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Most people go on vacation or take a break during the summer vacation, we at PHPBenelux DON’T !

Next Wednesday we’re organizing another lovely PHPBenelux User Group meeting. This time we’re hosting it in Brugge (or Bruges for those who don’t speak Dutch).

I’ll give you 6 reasons to attend:

1. Because PHP & PHPBenelux are cool
2. Because it attracts PHP experts
3. Because Brugge is an awesome city
4. Because there will be interesting talks by interesting speakers
5. Because we’re giving away some nice gifts/goodies
6. Because there will be free drinks and a great opportunity for socializing/networking

See http://phpbenelux.eu/en/node/1349 for more info.

The PHP conference season is reaching its climax with the many events taking place in autumn.

I personally love conferences, it’s the perfect mixture of geekiness, knowledge sharing, networking and socializing. Everyone has his reasons for attending.
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Back to basics

I’ve been an IT professional for 6 year now and I’ve grown to love the scripting/programming language PHP. A lot of you use languages like these for easy and quick web development.

But we often forget that C/C++ is the foundation of these modern creations. Although I have had some C++ training in school but got alienated from it over the years. It was actually the love for PHP that got me back into C/C++. When compiling PHP and its set of extension I got into contact again with this fabulous language.

But this blog post isn’t entirely about C and C++. My goal is put gcc (the compiler par exelence) in the spotlight.
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Today the schedule for the Dutch PHP Conference 2010 (AKA DPC10) was officially released. And I’m happy to announce that I’m part of it.
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The day after a PHP conference is the day you are most excited about PHP and the community. This statement also applies to me: I am very excited about PHP and the community after a fantastic PHPBenelux Conference (aka phpbnl10). Ter Elst in Edegem (Antwerpen) was the venue and hosting an international PHP conference was the goal.

The enthousiams for me is even greater because for the first time I assisted in organizing a conference. In fact it’s the first time this conference is organized.
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Character sets are a big thing these days and luckily we’re slowly evolving to a world where UTF-8 rules. In the meanwhile we’re stuck in a transitional phase where the ISO-8859-1 encoding is still used.

MySQL followed this trend and introduced character set support in version 4.1. Importing data from older versions is easy and SET NAMES ‘utf8′ is quite useful to ensure special characters are correctly encoded in the new databases.

But I learned first hand that the SET NAMES ‘utf8 trick is not a cure for every disease.
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That’s right, the title says it all: we’re having another BugHuntDay. After the success of the previous one, we (PHPBenelux) decided to host another one. Last time around it was all about Zend Framework. This time we feel that we should dedicate some attention to the Symfony framework.

To be perfectly honest, we were discussing it for a while, but we didn’t reach the planning stage. That was until the kind people at Intracto decided to take the lead. I knew they were pretty fond of Symfony, but now they decided it was time to give back to the community by sponsoring and hosting the event.

The event takes place Saturday November 14th at Frame21 in Herentals. More details can be found on the PHPBenelux website. You can still register for this event and we kindly invite you to do so by filling up the following form.

This blog post will assist you in preparing for the actual event. You shouldn’t be a rocket scientist to participate. A good knowledge of PHP and an open mind will get you a long way.
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Intro

Hello readers

It’s been a while: I’ve been busy at work, going on vacation and been lazy when at home. It’s more than about time to get into my blogging routine again.

This one is actually a short one on Tarball archives. You know, the (compressed) archiving you use to pack your files with. For people unaware of this technology: you can compare it to ZIP and RAR archives but with a little more punch.
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Better late than never: since DPC 09 is coming up this week, this is the ideal occasion for a review of the 2008 edition.

The trip to Amsterdam started off in Gent where I traveled along with Felix De Vliegher & Steve Roelens. Comfortably cruising along the Belgian & Dutch motorways, we where looking for some good times and some expert opinions on common PHP topics. In retrospect, we got both in spades!
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Last week I was optimizing the caching strategy for one of my projects and I was under the false impression that caching was accelerating my website.

At that time I was using Zend_Cache_Backend_File as my backend and cache files were created. My goal was to boost the performance by implementing the Zend_Cache_Backend_Memcached backend. Again everything seemed to be working fine because my Memcached logging displayed activity of some sort.

I was stunned to hear that in fact all of those cache files where created, but never read. So here I am optimizing everything, but in reality I was creating extra overhead. So I started my quest and found the solution (sorry for the spoiler).
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