PHP, the universe and all the rest

Is it really that hard ...? (or how i finally learned to hate CSS)

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:09:48 +0200

I confess that i've been hiding under a stone for quite some time when it comes to contemporary HTML stuff, for most of the things i'm doing on the presentation level even good old HTML 1.0 would be sufficient if it weren't for the occasinal tabular data ...

So while i know CSS in theory i've never really looked into the black magic of doing CSS layouts and stuff ... until now ...

What i'm up to right now was to produce a small series of step by step examples on how to use OpenLayers to present customized OpenStreetMap based maps, and for that i wanted to have a simple layout like this:

Continue reading "Is it really that hard ...? (or how i finally learned to hate CSS)"

Why ...

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:22:11 +0100

... oh why do java binaries (java, javac, jar ...) use long command line options starting with a single dash instead of going with the "one dash for one letter options, two dashes for long option names" convention?

I'll probably never learn to type things like java -version instead of java --version right away ...

What a difference a year makes

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:18:14 +0100

After getting a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS6 as christmas present for myself last year i today took my first try at photo mapping with Josm ... and failed.

Camera and GPS device clocks seemed to be almost perfectly in sync but i could not convince JOSM to load those issues and associate them with the loaded GPX track at all, no matter what i tried.

After double checking the photos EXIF tag entries and file system time stamps and the .gpx file entries for quite a while i finally found the reason:

The camera still believed to be living in 2009, it hat somehow forgotten to change over to 2010. The original test photos i did last year clearly show that i had set the date right, so i'm afraid i now need to remember to double check the cameras date every new year now ... :/

MySQL Plugin generator now supporting system variables

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:28:26 +0100

CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin had basic support for status variables (for SHOW STATUS) for quite a while, now it also has basic support for system variables (SHOW [GLOBAL|SESSION] VARIABLES, SET) in the 0.9.2 package version i just released as well

Continue reading "MySQL Plugin generator now supporting system variables"

MySQL UDF generator finally supporting windows

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:04:42 +0100

So i finally defeated my 'inner Schweinehund' and set up a working Windows development system again. Using the Visual Studio C++ 2008 Express edition i'm now able to compile UDF projects generated by CodeGen_MySQL_UDF aka. udf-gen, and the udf-gen script now works natively on Windows, too.

Continue reading "MySQL UDF generator finally supporting windows"

Speaking at the MySQL User Conference 2008

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:14:54 +0100

I'm talking at the MySQL User Conference once again this year presenting my Code Generators for MySQL Plugins and User Defined Functions in a formal session this time after my original "pizza & hacking" session on this topic on the 2006 UC (which ended up in hacking some other things on the way first ... photographs may follow ...).

The plugin and UDF code generators are based on the same foundation as my "pecl-gen" generator for PHP extensions so this might be of interest for hardcore PHP folks, too.

For more information see the Conference Schedule.

MySQL Forums RSS feeds working (again?)

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:37:24 +0200

In the recent past the RSS feeds on http://forge.mysql.com/ used to loose the formatting on posts leading to most feed readers showing them as just one long wrapped line of text. This made forum posts hard to read and impossible to figure out any SQL or code snippets within.

This has now been fixed a few days ago, so providing a way better reading experience for all us RSS users

Little things learned

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:01:33 +0200

I just came back from this years FROSCON event and even though i don't think that i did discover any new big things there were two small tools that i wasn't aware of so far which i'll probably use on a rather regular basis in the future.

Continue reading "Little things learned"

New REGEXP UDF release

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Sun, 13 May 2007 17:30:32 +0200

I finished implementing the missing optional REGEXP function parameters today, all regular expression functions should now work as similar to their Oracle counterparts as possible with the following restrictions:

* The MySQL UDF API predates the extended character set support added with MySQL 4.1 and so UDF functions have no idea about charsets and collations at all. As a consequence the functions for now are always case sensitve by default and are always assuming their input to be Latin1 encoded
* Only the 'c' and 'i' pattern modifiers for case sensitive and insensitive matching are implemented yet, the 'm' and 'n' modifiers for multi line input are not yet supported
* I haven't tested back references on REGEXP_REPLACE() yet. They may or may not work, as i borrowed the actual implementation from the PHP source i'm not really sure about whether it takes care of this or not

Anyway, the REGEXP UDFs are hosted on http://udf-regexp.php-baustelle.de/ and the new 1.0 release is available here

New MySQL UDF generator release, project moved

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:11:41 +0200

I released version 0.9.8 of my MySQL UDF code generator yesterday and i finally moved development over to my own php-baustelle.de family of sites.

Continue reading "New MySQL UDF generator release, project moved"

My first MySQL fulltext parser plugin

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:25:35 +0200

Using the CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin i have now been able to create my first working fulltext plugin: gzip_fulltext

gzip_fulltext will uncompress data that was compressed with MySQLs COMPRESS() function on the fly before passing it on to the default fulltext parser. Data that is not gzip compressed will be passed on 'as is'.

Update: there were some minor compile problems with yesterdays release, these have been corrected and th download link below fixed

Continue reading "My first MySQL fulltext parser plugin"

New PEAR release: CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:30:40 +0200

I have just released CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin 0.1.0dev

This package has been around in PEAR CVS for quite a while, now it is finally seeing its first alpha release.

Starting with the upcoming 5.1 release MySQL will provide a general plugin interface within the MySQL server.
Up to MySQL 5.0 the only way the MySQL server could be extended without recompiling it was to add UDF modules that provide new user defined functions on the SQL level. The new generic plugin interface allows for different kinds of plugins to be implemented on top of it.

Currently the plugin interface supports the follwing kind of plugins:

"daemon" plugins that only hook into server startup and shutdown
fulltext parser plugins that change the way data is broken into words for fulltext indexes
storage engine plugins
additions to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA

there are also plans for converting the UDF api to use the plugin infrastructure in the future.

The plugin infrastructure provides the following functionality to all plugin interfaces put on top of it:

plugin initialization and deinitialization hooks
status variables
version, license and author information

future versions will allow all plugins to declare server variables and command line options in addition to status variables, too.

CodeGen_MySQL_Plugin, like its Cousins CodeGen_PECL and CodeGen_MySQL_UDF, aims at creating skeleton code for plugin implementors so that focus can put on the actual plugin functionality without having to deal with plugin implementation details too much.

The code generator tool mysql-plugin-codegen will create all needed source and build files, even with a minimal specification file it will already create a ready-to-compile-and-load plugin project for unixoid systems.

The minimal.xml specification file available from CVS provides an example of what already works by creating a plugin that introduces some new status variables.

Do not expect too much else from it for now, but more usefull functionality should show up in the future.

Gehts noch?

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:56:05 +0100

This article is only available in German.

Bielepedia - ein weiterer Bielefeldversuch

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 11:56:35 +0100

...

Continue reading "Bielepedia - ein weiterer Bielefeldversuch"

Regular Expression Functions for MySQL

nospam@example.com (Hartmut Holzgraefe) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 05:37:51 +0200

My Regular Exrepssion UDFs for MySQL have been available on MySQL Forge for a while already, now i've taken the time to create a Trac project page for them.

I've implemented the following four functions

* REGEXP_LIKE(text, pattern [, mode])
* REGEXP_SUBSTR(text, pattern)
* REGEXP_INSTR(text, pattern [,position [,occurence [,return_end [,mode]]]])
* REGEXP_REPLACE(text, pattern, replace)

that behave very similar to their Oracle counterparts, using the same regular expression syntax as the MySQL REGEXP operator.