PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He is still the lead of the PHP group today. It was a template layer for his software that was written in C. He open sourced it and people loved it. More and more functionality was added over the years and the language grew significantly from its original idea.

In the years 1997-1999 two students named Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans re-wrote the core of PHP and released it as version 4. This new core that they wrote was named the Zend Engine. “Zend” comes from their names. This is still the main engine that operates inside PHP today. In 1999 they founded the company Zend technologies. In the years between 2000 and 2010 Zend technologies receives a number of findings from various investors.

Over those years, they are the main contributor to PHP. They call themselves “the PHP company”. Their business model is offering paid PHP products and services to enterprise-class customers while helping and grow the open source PHP community.
(more…)

This is the second part of my original article “Show IIS PHP server2server connections in Fiddler”. Here I will be talking about the PHP’s CURL extension.
(more…)

So I am running PHP on Microsoft IIS web server. I have to open some sort of a socket to a remote host. I would like to inspect that socket because I would like to see the data being exchanged between PHP and the remote web service. In our case you could call this a server to server connection. But remember that as far as the remote web service is concerned PHP is acting as a client. Fiddler is an irreplaceable tool. I have been using it for years and I really can’t imagine my life without it.

(more…)

I am writing this guide because I couldn’t find a working solution to the problem where you might want to clone a complete installation of Mac OS X on a physical hardware Mac to a Parallels virtual machine. In order to do that you would need to take full DMG image of the whole hard drive. Most solutions out there suggest that Parallels should automatically prompt you to conver the DMG file to its .HDD format when you add it to the VM, so you should try that first. However, that method did not work for me.
(more…)

Me and the guys from Sco.Biz have just finished working on the Chicken Shop’s website: http://chickenshop.co.uk

As I am writing these lines, history is happening. The biggest mass-hacking campaign in the history of the web is happening right now. The campaign is named LizaMoon and more than 1.5 million websites have already been hacked and counting.

The infection uses vulnerability in the security of the Microsoft .net based web applications. The two worst nightmares me and every other web developer have are SQL Injections and XSS. While everyone is talking about XSS, I was left with the impression the SQL Injection vulnerabilities are not that common anymore and that XSS was a bigger issue.

(more…)

So I need to get Imagick php extension for an old web system i’ve got to work on these days. This is made so easy on Ubuntu:

root@webdev:~# apt-get install php5-imagic


Then just restart the web server:


root@webdev:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And that’s all! One line in ubuntu and we have that extension working. Life’s good!

Well it’s not, because we decided that Centos will be a better choice for a server operating system. The reason for that is because it is the free version of Redhat and it’s supposed to be “enterprise class”, so as you know in the IT industry, business class products are supposed to be better.

(more…)

I hate WYSIWYG web editors and I never use them. Read one of my stories about Dreamweaver. The idea of this type of web editors is great but it will work properly may be after 5 or 10 years when HTML5 is the current web standard and all the web browsers are based on similar standard rendering modes (we are getting there just hold on tight). I’ve read the book “Weaving the web” by the creator of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he states that he wants people to be able to publish materials on the web without the need of html or any other technical knowledge. Well, I am afraid that’s not possible. Not yet.
(more…)

As you know I am a LAMP web developer. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL that are all free open source software products working together to bring you this website and most of the rest on the web.
Linux is my operating system. On my servers I use CentOS and on my personal computers/laptops I use Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu with KDE).

Speaking of LAMP, why dont you like my Facebook page about LAMP? I post a lot of interesting stuff there. Thanks!

(more…)

I am now just back from Bulgaria and I am starting work on a few projects. The most interesting one is a content management system (CMS), which I am doing from scratch for a client. You don’t realise how much work is involved and how much functionality there is behind a CMS (such as Joomla, wordpress, drupal, etc) until you start doing one like them yourself. At the moment I am doing a system for managing self describing data (I am not talking about XML), which means managing the data about the data, which is provided by the user and doing advanced operations and calculations with it.

I have moved to a new University – Edinburgh Napier Uni and I am doing an Engineering Bachelor (BEng) in “Web Technologies”, which is a brand new course combining the courses “Web Based Systems”, “Data-driven Web Systems”, “Interactive Multimedia Systems” and “Web Design”.

As you know, I am not a big fan of flash, but I had it as an assessment for my Interactive Product Development unit. The task was to create a keepy uppy game. For those of you who are not familiar with Flash, basically you can put different object in there (for example the ball), which will not do anything, unless you program them to. The programing language in Flash is called Actionscript. When you click on the ball it will not do anything unless it’s programmed to.

In my case, I had to program flash to calculate, where the ball has been clicked and then move the ball depending on the point where the ball was clicked. We are using trigonometry (yes, the things with cosines, sines, tangents..) to calculate where the ball has to fly, how hi does it have to fly and how heavy should it feel (when should it start falling down).

One of the main purposes of the next generation of web technologies such as HTML5 is to get all those multimedia and interactive elements, which today can be achieved only by using plugins and make them part of the standard HTML DOM (also accessible by the JavaScript/CSS/etc).

For example, to embed a video today, most of the web sites use Flash, which requires a plugin and the embeded flash movie is not controllable. In HTML5, a video is inserted, similar to the way images are inserted in the previous versions: today, we insert an image, using something like <img src=”file.jpg”>, video will be inserted in HTML5, using the markup similar to <video src=”video.ogg”>.
(more…)

Please note that this website will be totally redesigned and WordPress won’t be used for it anymore. I am doing a new graphical design, which will be more into the current trends.

I am also writing my own Content Managment System specially for what I need. The CMS will basically be a collection of all the best elements I have seen and liked around thousands of websites on the web. It will be based on the LAMP technologies (of course). And for markup, I’ll use HTML5 (only some elements, which are currently supported by most browsers (or planned to be supported)). Once, the CMS is ready, I will make it available open source under the GNU/GPL license.

Unfortunately, I am so busy that I don’t have any time to work on it, so I can’t really tell you when it’s gonna be ready…

Google reminds us again, why they are number one in the web world and
yesterday, they announced on the YouTube blog that full hd support (both 1080p and 780p) will be added. So now the ‘High Quality’ button can go really high! This is a step forward in the history of the World Wide Web and the modern technology (although there are other websites that already offer HD videos since long time ago).
(more…)