Thomas Koch

I'm going to fosdem 2010.

These are things I'd like to attend:
Continue reading "Going to FOSDEM 2010"

Die Presse schreibt gerade [1, 2] , dass "Hacker" (es heißt Cracker!) zugriff auf Emails eines Klimaforschungsinstitut erlangt hätten. Diese Emails sollen angeblich belegen, dass Klimaprognosen absichtlich pessimistisch dargestellt würden.

Es macht mich schon misstrauisch, dass ausgerechnet einen Monat vor dem Klimagipfel in Kopenhagen diese Emails ans Licht geraten und es ärgert mich, wie unkritisch Zeitungen so gefährliche Gerüchte weiterverbreiten. Kurze Recherche (das sollten doch eigentlich die Holzmedien für mich leisten?) liefert:

Das Gerücht wird vor allem von Stephen McIntyre verbreitet. Er ist bekannter Lobbyist der Ölindustrie. Die Kritiker kaprizieren sich vor allem darüber, dass in einer Email das Wort "Trick" verwendet wird. Ein "Trick" solle verwendet werden, um die Daten aufzubereiten. - Aus meinem Physikstudium bin ich gewohnt, dass man von einem "Trick" spricht, mit dem man schwierige Analyseprobleme löst. Aber dann ist nicht von Datenfälschung sondern von besonders cleveren Rechenmethoden die Rede.

Back in 2006 I learned, that KWrite (a simple text editor) was not enough to write PHP code with. I tried eclipse, but it seemed too complex and was way too slow on my old laptop.

So inspired by the Comfortable PHP editing with VIM series of Tobias Schlitt I learned VIM.

My blogpost about Vim as an IDE for PHP is a popular page and I often get requests about details of my setup. Please don't ask me anymore, since I intend to move away from this setup!

Some weeks ago I've been at a conference (GearConf) about team collaboration. Some of the tools presented there (like Mylyn) made me jealous of the java people.

So it was time to reconsider Eclipse. However editing text with what's called an "editor" in eclipse is a pain to say the least. But life's good and somebody already created eclim. Eclim allows you to keep using gvim for text editing but integrates with Eclipse to give you code completion, manual lookup, code projects and more.
This alone may not convince you, since I already have this integrated in vim. But there are at least three major advantages of vim+eclipse:

• There's not only the integration for PHP but also Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, C/C++, CSS, HTML and XML
• Eclipse comes with a bunch of other cool plugins (like Mylin)
• The code completion from eclipse is much more powerful then anything you can do with VIM. For example it also proposes you the correct classmembers after foo:: or $bar->

My collegue Jiayong just installed the bundled version of PDT with eclipse, ran the eclim installer and was ready.

However I'm much more addicted to pain, so I took the Ubuntu packages of eclipse 3.5.1, linked the pdt runtime download and all dependencies in a separate directory, checked out the GIT repository of eclim, configured the classpath in the ant buildfile and build eclim from source. The deployment of eclim can be looked up from the ant buildfile.
There are some more tweaks to do, which I can point out later, if you should dare to follow this road. You shouldn't have a need for this until you'd be interested to become famous and beloved and package PDT or eclim for Debian.

Do you already have experiences with eclim+pdt? Are there tutorials I've not found? Are you interested to come with me to explore this setup?

... you may just not have used it appropriately. Fabien Potencier has blogged about templating engines, compared their speed and finally concluded that his own templating engine is the fastest. Not only that, but my beloved eZ Components Template engine, which we use with great pleasure at YMC, came out as the slowest in his benchmark. (Althought he complimented it as "probably the one which have the most features".)

Dear Fabien, I think it's not fair to blog a benchmark without publishing the code you used to do the benchmark! But even without the code and without doing my own benchmark, I can offer some explanations, why eZ Components may have been the slowest in your benchmark and why you've compared apples with oranges. I take the compiled template code from the Twig site: Continue reading "eZ Components Template is not slow..."

I'll be giving a talk on PHP quality assurance tools next week at the gearconf in Düsseldorf. The event is focused on team collaboration and most of the audience will come from other languages then PHP. Since I'm not a contributor to any QA tool I'll center around the user perspective and the process of establishing these tools in a small to middle web company like YMC.
As an outline for the first part I thought to give an historical view on QA in PHP and therefor made a timeline of PHP QA milestones: Continue reading "Timeline of PHP quality assurance tools"