November – 2009 – techPortal

Analysing PHP web applications with dtrace November 24, 2009

Speaker: David Soria Parra

DTrace is the Swiss army knife to analyze the behavior of applications and enabling you to gather detailed information from the bottom of your application stack up to the top. DTrace is used by system administrators and developers, on Solaris, Mac OSX and FreeBSD, to do in-depth analysis of an application, to find and reduce performance bottlenecks and problems in productive system.

The talk will give an introduction how to use DTrace's capabilities in web development, reflect the current state of DTrace support in PHP and show examples how to trace PHP script in production.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (68.5MB)
PHP on Windows: The WinCache 1.0 Benchmark November 19, 2009

Today Microsoft released the stable 1.0 version of their WinCache accelerator. Although Linux is still the most frequently used platform at Ibuildings, we have a significant and growing number of PHP on Windows deployments, and since WinCache is designed to speed up PHP applications it is an interesting product to us. The best way to put an accelerator product to the test is to benchmark it. While it's important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article.

The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists.
I'm going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I'd like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

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PHP on the D-BUS November 10, 2009

Speaker: Derick Rethans

The D-BUS Inter Process Communication mechanism is the basis for many system-related functionality on Linux-based systems. Both GNOME, KDE, as well as the Open Moko Linux computing platform use it extensively for everything related to talking to services and hardware. Skype, as well as other applications, provide D-BUS APIs as well.

In this presentation I will be presenting a PHP/D-BUS integration to allow PHP to talk to D-BUS aware applications. I will demonstrate controlling Skype from PHP, as well as the implementation of PHP-GTK based applications on the OpenMoko to talk to, and use the different hardware services it offers, such as GSM and GPS.

This talk should show a few things that people don't really associate PHP with, and thus provide some insight that PHP's strength is not only on the Web.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (88.0MB)
New Editor-in-Chief at techPortal November 4, 2009

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I'm your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

This portal was created and managed by Cal Evans and at Ibuildings we will always thank him for doing such a wonderful job in getting this venture set up and pointed in the right direction. As he moves on to new challenges, I will be stepping up to continue this initiative and see it grow further. Cal is a tough act to follow but I am delighted to have the opportunity to try.

If you have any comments about the site or would like to contact me, I can be reached at techportal@ibuildings.com and I'm always pleased to received feedback. Before I sign off, I'd like to say a big thanks to all our readers - I hope you continue to enjoy techPortal!
Precision color searching with Gmagick and Amazon Elastic MapReduce November 2, 2009

There are many insights that we can gain by considering colors. For example, a search for Manchester football teams will yield more meaningful results if colors close to either primary red or blue is specified, and that certainly makes all the difference.

Searching for colors

We can also use information implicit in colors to fulfill our search requirements without additional search support structure. If we want to search for the Victoria line on London's useful tube map for example, we could search for the light blue color RGB(24, 132, 188) instead of having to set up the vector structures or other means to enable highlighting of the line. With Gmagick, we can highlight search results as we shall see further on in this section.

More specificity in terms of colors and positions certainly helps too. Consider a situation where we are looking for a red roof in a collection of paintings. Knowing the opacity and location of red occurrences helps in narrowing down the scope of search.

The necessary challenge with enhancing specificity is that ultimately latent in all human endeavors, that of resource constrain. A typical image usually contains millions of pixels. Storing and indexing a large amount of images is resource intensive depending on the quantization level. While computing resources in the domain of individual servers had and will continue to increase dramatically, the cloud has presented itself as a practical and available solution for us to do such resource intensive tasks.
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Searching for colors

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