Piers Warmers

PHP Date Rules Utility

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just threw up a small toolkit (ManDate) for working with date rules.

It even lets you write rules which take into account sunrise and sunset.

For example:

Enjoy!

PHP7 and Symfony Performance

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I missed the talk but these slides – PHP by Rasmus Lerdorf – inspired me to take a look for myself.

So I thought I’d run a very quick test to see how a fresh Symfony Framework 2.6.4 install performed on in comparison testing against PHP 5.6.6-dev vs PHP 7.0.0-dev.

I’m using a Rasmus’ Vagrant configuration and Apache Benchmark to target the demonstration “Hello World” script shipped with Symfony – and enabled on production.

The Results

I ran 600 hits with a concurrency of 100 and found that the mean for each was:

PHP 5.6.6-dev = 220.55 req/sec
PHP 7.0.0-dev = 341.77 req/sec

That’s a pretty impressive performance boost.

I’d love to see a Blackfire probe compatible with PHP7 to see where the performance gains are.

PHP / Symfony Checker

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Before I commit changes to my PHP / Symfony projects, I like to pre-check it against a few utilities to ensure quality and consistency. This little script to automates the steps:

A PHP compilation check.
A syntax cleanup - PHP Coding Standards Fixer
Run my unit tests - PHPUnit - with code coverage as an option.
Then optionally commit and push changes - only if the above steps passed.

It’s simple and I can modify it easily from one project to another. I thought I’d both share it and ask for any tips on improvements.

Here it is: check.sh

You can run it via something like:

./check.sh
or
./check.sh -g -b -p -m "Fixed the stuff and things."

Blackfire, PHP Profiling by SensioLabs

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Blackfire is a new service by SensioLabs. It’s a web based utility to help benchmark your PHP applications. I’ve just sat down to give it a try. I’m blown away!

Installation was very simple via a Brew Keg (blackfireio/homebrew-blackfire) and I tested it with a Symfony Framework application using one of my custom commands.

The standard interface tracks a single test batch:

You have 10 slots to store test batches. This allows you to compare your benchmarks from one iteration to another, as shown below:

Hat’s off to the interface people - that’s some sweet work.

A incredible addition to the toolkit.

Also, take a look at this simple toggle for XDebug.

Understanding awesome passwords

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows that long random passwords are best, but how random, how long and what about practicality?

A bad password

Let’s start with an example of a bad password: “G3org3.1984”.

There are many methods hackers use to exploit systems. One of which is the “brute-force attack”, a technique which attempts to discover a users password by trying one variation after another. Each failure triggering another attempt with a new password. You might be thinking, “my password is awesome, that would take forever”. Is it, is it really that awesome?

A closer look at “brute-force”

Brute force attacks are not actually carried out by a person. Instead a computer is given the task — even if it takes days, months or longer. The time it takes is linked to the strength of your password.

Lets look at a password example: “J@ck.1984”. A mathematical perspective uses a term “key space” to determine it’s strength. The “key space” for that password would be 85⁹ (depending on the characters used ¹). That is to say that it would take 85⁹ or less² attempts to crack it.

85⁹ = 231,616,950,000,000,000… is a huge number!

“J@ck.1984” is a BAD password

Here’s why. 85⁹ is a big number, but we’re being naive to assume a hacker is going to simply try random character combinations. We’re dealing with people. Creatures of habit that love to give things meaning and have limited memory. A dangerous combination which hackers use to optimise their efforts.

Think of the complexity reduction if you focus on passwords built on simple proposition:

password = "<word or name>.<year between 1940 and 2014>”

Complexity reduction may be further reduced if the persons email address “jack.beanstalk@example.com” was known.

An Acronym Solves All

A good password is built on four simple steps:

C	Character Rich	Use uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters
U	Unique	A fresh password for each credential
R	Random	Avoids words, names and dates
L	Long	15 characters or more

“C.U.R.L”, a recipe for awesome passwords.

Great, but we live in the real world?

No one is expecting you to memorise dozens of long, complicated codes. If you haven’t already – now might be time to move to a dedicated password management program like RoboForm, or 1Password.

At the very least, keep the “C.U.R.L” principles in mind when creating your next password. Your credentials are yours and yours alone.

Stalking Steve Jobs

Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An audiophile writeup on Wired caught my attention: We Pieced Together Steve Jobs’ Long-Lost Stereo System.

It gives a run down of the music related pieces shown a portrait taken in for TIME in 1982 by photographer Diana Walker (a good article here on the shoot)

Here’s the soundtrack for your convenience.

Bach Brandenberg Concertos (Jean-Pierre Rampal, Maurice André; RCA)
Ella Fitzgerald: The Cole Porter Songbook (Vol. 1, Verve)
Steely Dan’s Aja (ABC)

Find it on Spotify: Steve Jobs - Diana Walker Shoot

PHP, Symfony, OSX – Oh my!

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sitting down this morning to update my Brew managed PHP install on OSX – I’d planned to document the process. Justin Hileman had already put together this awesome walk through:

(Re)installing PHP on Mac OS X

Note to self: when the PHP module location changes, Apache fails very silently. Took me a while to figure out what was going on. So don’t ignore the “Caveats” notice in the Brew installation output.

Getting Cozy With Dependency Injection

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just posted a brief introduction to Dependency Injection over on the Cross Media blog.

See article here: Getting Cozy With Dependency Injection.

You can also catch myself, Ryan Cross and Geoffrey Roberts in DrupalCon Portland this May, where we’ll be giving a training session on Drupal 8 and Symfony. Registration is now open.

Symfony Live

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Very keen to make it to Symfony Live Portland this year. This time it will be running next to DrupalCon Portland and WebVisions. It’s sure to be a busy couple of days.

Symfony Components for Drupal

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give a talk at DrupalCon Sydney about Symfony Components. So here are the slides and some extended examples for those interested.

The following is an example which demonstrates how the Symfony HTTP Kernel, HTTP Foundation, Routing and Twig Components can be used to build a very simple application.

The commands noted in the discussion download, unpack and then run the example application.

Please note: these commands may need to be adjusted depending on your setup. Also PHP testing server is only available for PHP 5.4.

$ curl https://gist.github.com/pierswarmers/4712678/download > app.tar.gz | tar -zx
$ cd gist4712678-*
$ curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ php ./composer.phar install
$ php -S localhost:8000

Check it out: http://localhost:8000/app.php/say/hello/DrupalCon

And the code for browsing pleasure…

PHPStorm Data Sources and JDBC

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Setting up PHPStorms database integration for MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, I ran into a couple of small gotcha’s which might be worth noting for anyone else struggling through some of the vague error messages.

To keep things brief I’ll note the the server locations and JDBC libraries I used.

MySQL On Localhost

I run a local MySQL server on my OS X machine (mysql-5.5.25a-osx10.6-x86_64). The JDBC driver I used was downloaded from the source and unpacked into a safe location.

I used the package:

mysql-connector-java-5.1.22-bin.jar

…and the class:

com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

My server location looked something like:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDataBaseName

Done and done!

Microsoft SQL Server on Remote Server

It’s pretty rare I get to play with SQL Server, but at least a couple of my ongoing projects use remote SQL Server access. This example is from a Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 connection. The drivers can be downloaded from Microsoft. Like above, I unpack them into a shared location and…