PHP 5.3 has closures in it! Finally we get some good stuff to play with: PHP 5.3 and Closures. This is excellent news, even if the closures look weird -- look at the strange use keyword.

Some keywords: SQL Insert Update Zend_Db_Table_Row NOW() now function Zend_Db_Table Zend_Db_Expr

Use the SQL function NOW() in ZF:

$k = new My_Table();
$row = $k->createRow();
$row->datetime        = new Zend_Db_Expr('NOW()');
$row->save();

This works because DB Expr doesn't escape the string 'NOW()'. Yay.

I wish I could do this in any of the languages I use: porting-perls-qq-to-common-lisp. A few simple lines of code and you have a new language operator qq. Ugh. This would be soooo cool.

I had a problem the other day where I had an object with various members, some of which I wanted to have the extra attribute 'merge-able' some how. This is how it looked:

class moo{
  private var colour:String;
  protected var depth:Number;
  public var height:Number;
  .....

Then in a method inside moo:

foreach( prop in this )
{
  // this iterates over 'colour','depth','height'

and what I wanted was to somehow 'hide' height from the iterator...

I guess there are two ways of doing this, first override the 'iterator' or 'foreach' operator. This is impossible in ActionScript. Or second add an attribute to each property, kinda like:

class moo{
  private var colour:String;
  protected var depth:Number;
  public non-iterable var height:Number;
  .....

But there's no way to do this and no way to extend the language to make it work. It is most irritating.

I have 40 or 50 objects and I iterate over all of them. And I have this problem in one or two of them.... argh! How annoying.

The only thing I can think of is to have an iterable properties list, then:

foreach( prop in this.iterable_properties_list() )
{
  // only returns 'colour' and 'depth'
  this[prop] = ....

But this means keeping my object definition and iterable_properties_list method in sync (for over 40 different objects.) Filth.

I guess I could hack it using PHPs naming scheme, anything that starts with an underscore is 'special'. Then I could do:

foreach( prop in this )
{
  // this iterates over 'colour','depth','_height'
  if( !prop.starts_with('_') )
    // _height is magically hidden...
    ....

But then I need to rename all my properties in all my objects. Bah. I want language macros! And I want them now!! :-)

Shit! The new intel chip, Larrabee has 32 cores! Core me up y'all.

Some interesting links about PHP. PHP 6 may use the Parrot virtual machine to run. That would be very interesting, for example when the Perl guys port CPAN to Parrot, PHP would have access to that vast, vast library of code.

Compiling PHP to Parrot (or .NET or Java) would speed up the code, reduce the memory consumption and just make everything much more nicer. But until we get that, there are a few PHP op-code cachers and PHC a PHP compiler. Sweet.

My problem is that I have a csv file that Python can't read because it has NULL bytes in it. Python has a built in csv reader, but this chokes and dies :-(  (booo)

Problem 2: line.split(',') also chokes because some lines look like this:

1,2,"3,4,5",6

which have to split into 4 items. Ack. I thought I was going to have to write a little finite state machine (which I like doing) but my csv file is 18meg. So fsm may = slowness.

After some searches I came across this funky bit of regex that I made into even funkier Python:

>>> subject = """1,2,3,"4444","55,55,,,,55",99"""
>>> splitter = re.compile(r',(?=(?:[^"]*"[^"]*")*(?![^"]*"))')
>>> splitter.split(subject)
['1', '2', '3', '"4444"', '"55,55,,,,55"', '99']

:-)

wtf? I'm not sure what is going on, I got lost at "Assert that it is impossible to match the regex below starting at this point (negative lookahead)" hmmm. Yes. Magic.

You need to turn off the layout renderer and the view renderer:

public function busyAction()
{
    //
    // turn off the view helpers
    //
    $this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();
    $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
    //
    //
    //
    $tmp = array( 'test'=>'value' );
    echo Zend_Json::encode($tmp);
}

Then use Zend_Json to encode your values and output them.

For the client side I suggest you grab jQuery or prototype to make things easier.