I’m starting on a new project that I hope to see off the ground in a few days. the big sqaure will be a webcomic of sorts. If a webcomic could be crossed with a Digg or Reddit that is.

The gist of it is: I can’t draw, but I’ve got tons of ideas. Serial and otherwise. So, each week I’ll post an idea and an empty square. Anyone can draw what I’ve asked and submit it. Upon acceptance, the image will join any others gathered. Every visitor can then vote on which is the best depiction of my description. When I post the next square’s description, the winner of the previous week is set as the comic and will appear in the archive appropriately. All others will still be stored and available for perusal. Every piece of art remains owner by the artist, yadda yadda yadda.

I hope it will cause many different interpretations of what I describe. If not, it’ll divert my attention for awhile.

Expect an announcement and promotion once I finish creating the back-end to run it. Should be an easy dev project for an old horse like me.

What was the single most important thing I learned today? Always bring your condom! Er, I mean, your keyboard condom¹.

First official day of the conference and my new MacBook survived three spills, two coffee and one water and lived to tell the tale.

Man these php devs just don’t like Macs!

(See what I did there? When this tweets, the hashtag will be picked up!)

So in less than a month I’ll be attending php|tek¹ adn its high time I decided what talks I want to be seen at. Erm, I mean, which I want to attend…

Tutorial Day:

I’m torn bewteen MVC Development in PHP and Web Application Security Boot Camp but in the end I think MVC will win out…

PHP Code Review wins in the afternoon. And that evening I’ll be busy attending the ChiSox/Twins game.

Day 1:

Highly Scalable Web Applications

Streaming XML

MySQL Server Performance Tuning

SPL to the Rescue

Getting it Done

Security Centered Design

Day 2:

Exceptional PHP

Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML and JS in AIR

Seven Steps to Better OOP Code

PHP Database Application Architecture for Scalability and Availability

Bend SQL to Your Will With EXPLAIN

Taking it All Offline with SQL Anywhere

Day 3:

Out with Regex, In with Tokens

Working with Microformats

It looks like I’m going to have a lot of fun and will learn a lot. I’m hoping some of my methods get justified as well by my peers.

Kudos again to my work for sending me on this trip, and to my wife for allowing it!

Once again, my job has me writing mutli-threaded PHP¹ scripts that use PHP’s CURL² library to connect to remote servers. (I’m calling an API here!)  Without going into too much detail, the networking specifics changed between me and the api server, adding a new, or newly reconfigured, invisible proxy to the data path.

This proxy is running Lighttpd, while light in name, is starting to throw around it’s weight and get in my way.

Warning! We are going to get technical!

Here is the output of curl when trying to access the api. (All ip addresses have been obfuscated to protect the innocent!)

[cc]

* About to connect() to theapi.com port 80 (#0)

* Trying 42.42.42.42… * connected

* Connected to theapi.com (42.42.42.42) port 80 (#0)

> POST /ApiCommand HTTP/1.1

Host: theapi.com

Accept: */*

Content-Length: 1760

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Expect: 100-continue

< HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed

< Connection: close

< Content-Length: 0

< Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:16:26 GMT

< Server: lighttpd/1.4.1

<

* Closing connection #0

[/cc]

Wow, that was short lived. The culprit here is that lighttpd doesn't handle the Expect: 100-continue properly. In fact it cacks on it entirely. What you get (if you aren’t looking at headers) is an empty response from curl. Not very fun to debug if you were expecting some kind of response from the api.

It has been suggested ³⁴ that this bug will be fixed in version 1.5.x but that doesn’t help us right here, right now⁵. So what to do. Who will save me? The internet of course!

gnegg, amongst others, has run into this problem before me and has a fix⁶ that solves the problem easily. Just add a blank Expect: header to your curl call. That fixes the problem nice and quick:

[cc lang='php']curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(‘Expect:’));[/cc]

And that’s it, by implicitly setting the Expect: directive we bypass the default condition that CURL injects on every request.

Now I can’t say exactly what Expect: does, but I think it helps by chopping up data into smaller chunks, but that is a guess and I don’t feel like looking it up.

Update: I’m so very wrong!

Philip Hofstetter, who wrote the article on gnegg.ch sent me an email today clearing up my assumption about the Expect: 100-continue HTTP directive:

I’m the author of the blog post on gnegg.ch you referred to and I

wanted to take the oportunity to explain what the idea behind Expect:

100-continue is:

The idea behind Expect: 100-continue is to give the server a chance to

make checks for the requests validity without the client actually

having to send all the data first.

So the clients sends the POST request just as if it would just post

the data, but it leaves the request body completely empty, but adds

the Expect: 100-continue.

The server can now check

- if maybe authentication is needed but not provided

- if the URL in question is even capable of accepting a POST request

- if the remote host is permitted to send the data

or what ever else that can be checked independently of the post body.

Now the server either sends back a fitting error code or it sends the

doe 100 telling the client that it’s ok to go ahead and resend the

request, but this time WITH the request body and WITHOUT the expect

header.

So the idea isn’t chopping up the data, it’s making it as sure as

possible to detect early failures without the client having to

transmit all the data first.

I hope that helps to explain what’s going on.

I knew I should have just gone and looked it up! Thanks Philip!

I’ll be attending php|tek 2009¹ in Chicago this May. If anyone is attending who knows me, we should make plans to meet up.

I’m excited for this conference. I can’t remember the last time I attended a programming conference, let alone one being paid for by my employer!

Okay, maybe some of these are more annoyances than quirks:

• Springboard Application Placement Upon Update

• Developer Hardware

I’m going to attempt to not spam this site with a bunch of non-development work stuff. I’ve other blogs for that… But in keeping with the vein of this website¹, I’ve recently been pointed to a very cool website who’s basic premise is too simple to have not been thought of before now…

We’ve all seen web clipboards and code repositories before², and even I am guilty³ of wanting to get in on the action. But all of these sites are simple repositories.

Marc-André Cournoyer⁴ has a fresh take on the idea. His refactormycode.com⁵ site isn’t just a web clipboard, but rather it is a place to put your code up for community scrutiny.

The idea is that you can post a code snippet and ask for help to see if anyone can help you sort out a problem. This isn’t a wholesale help board for new programmers, but for people who are having problems envisioning code design changes, code cleanup problems, and even those who want the tightest code possible and are seeking improvement.

The website even has an API⁶ for those who want to dig into the site that much more… (Maybe I’ll add a widget here for my refactorings…)

Good job Marc. Nicely executed.

A lot has happened since I put this blog on hiatus a couple of years ago. I’ve changed positions at my place of work, I’ve completed a bunch of interesting projects, my wife and I have welcomed our first child into our lives and I’ve been given my freedom!

That’s right, I’m a free agent at the moment and am in the process of scouting out my next opportunity. Until that time comes, I’ll keep everyone updated as to my status here.

In addition, now that I’ve got a little free time on my hands, it’s back to the developmental grindstone. I’ve not had opportunity in the last few years to get anything out of me that wasn’t tied to my employer of record and I’m near to burst with ideas. This website will become home to all of them.

Most notably I’ve become a WordPress fiend and have a bunch of plug-ins I’m writing as we speak. I’ve joined Facebook and have more than a few ideas for applications for their platform. I’ve made a few improvements to my template class now known as tmpl and will be bringing those online shortly. And lastly, but not least(ly), I’ve an iPhone and am geared up to write a few apps for it as well.