After my last post I thought it might be also helpful to publish how many open jira tickets I have to my skype status.

You can get each jira search result also as a rss feed. Your browser does indicate the link to the result as rss. This url might look something like:

http://jira.example.com/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-xml/temp/SearchRequest.xml?&&resolution=-1&assigneeSelect=specificuser&assignee=leo.buettiker&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&tempMax=100&reset=true&decorator=none

To call this url, even if you have no valid session, you might add your user credentials at the end. This looks like:

&os_username=$username&os_password=$password

You could now use a xml or rss parser to interprete the returned feed. But for my result even that is too much, I only will count how many items in the feed are. The php snippet to do this will look like:

$jiraRss = file_get_contents($url);
$jiraCount = substr_count($jiraRss,'<item>');	
$jiraMessage = $jiraCount?" and $jiraCount open Jira Issues":"";

There might be a lot of other cool usecases you can simply implement (ticket you currently work on, Tickets closed int the last week, etc.). It's just a little bit sad that there is no REST API for Skype which would be make it easier to change the status between platforms.

You all know the troubles with overflowing inboxes. I'm a bit fan of Inbox Zero and I found a lot of ways to work fast with my mails. I did switch off signaling ingoing mails, I use a lot of filtering and a good folder structure.

But sometimes my own lazyiness get into my way. So I started to put "Inbox Zero" into my skype status if I get my box empty. But after some times I decided to automatised this message.

I do know that Patrice does automated Skype updates with his Mac. After a quick search I found out that on Windows Skype has a COM-Api and they even provide a little PHP Example. With PHP it is also pretty easy so to acess an IMAP inbox (MS Exchange also provide a IMAP access). So I wrote a quick script that updates my Skype-Message:

$mail = imap_open('{mail.example.com}INBOX','leo.buettiker', 'password');

// Create a Skype4COM object:
$skype = new COM("Skype4COM.Skype");

// Create a conversion object:
$convert = $skype->convert;
$convert->language = "en";

// Start the Skype client:
if (!$skype->client()->isRunning()) {
  $skype->client()->start(true, true);
}


while(true) {
	imap_check($mail);
	$number = imap_num_msg($mail);
	$skype->CurrentUserProfile()->MoodText= 
		"Leo has currently $number mails in his inbox";
	sleep(5);
}

This does not only demonstrate how you can overcom your own lazyiness with open comunication and automated tools. It's in my point of view also a nice example what it's possible with PHP outside of the classical website rendering.

Ok, Mirko made me again losing a hell lot of time. He wrote a about his implementation of a quine in Ruby. Quines are just programmes that can replicated themselves without opening a file (also not itself, 'cause that would be too easy in PHP). As usual I had to try this in PHP myself. I found the article from Patrick Schneider very helpfully. He explains a quite cool approach with a base64-encoded-dna pretty clear. I just wrote the solution a bit shorter which brought it down to 159 chars (you have to have it all on one line):

<?=($dna='PD89KCRkbmE9JyonKT9zdHJfcmVwbGFjZShjaHIoNDIpLCAkZG5hLCBiYXNlNjRfZGVjb2RlKCRkbmEpKTonJz8+Cg==n')?
str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna)):''?>

Unfortunately Mirko did not allow my copy-past solution (damn academics!). And for myself the solution with a generator is not too natural, as using another program to generate a quine is probably not like it was supposed to be. So with help of diff I tried to find my own solution:

php quine | diff -u quine -

I still nearly got a knot in the brain (much nicer in swiss german: "chnopf im chopf"). But after some trying I did had a solution which is with 113 characters even shorter:

<?=($a=array (
  0 => '<?=($a=',
  1 => ')?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";',
))?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";

By the way, as a nice start for the language of your choice you should look in the messy c2-wiki (although not all solution there might be work).

I had the idea to write a script that find out which people you might add to your delicious network, based on the links you have in common. Probably this idea was unconsciously influenced by my co-worker Stefan how had a similar idea for tilllate-users. Unfortunately you don't get the information you need for this out of the del.icio.us api. So I wrote a littel screen-scraper that sucked the information directly from the del.icio.us frontend. Unfortunately I run the first few time into the Yahoo-"you shall not steal"-guard. (Even if I did wait one second between request, seems that for the frontend you have to wait even longer between requests.) This weekend I increased the timeout between requests massively and it did work (but very slow).

The idea is pretty simple:

• The script get's your last 100 links
  
• It does search then all the links that are saved by other person as well
• It does save all person that have saved this link by username
• Afterwards it does callculate how often a username is saved
• It does order the usernames by occurrence
• It does print out the first 100 usernames with information if they are fan of you or in your network

As the script is, because of the trottling, very slow I can only give you a small sample of output here. If you're near to my "network" likelihood might be big to find you on the list. As you see I did not spend a lot of time in html formating ;-) I did use PHP for scripting, XML_HTML_Sax3 for parsing and Cache_Lite for, well, caching.

I hear and read the world scaling so often lately that I earnestly think about giving it a fixed field on my bullshit bingo card. As a lot of words on bullshit bingo, scaling is often misused.

After talking with Mirko and reading a lot of blogs I really think the world needs yet another one. So this article tries to try to kill 4 common misunderstandings of scaling, because scaling is not about…

[more after the jump]

Lots of functions listed on PHP.net- thank god!

[stumbled over this on twitter]

I know, that's definitely old news. But still it's worth to mention that the Zend Framework 1.5 is out since some weeks. It's a big jump from Zend 1.0 but also they have a lot new features in there (and probably some Zend Developers drink too much Java). They have also a new and cooler website for the project now.

In my point of View specialy the improvment in Zend MVC makes the framework now usable for companies with a lot of developers working on the same project (without patching the code over and over again).

The full list of improvments:

• New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
• New action and view helpers for automating and facilitating AJAX requests and alternate response formats
• Infocard, OpenID, and LDAP authentication adapters
• Support for complex Lucene searches, including fuzzy, date-range, and wildcard queries
• Support for Lucene 2.1 index file format
• Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
• New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts
• UTF-8 support for PDF documents
• New Nirvanix, Technorati, and SlideShare web services

As I allready mentioned I can't let my finger from coding contest. Unfortunately Bob found in a comment in my blog more nasty stuff about links in html comments which makes parsing even harder.

I trimed my script again under the size of the original script (ok, nearly the original), but I think if my regex skills would be a bit better, I could still squeeze some bytes out of it. But as I go finaly to holiday tomorow I will send my script to Paul and hope to get some points for the shortest script, as it will definitely not win any price for speed or beauty (did not wrote so ugly code since ages).

BTW: If you still trim you script, I brought up a new testfile. You should still come up with the same 11 links. This testfile is so ugly that my old konqueror is not able to parse it correct (but the comments are absolutly valid, according to the documentation and the validator).

Unfortunatly I can not resist if somebody brings up a coding contest. This time Travis and Paul wrote about the coding contest of php architect at planet-php. I did not invest a lot time into it, but still ways more then I planed.

The problem is that the ranking is once by speed and once by size of the script. Two parameters which usually not go well together. After having some great ideas for speeding up my code (even parallel processing, shared memory and map-reduce came to my mind) I decide to let this race to others and fully concentrate to the size. I not even run benchmarks anymore.

Unfortunatly some nasty html special cases (whitespace, case independence, single- and double-quoting, various attributes and so on) blow my perfect sized script a bit. But with some nasty php method tricks it's hopfully still the shortest possible script that gets all valid cases.

Just to let you feel not to save, I wrote a littel nasty html example that might break your own script. (You should get exactly 10 11 links out of it.)

Androide the "gPhone" software stack

There was a lot buzz around when Google launched Android, there mobile platform. A lot of newspapers write a lot of articles about it, but technical insides are really rare. Even on the official android-page it's hard to find a good written architectural overview. Probably the best start to understand how Android works is probably this video from google. If you don't can or want to watch a video there's also, as I think a bit a short, explanation on the google code site.

The architecture view

Let me give you a short overview. Android is basically a layered architecture for mobile phones. At the bottom there's a Linux kernel 2.6 that basically handle the drivers to access the hardware. That's really nothing new there; there are already some phones out there that use Linux as a foundation. The most famous one of the Linux mobile Phones are probably the Nokia Internet Tablet or the OpenMoko.

On the next layer there are c-written libraries that bring some basic stuff to the phone. Although this layer is mainly internet-computer and not phone related (Google PC anyone ;-)). There are libraries to display stuff ("Surface Manger", "Open GL|ES", "SGL", "FreeType"), WebKit to display web pages (the same engine that is used in the iPhone and KDE), a SSL library for secure communication, SQLite to simple store stuff and libc as basic c layer.

Then there's the Android runtime, that’s the layer where a programmer can start building there own application on the top. It consists out of a virtual machine that can execute byte code that’s build out of the "Java Programming Language" and a core API that have a very big similar to sun's java package (in fact Google is using part of Apache Harmony, a open source implementation of the Java class library). Let this be enough for now, we go back to this part later on.



On the application framework is the stuff that makes programming a phone easy with android. There are classes to access resources and creating windows. Some stuff here is still in development, there is no MMS or HSPA support yet.

On the top there are the applications of a phone, they are all written in Java and use exactly the same system, no matter if they are written by Google, the phone company, the network carrier or you.

Java or not to Java

Google always talks and writes about "Java Programming Language" and not Java, why comes that? Well what's running on Dalvik, the virtual machine of android, is not really Java bytcode. You program as every Javaprogram just as usual in Java and compile them to bytecode. After that you need to transform your bytecode with the "dx" tool to a .dex file. What you get is now Dalvik bytecode.

Ok!? Why the hell so complicated? Well there may be a few reasons for that. As you still use Java until just before delivering you App, you can easily use your usual tool chain. Eclipse, JUnit, Cruisecontrol or more exotic stuff - it's all no problem! But why they don't just use Java then, you may ask. Well, for mobile phones you still have not the resources like on a pc. So Dalvik-Bytecode is well optimized for the CPU and hardware you will typically find in a mobile phone. And there's another fact which is no secret: Google don't like to pay license few to Sun. So that's the reason why Google is using the "Java Programming Language" and not "Java". It might be a not too big difference for technical guys, but for the lawyers it definitely is.

Smart decision

After all Android, and therefore also Dalvik looks like a smart idea to me. As Sun tried to run Java with J2ME on every device, Android will never run on today’s low coast phones. You just need some basic CPU power to run it. As J2ME is not really a strong framework, you have a single programming language, but it's up to the vendor which functionality he likes to integrate, every single phone is different. That makes porting J2ME to a real pain. As it looks now, the open handset alliance is putting on some standards on library and functionality that needs to be implemented by every vendor. This will make developing an application for every Android phone easy. As the vendor needs to use the same libraries and framework to develop his own applications it's pretty much "eat your own dogfood" and this will give a little security that Android will be useful.

Android will hopefully be a strong platform until we have enough CPU power on the mobiles to just run some standard operating systems on them. And yes, Dalvik is the better J2ME for me, less compromise and more technical possibilities to the programmer.