on malicious HTTP requests. Consider using Apache's mod_security to block known PHP attacks
• If you use PHP, migrate your application to PHP 5.2 as a matter of urgency.
• Encode all output using htmlentities() or a similar mechanism to avoid XSS attacks

Mike Potter is happy to announce that Adobe is officially a "Gold Sponsor" of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo as well as a mention of his involvement at the conference.

I'm happy to announce that Adobe will be sponsoring the Zend / PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose in late October. I have a speaking session there on Rich Internet Applications, and we'll have a booth where we'll be showing off integrating PHP, using open source tools such as AMFPHP or WebORB from the Midnight Coders.

He also reminds potential conference-goers that the Early Bird discount is still in effect (until September 15th - just two more days!) to get the dicsounted price. Head over and register today!

Mike Potter is happy to announce that Adobe is officially a "Gold Sponsor" of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo as well as a mention of his involvement at the conference.

I'm happy to announce that Adobe will be sponsoring the Zend / PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose in late October. I have a speaking session there on Rich Internet Applications, and we'll have a booth where we'll be showing off integrating PHP, using open source tools such as AMFPHP or WebORB from the Midnight Coders.

He also reminds potential conference-goers that the Early Bird discount is still in effect (until September 15th - just two more days!) to get the dicsounted price. Head over and register today!

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Theo Schlossnagle's book from the Developer's Library series "Scalable Internet Architectures".

I had the pleasure of meeting Theo Schlossnagle at OSCON 2006. He gave me 30 minutes to peek inside his brain and do an interview. 30 minutes just was not enough time. So when I received his latest book in the mail I was excited. Finally a chance to get more in-depth on some of the topics we covered. I've taken the time to collect my thoughts for you here so you can decide whether this book is a good one for you.

Cal talks about how he hated the book (from a reviewer's perspective, not a developer), the contents of the book, and his personal favorite section - "Distributed Databases are Easy, Just Read the Fine Print". His only critism is that the book seems to come across in a "demanding" tone (misunderstood by those that don't know Theo's style as just being matter of fact).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Theo Schlossnagle's book from the Developer's Library series "Scalable Internet Architectures".

I had the pleasure of meeting Theo Schlossnagle at OSCON 2006. He gave me 30 minutes to peek inside his brain and do an interview. 30 minutes just was not enough time. So when I received his latest book in the mail I was excited. Finally a chance to get more in-depth on some of the topics we covered. I've taken the time to collect my thoughts for you here so you can decide whether this book is a good one for you.

Cal talks about how he hated the book (from a reviewer's perspective, not a developer), the contents of the book, and his personal favorite section - "Distributed Databases are Easy, Just Read the Fine Print". His only critism is that the book seems to come across in a "demanding" tone (misunderstood by those that don't know Theo's style as just being matter of fact).