As I mentioned previously, I'll be at MIX this year on a panel discussing ASP and PHP interoperability, along with Jesse Liberty, Bill Staples, Joe Stagner and Brian Goldfarb.
I've been told that MIX has sold out and that there is a lot of interest in our slot, so I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about, but I'm looking for questions to break the ice and get things rolling.
Wez Furlong in
Conferences PHP Windows.
I've been invited to participate in a panel at Microsoft's MIX conference this year. The panel is entitled "Can't ASP.NET and PHP just get along?" and is to be a "spirited but friendly" discussion on PHP and ASP.net interop.
For those folks clicking through from the MIX site, you might be wondering who I am and why I'm on the panel... I've been partly responsible for development of the PHP core and primarily responsible for a lot of the Windows specific portions of PHP. I work for OmniTI, a world respected internet technologies consultancy.
Wez Furlong in
Conferences PHP Windows.
I uploaded release 0.9.0 of EvilDesk tonight. I realized that I hadn't made a release in over a year, so I tidied up a few bits and pieces and uploaded it. Feel free to review the changelog if you're curious.
Highlights include an improved dock style toolbar, a launcher plugin (type the name of a program or document to find it and run it, instead of poking around the start menu), simpler configuration of the toolbar positioning, translations for German and French, less bugs and support for 64-bit Windows.
Wez Furlong in
Evil Blog Windows.
The folks over at OSR Online have a handy, no-nonsense and free (as in beer) driver and configuration utility that allows you to mount disk, floppy and ISO images under Windows.
You have to register to get at their downloads, and in return you get a very occasional email as well as a periodic printed "magazine" containing low level windows kernel coding information.
Wez Furlong in
Windows.
Wez Furlong in
Windows.
I'm getting more and more irritated with windows apps that assume that they can do stuff that requires administrative privileges, like automatically install updates.
I don't run as an administrator because I don't want internet facing apps to mangle my system if/when they get hacked. For the past week I've been telling yahoo music engine that I don't want to upgrade now. It should be smart enough to realize that I don't have administrative rights and not prompt me.
Wez Furlong in
Windows.
It looks like this PHP vs ASP.NET article really struck a nerve with Joe Stagner.
Joe's response is perhaps a little pro-Microsoft (you can't really blame him for that--he does work there :-) but the essence of his response rings true; there's nowhere near enough factual data in the OTN article to make a balanced decision one way or the other.
Wez Furlong in
PHP Windows.
I've had an incredibly busy year so far, having spent the better part of half of it on-site with a customer/partner across the atlantic, and it's only March. In addition to working with them on a large scale deployment proof-of-concept project (I'll blog more about that when I'm sure it's ok to blog about it), we've been hard at work on our Ecelerity 2.1 release, which is just about out-the-door (just some final QA to go).
One of the internals features in our new release is the adoption of the Solaris slab memory allocator, libumem. We already had our own slab allocator, but there are some interesting innovations in libumem that reduce lock contention and cache invalidations that make it attractive for a very high performance multi-threaded application like Ecelerity.
Wez Furlong in
Solaris Windows.
I've been enjoying my vacation time, spending a good bit of it hacking on EvilDesk. This is something of an eyecandy release, with some visually appealing refinements. I'm always wary of eyecandy for eyecandy's sake, so I've tried really hard to balance resource consumption with visual goodness. To that end, the eyecandy features can all be turned off, and can also be tuned to reduce (or increase, if you like) their memory consumption. So, what features are new?
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
[Update: Newer releases are available]
As a follow-on from the last release, I've uploaded the latest iteration of my EvilDesk shell replacement for Windows XP.
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
Well, the bug fixes I made in the last release left me feeling empowered again, so I've followed up with a couple more features and some more bug fixes:
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
Having finally found some time to myself, I thought it was about time that I push out a release with the changes that I've been using for the last few months. Some of these changes are based on feedback from users; keep it coming folks! :)
Feature changes in the new release include:
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
Having just set up the mozilla calendar plugin to launch when I open thunderbird, I was wondering how much memory I was going to be sacrificing to the GUI god. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that thunderbird.exe was consuming less than 2MB when minimized.
I put this down to MinimizeToTray. My guess is that it's calling SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff) to swap the process out of memory when minimized.
Wez Furlong in
Windows.
I don't know if you're all aware of pecl4win.php.net. This new service, graciously provided by Emini A/S, continually builds PECL extensions against the various different branches of PHP so that you can very easily find the latest version of a given PECL extension to match the version of PHP that you're running.
Edin Kadribasic from Emini has been looking after the official Windows build of PHP (he builds our Windows distribution) for some time, and this service is his latest innovation; thanks Edin!
Wez Furlong in
PHP Windows.
One of the people that I met at ZendCon was Joe Stagner, who's been using PHP since before he started work at Microsoft. Joe gave a talk entitled "PHP Rocking in the Windows World" which went down quite well. I'm sad to say that I missed it--I got caught up talking to a bunch of people and lost track of time.
Joe is running a series of PHP-on-Windows webcasts next week on MSDN:
Wez Furlong in
PHP Windows.
[Update: I wrote some docs for the php manual]
So, you've written some kind of super-duper daemon process in PHP, perhaps using the event extension and stream_socket_server(). On Unix, it's quite a simple matter to have it run from init (or maybe inetd) when your machine starts... but doing the same on windows isn't possible without some hacks. Until now.
Wez Furlong in
PHP Windows.
I've pushed 0.5.1 tonight; if fixes an uninstallation buglet that could leave you without a taskbar after uninstalling EvilDesk.
The only new feature is being able to select how many workspaces the alt-tab task switcher will cycle through; you can use up to 32, with the default being 4.
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
I've updated EvilDesk yet again this weekend. The biggest new thing is making all the hotkeys (aside from alt-tab) user configurable.
Find out more on the EvilDesk Home Page (I've added a ChangeLog section for your tracking pleasure).
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
[Update: Release 4 is out]
I've updated my EvilDesk and included the user-definable context menu code I mentioned in the comments of my last post.
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
I've updated EvilDesk again. Aside from fixing a couple of bugs here and there, it now features built-in support for "Safer" execution of internet facing applications.
Find out more on the EvilDesk Home Page (I've added a ChangeLog section for your tracking pleasure).
Wez Furlong in
EvilDesk Windows.
Wez Furlong is Director of Engineering at Message Systems where he works on the fastest MTA on Earth.
Wez is a PHP Core developer and active OpenSource contributor. He currently resides in Sykesville, Maryland with his wife, son, and dog. (read more)
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