I’ve recently switched from Xubuntu to Gentoo, and I couldn’t be happier. I’d recommend it for anyone sufficiently technical with strong knowledge of Linux. I’ve found it to be fast, efficient and bloat-free. There are a few glitches to overcome, but they can almost always be handled with a few config file changes that are well documented across the internet.

As a PHP developer, tools such as xdebug are important to me and I really want to make the most of vld – thanks Derick, you’ve written some great tools. I had issues installing xdebug and vld in Gentoo and the solution wasn’t as clear-cut as usual. To help others in the same situation, I’ll document the solution.

If you’re getting:


libtool: Version mismatch error. This is libtool 2.4, but the
libtool: definition of this LT_INIT comes from an older release.
libtool: You should recreate aclocal.m4 with macros from libtool 2.4
libtool: and run autoconf again.


Try running:


phpize
aclocal
libtoolize --force
autoheader
autoconf


You should now be fine to run configure and make.

I hear Geocities has gone forever. Well, it’s hardly surprising, but it is a little sad. I remember signing up for one of their quaintly named sites all those years ago. Still, I went investigating and found Yahoo Web Hosting! (I feel everything with Yahoo! needs exclaiming, it is like some kind of marketing ploy of theirs, right!?)

I was curious to see what kind of features such a major player like Yahoo! would offer in their web hosting, and after a few clicks I found Perl and PHP support. Now before you pull out the party hats and invite your friends over, I mean it has “PHP” support. 4.3.11 to be precise.

This leads me onto a pet hate of mine. The PHP community have been moving ever forward and have hit a great milestone with version 5.3. It’s a great, rapidly maturing language – I use it daily. Hourly, even. Version 5 of PHP has been around for an eternity (in IT years, they’re like dog years you know…) and yet a large subset of the internet web hosting companies STILL INSIST ON USING PHP 4!!! WHY!?

I suggest next time you find a company “offering” you PHP 4, you send them a polite email reminding them version 5 was released in July 2004, and while you appreciate 5 years clearly isn’t long enough for them to evaluate and upgrade, perhaps now is the time to “take the plunge”.

For the record, my Lamped hosting offer 5.3.1.

I wasn’t feeling very well today, so I thought I’d do something more light-hearted and fun.

Yes, that’s right! I wrote a website compression utility!

Basically, you do “php sitecompress.php mywebsitefolder” and it goes through all the .php, .html, .htm, .js and .css files. Javascript and CSS (inline and external – yes I said inline. It pulls out the scripts and styles embedded in your HTML and compresses those too) go through YUICompressor (courtesy of Yahoo UI library), PHP and HTML go through an internal algorithm to kill the whitespace. No, I didn’t use “php -w filename”, that would (a) be cheating, and (b) not be very good. Seems PHP’s own whitespace removal is a bit lackluster and keeps a lot of unnecessary whitespace.

I’ve run it on a download of microsoft.com and it displays identically. I’ve run it on the source code of PHPBB3 (after realising I have to add a “keep html comments” option, due to their templating system) and that seems fine (strips 4mb off the 37mb install).

I’ll do a bit more testing in the next couple of days and GPL it on Lamped.co.uk.

p.s. Apologies for the poor readability, It’s 00:45 and I’m very tired…