HTTP Signed Requests with PHP

I thought I'd write a quick primer on a basic implementation of HTTP request signing with PHP. I see a lot of posts dealing with the topic, especially by people writing homebrew REST services. What are signed HTTP requests? Signed HTTP requests are simply a normal HTTP request, such as a GET or a POST, that happens to include a signature as part of the request.  A signature is just a string of characters generated in a...

Installing Gearman and gearmand on Windows with Cy...

Recently I've come face-to-face with a significant processing task for a web application written in PHP.  I haven't worked with process control very much, so I started researching ways of distributing the calculations to multiple processes.  PHP offers several libraries for doing this (pcntl, POSIX), but it quickly became clear that if you're running Windows these libraries are not an option, and unfortunately at work I...

MSB1025 – Adventures in Visual Studio Projec...

So we had a Sql Server Integration Services project that wasn't really being used currently, so one of our guys removed the project from our VS2008 solution file and checked it in. Worked fine on his machine - heck, it worked on all our machines. The build server? Not so much. Immediate barfing with the cryptic message of "MSBUILD : error MSB1025: An internal failure occurred while running MSBuild". CruiseControl looked at...

An Exercise in WordPress Integration, or Why WordP...

I'd like to prefix my upcoming rant with the fact that WordPress is good at what it does: making basic blogs and publishing content. I use it, many other people use it, it works. Heck, I'm using it right now. But from a technical standpoint, WordPress sucks. I'm going to relate my experience here trying write a quick function to store post output to a file, to be used by a separate application on the same server. I...

Facebook Notifications – "An unknown er...

Over the last few months, I've worked with the Facebook Notification system many times, and there has always been a moderate-to-high level of frustration with it. It is difficult to test on a development application, because you simply don't have the same number of users as a live application, and the application settings on a dev app are different, which affects your allocation of allowed notifications. One of the prevalent...

Defend PHP

I ran across a great discussion at StackOverflow today that started with this question: I made a tongue-in-cheek comment in another question thread calling PHP a terrible language and it got down-voted like crazy. Apparently there are lots of people here who love PHP. So I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing? Why makes PHP a good language? The article lists a dozen or so "flaws" with the language, and then continues: Worst...