bye bye version 4...

Ten years ago Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski started to renew the old PHP3 core and in 1999 PHP4 was published and became really famous among Web-Developers.
Bute 5 years late the successor was published and since then everyone is wondering why the era of PHP4 will end.
Today is the magical 8-8-8 where PHP4 is no longer supported so for everyone who still runs PHP4 for some reason
YOU SHOW NOW REALLY HAVE A LOOK AT THIS PAGE: www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php

Detailed history of PHP can be found on www.php.net/history

Working from home.

There's so much work in this week that I can't publish a article in the next days.
But Natalie Jost from A List Apart just published a very nice article which you really should read if you're (like me) working from home read on.. ... you'll like it.

track time for a subroutine within a shell-script

The following code-snippet is a shell-script which does the following:

1. Track the time for a block of shell commands
2. Check if the time was less than x seconds (the example uses 10 seconds)
   
3. If the block run through too fast the script waits/sleeps a few seconds
4. Run all this within a loop so that the block of shell-commands is executed periodically

I used the script combined with a PHP script which processes a queue. The PHP script processes 1000 elements from the queue and takes about 30 seconds for that. Since just having a cronjob per minute would be not efficient enought I used this script.
The waiting-block is necessary because now and then the queue is empty ... but I think there are lot's of situations where a script like this can be usefull:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 -ge 0 ]; do
time_begin=`date +%s`

###BLOCK 2 TRACK - BEGIN
number=$RANDOM
let "number %= 20"
sleep $number
###BLOCK 2 TRACK - END

time_end=`date +%s`
total=$((time_end-time_begin))

if [[ $total -ge 10 ]]; then
echo "time taken was: $number : $total"
else
echo "time take was too less $number : $total"
sleep 10
fi
done