Recently I had opportunity to obtain a Gmail account (thanks James). For those you living under a rock it's the latest fad as far as free e-mail is concerned from the same people who brought us Google. The biggest attraction of Gmail is the 1,000 megabyte storage box and saner(?) monetization model that will rely upon the same text ads you may have seen near Google's search results, rather then big bulky banners and/or popup variations. At this time the system is in beta stage, so to get an account you first must be invited by an existing member, but only some members can invite (I am not one of them, so don't bother asking). While my initial plan for this account was to use it as the handler for mail comming to my @php.net account, which now a days comprises mostly of spam and windows viruses. Rather then have my server perform slow analysis on some 2-3 thousand messages, I'd let Google's Gmail do it for me. Since most of the e-mail going to that account ended up being removed by spam filters, which seem t...

A friend of mine gave me a good idea of making a wrapper around the sendfile() syscall that can be used for very quick data transfers between socket and file descriptors. This syscall in some instances can replace 3 other syscalls (seek, read, write) when you need to write a portion of 1 file into another file. Another words a very neat functionality that I could see myself using in my own applications, such as the message file compactor for FUDforum who's entire job is to seek and write data from one file to another. Further tests have shown that this syscall can also be used to create a much faster copy() that compared to PHP's current copy mechanism is about 2x faster, not a bad improvement if I do say so myself. However, when it came to testing the code in my primary development box it just would not work, neither would any sendfile example I could find on the net that dealt with transferring data across two files. After much searching on Google, IRC and reviewing the relevant kernel sources I've discover...

Sitting at the airport enjoying the "cheap" Dutchie wifi at a mere $10 per day waiting for my flight that is about 3 hours off. The conference was quite a bit of fun. I got to meet a number of PHP guys who I have not seen before as well as meet old friends and acquaintances. The city itself is quite interesting ;-) and nearly everyone speaks English so communication with the locals is quite simple. One surprise was the fact that Dutchies don't seem to wear the traditional wooden shoes (perhaps it makes riding bicycles too hard?), the only time I've seen them was in the various tourist shops. The other was the fact that I have only seen about a dozen tulips in the country, which supposedly world renowned for this particular flower, oh well. P.S. The two talks I gave will be put online as soon as I return to Toronto.

I am an avid user of Joe, a console text based editor whose roots can be traced to WordStar. It was the editor I've started my *NIX experience with and it never gave me a reason to consider more popular alternatives such as VI or Emacs. One of the things Joe lacked was syntax highlighting that the developer had been promising to add for what seems like years. Well, the wait is over! This morning while doing a the morning news crawl I've discovered that Joe 3.0 has been released with UTF8 support and the long awaited syntax highlighting support. While the syntax highlight support is at very early stages and is nowhere near the capabilities offered by VI, it's is certainly a move in the right direction and it does not look like it would be terribly difficult to make it do a better job at highlighting C and PHP. One nice thing about it, is that the colors are much less 'bright' then the ones used in VI that does confuse you with the rainbow of colors.

I always thought of Canada being an progressive country with ties to various economic markets that make it easier for it's citizens to engage in cross-border commerce. Alas this seems to be only true when dealing with our neighbor to the south, the US. In preparation to my upcoming trip to Netherlands I went to my bank to get some (small amount) of Euros. However, after speaking to the teller and the bank manager I quickly found out that my home branch does not carry any foreign currency other then US dollars. Calls from the branch to other nearby branches of my own bank as well as other banks have yielded the same response, "no Euros". So, how can I get some Euros? Well, I have to order them and wait no less then 5 business days, before getting my hands on this rather unusual currency. The explanation for the delay that Canadian banks often do not have any currency on hand and need to go to currency exchange house to buy the currency themselves, unless someone miraculously decides to trade in their Euros for...