ZF-Poster, N° infinite...

Wow, nearly forgot to blog about this. A few weeks ago, I received a great Poster in the Mail: It's a HUGE (3ft x 4ft) Zend Framework cheat... poster.

The poster came from Mayflower ("The LAMP experts") - for FREE! If you want one, too, you should ask @BjoernSchotte on Twitter. Last time I checked, he still had some lying around.

If you want to have a little comparison regarding the relative size of the poster, I can recommend you Rob Zienert's photo.

Oh, and yes: First post since for-freaking-EVER, sorry, but I had other things to do.

Another one bites the dust...

Just wanted to mention this because it's a part of history that's just going down the drain:

Because of the wordwide economic crisis, German pay-TV company Premiere shuts down its (free) TV station GIGA, whose program focus lay on gaming. Premiere acquired GIGA in 2008, while GIGA itself existed since 1998. It was always leading in letting the viewers contribute to the shows live via forums, SMS, E-mail etc. and allowing them to voice their own opinion.

All employees of GIGA received their pink slip today. TV production is halted, and until the web stream and TV channel go down at the end of March, viewers will see re-runs of old recordings.

I feel sorry for all of the guys who made GIGA what it was, and hope that an investor will jump out of the bush last-minute; but as this won't happen for obvious reasons, the only thing left to say is good-bye GIGA, and thanks for 10 years of great TV (which was, by the way, produced on a yearly budget that your average TV station will burn in a week)!

-- Tobias

I has a birthday.

Today is my 18th birthday, so I thought I'd share with you the most awesome birthday present on the world (TM).



Thanks, mom and dad!

-- Tobias

Tag, I'm it! - Seven things.

Thanks to Pádraic Brady, who tagged me into the seemingly infinite "Seven things" chain, I finally come to posting on my blog again.

So, without further ado, here are the seven random/weird things most of you may not know about me:

1. I am still a student.
I am working towards my A-levels in the Thusnelda secondary school in Cologne, Germany.

2. I am 17 years old.
Yes, that's true. Even though it's only valid for five more days and the rest of today. *hint, hint*

3. I am a regular reader of the following web comics:
Ctrl + Alt + Del, Cyanide and Happiness, XKCD.

4. I am a Live for Speed freak:
Live for Speed is one of the best online racing simulators out there, it's under continuous active development, it's being developed by a small partnership of only three people, and it's only 24 GBP! Its slogan really tells you what it's all about: "No arcade modes, no steering aids. YOU have to do the driving."

5. I speak some Russian.
Had it for the last 1.5 years in school. Failed the class spectacularly, tho. Очень плохо!

6. I can remember numbers really well.
Give me ten seconds to look at a ten-digit phone number, and chances are I can recite it days later.

7. A photo of me.
Searching the intertubes for a photo of me will result in only one photo, the one I have in my ESL player profile. Let's fix this:
-- removed - no good photo --

OK, so these were my seven things. Now, let's tag the next seven people in the chain:

• A. J. Brown - because he asked for it on IRC.
• Tim Buckley - the creator of Ctrl + Alt + Del, the Digital Overload LAN and Winter-Een-Mas!
• Andre Moelle - for his great post on multi-page forms
• Ralf Eggert - For his awesome Zend Framework book!
• Martin Parsiegla - for his creative rant about "if-loops".
• J. Pieper - just to revive his blog.
• KingCrunch - because he exists.

Tag comments will follow tomorrow.

The rules, as Pádraic posted them:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

array_multisort vs. usort

Just wanted to blog this in reply to et- on #php.de (Quakenet). View Source.

array_multisort:
----------------
start: 1228738359.48
end: 1228738361.23
diff: 1.74608802795

usort:
------
start: 1228738361.23
end: 1228738375.35
diff: 14.119177103

usort - array_multisort:
------------------------
12.3730890751

Zend and Adobe co-operate!

Hi all,

Andi Gutmans of Zend just made a very exciting announcement at ZendCon: Zend and Adobe will co-operate! This will get some nice features both into Zend Framework and Zend Studio for Eclipse, and I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with these. You can go and read some more information in the Zend press release and on Andi's blog.

Doctrine note: How to run the Doctrine CLI on Windows

OK, so this blog post might be more of a "note to self" nature, but why should I only put a post-it on my screen bezel when I can instead post it to my blog, where it might help other people as well.

Some of you might already know the PHP Doctrine ORM. It is a nice PHP ORM solution that just recently reached 1.0-final status ('grats to the Doctrine team on this one, btw). Doctrine has a nice little command line interface class that really makes your life easier because it automates tasks like "generate a model from schema definition". On Linux, you can easily use it as a standalone script by saving the following to a file and making it executable (chmod +x yourfile):

#!/usr/bin/env php
< ?php
require 'doctrine-config.php'; // Sets config, includes doctrine autoloader, ...
$cli = new Doctrine_Cli($doctrine_config);

$cli->run($_SERVER['argv']);

Note the shebang line on the start that tells Linux to use php as interpreter for this script. Also note that I had to put a space in the php start tag because otherwise the blog software would swallow my code.

OK, so how do we run this in windows? easy. First, chop off the shebang line, because that will obviously not work. Then, use the following to run the Doctrine CLI command in the DOS-box (assuming PHP is part of your PATH, and you cd'ed to the location where your doctrine script resides):

php yourfile yourcommand

Hope this helps someone.

Best regards,
Tobias