Every so often, I get asked about whether it is really worth it to chase double quotes and constructs like print "foo $bar baz", and replace them with something like echo 'foo', $bar, 'baz', or even to remove all those big heredoc strings so convenient for large texts.

Of course, most of the time, spending hours to fine comb code in search of this will result in less of a speedup than rethinking just one SQL query, but the answer is still that, yes, in the infinitesimal scale, there is something to be gained. Even with string reformatting ? Yes, even that. But only if you are not using an optimizer.

Just don't take my word for it, Sara Golemon explained it years ago with her "How long is a piece of string" post, in 2006.

That's a no-brainer sort of question, is it not ? Or... is it ?

I noticed today that one of my sites returned 403 Access denied on various pages with URLs like format/<foo>, although it was an alias for a taxonomy/term/<tid> taxonomy path which was actually available when not aliased. What could be going on ?

Like any VCS, CVS is able to show the status of the current directory when compared with the repository from which it is checked out.

However, unlike SVN, GIT, or bzr, which by default show only a rather compact set of information, CVS provides already verbose information, with only an option to add even more, and no terse mode.

Luckily, piping its output through a few commands allows one to obtain such a compact cvs status display. I tend to use this, aliased to cvsst.

alias cvsst="cvs st | grep -vE 'revision|Sticky|^$|==|Commit' | sed -r 's/^File: |Status: //g'"

Received this Harris Interactive poll today, on behalf of Tarsus, the french company organizing the Solutions Linux expo.

One of the choices was a list of the top 30 Internet Technologies. And guess what ? For once, Drupal was on the list: first time I see it mentioned in this type of business context. Interesting.

In case you somehow managed to miss today's announcement, Facebook's Hip-Hop is now available, along with a wiki to show how to build it, and an issue tracker, all on Github.

Wow, the XKCD webcomic made me sad today: it's fairly uncommon !

Want an Opportunity to shed a tear too and feel you're not a mean Spirit ? http://xkcd.com/695

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:
<?php
// lazy version for simple cases
function foo_bar($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(func_get_args());
// [...]

// less lazy version for more hairy cases
function foo_baz($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(array('in foo_baz, x' => $x, 'y' => $y, 'z' => $z));
// ...
?>

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.