December 2009

Why I am not a big fan of Mollom

Like many people, I spent the last few days away from my computer, spending the holidays with family. Today, when I logged in to post a brief blog entry, I found hundreds upon hundreds of SPAM comments had gotten through the Mollom blocking software that supposedly protects my comments section. I've been battling the comment SPAM for about a month -- it was around November 21 that I realized that Mollom was allowing huge amounts of SPAM through.

Here's my Mollom report from that period of time:
Mollom ReportMollom Report

Mollom Report

Mollom Report

Phing: Fixing Output on OS X

Submitted by matt on Sat, 2009-12-26 18:18

Using Phing on a Mac OS X console sometimes has a strange result: While the Phing script runs correctly, the console displays nothing. The reason for this is that the ANSI color codes used by some versions of Phing are not supported by OS X.

The solution is simple. Change the output logger.

$ phing -logger phing.listener.DefaultLogger ftest

This will use a non-colorized logger.

Git Cherry Picking: Move small code patches across branches

Submitted by matt on Fri, 2009-12-04 22:35

I just performed my first 'git cherry-pick'. And it was great. A cherry-pick, in Git parlance, is an operation which moves a specific glob of changed code from one branch of the VCS to another. Not sure what that means? Read on for an explanation and an example.

Streamlining Iterators in QueryPath 3.x

Submitted by matt on Tue, 2009-12-01 22:21

Work has officially begun on QueryPath 3.x. The upcoming release is focused on implementing and supporting many of the new features introduced in PHP 5.3, including enhanced SPL support, namespaces, closures, and phar archives.

In an earlier article, I examined the performance of various iteration strategies in QueryPath. After taking a hard look at the patterns I observed there, I revisited QueryPath's QueryPathIterator class to see if I could make a sizable performance improvement.

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