Emran Hasan has a recommendation for those looking to hire on a "senior PHP developer" - beware.

With the rise of PHP developer as career, many are trying to get their share in the pie. Lately I've met a number of developers who have worked for more than one/two years in developing PHP applications in various companies and they consider themselves as "senior" developers.

Key things to keep an eye out for are the "more talk, less code" they tend to do and the lack of dedication to the tasks at hand. These bad developers then follow up with the typical blame to the junior developers, noting that it was them being difficult that caused all of the "real" problems.

Felix Geisendorfer has come across something interesting in his coding - an issue where false might not be false in the right situation.

So far I've always thought false would evaluate to 0 when used in a computational context. Turns out that this isn't always the case.

His code example tries to check is a false value is greater than or equal to a negative number. The result, however (despite the thinking that false is a zero value) turns out to be false.

I randomly stumbled upon this when arguing with Mariano today if setting Model::recursive to 'false' has the same effect as setting it to '-1'. Turns out that cake uses a statement like this: if ($recursive > -1) in the core which in turn makes -1 and false do exactly the same thing.

Stefan Esser has released the latest version of his Suhosin security patch for PHP:

Yesterday I released Suhosin 0.9.17 in response to a bug report by Ilia Alshanetsky and some crash problems with PHP 4 that were reported during the last weeks.

The issue dealt with a method to "bypass the hard_memory_limit of Suhosin due to a bug in PHP" that could result in memory consumption up into the gigabyte range for a single script. The patch takes care of the issue by not allowing negative memory_limit settings, preventing the problem from happening.

Responding to the recent comments about the filter extension included in recent PHP 5 releases from other members of the community, Pádraic Brady has posted comments on the matter including his experience with the extension and his worry about the other comments tarnishing the extension's reputation.

Personally I haven't tested ext/filter. I should no doubt be shot like a rabid dog for daring to post about this for that reason alone. Commenting idly without any knowledge of an extension is obviously illegal somewhere, possibly China.

He notes that some of the comments (the more inflammatory ones) were a bit out of place, and that feedback about issues has its place - not in major public view. He worries that the negative comments will cast a negative shadow on the extension and that the "back and forth" that's a result of it only serves to cause more trouble than it's worth.

If you're tired of spam comments or people flooding your PHP application with junk text and links, you'll definitely want to check out this new tutorial from PHPit.net. It looks at how to integrate the Akismet anti-spam service into your application.

To start off right, you need to know how the service works and what kind of methods you'll need to access it. They show a simple connection to the service as well as two functions to mark something as spam and to mark it as non-spam (or 'ham' as he calls it). He also links to their development page and to the WordPress plugin that performs the same action.