Pythoneer

My guess is that the next single PSB release is “The Sodom and Gomorrah Show” from the new record “Fundamental” which had been released 2 days ago.

As usual I need a lot of time warming up and liking the music. I don’t know but this new record is somehow not that appealing to me yet. But I know for sure, after I had been listening to it 10 times I will have my favourites and see it all from a different perspective. It was the same with the last Depeche Mode record. Let’s listen …

I have no experience with Ruby on Rails I just know the screencast and am reading about all the hype. But I think I know PHP quite well, so I wanted to know how much people had learned from RoR and how it has effected the PHP community, especially concerning frameworks and stuff to make your life easier. Here is an article Rails-inspired PHP frameworks from H3rald, which is not going very much into depth. But from what I read symfony seems very promising, especially because it has I18N support integrated and extensive docs, which I think are musts nowadays. I haven’t worked with neither one of them, but I probably will.

Let me just state that I think the integration of AJAX is pretty neat and comfortable, but when it comes to really dedicated JavaScript stuff I would probably not use it. And the Web2.0 stuff nowadays does really dedicated JavaScript. But we will see how this is evolving …

Since I used to work in this field, it was really interesting to read this article Introduction to Smart Cards. Especially bearing in your mind the combination of secure cards and distributed apps on the web …

Future for smart cards depends mainly on the introduction of multi-application cards and overcoming the simplistic mindset that smart cards are just a method of making a payment.

After working with Python for a while and enjoying the pleasure of having a shell where you can test your code before you actually programm it I came back to PHP and missed the shell big time. Especially when you don’t exactly know how to use special objects or functions. Now the pain of not having such a shell is over, Jan wrote the real shell for PHP. Thanks a lot. This will make testing and just playing with PHP so much easier. It provides of course auto loading of classes.

Install
Download the actual PHP_Shell class here, and rename the file to “.php”. Download the php-shell script, that you want to start later, from the command line here, rename it to “*.php” too.
To make it callable from the command line using “php-shell” you might want remove the “.php” from the later file too and put either both in one directory that is globally reachable (that is in your PATH). The other opportunity, when you don’t want the PHP_Shell file in you bin-directory, would be to put the PHP_Shell class in the include_path, but then you have to adjust the php-shell script to not include the PHP_Shell from “./PHP_Shell”, but as “PHP_Shell”.

Have fun …