php

I've been banging my head against the wall over an error reported in some PHP code I've been writing. For some reason the session would be trashed on the server and on next page load I'd get "Node no longer exists" when I tried to open the session.

It turns out that you can't take a response from a SimpleXML object and store it in a session. You'd think that if you could type "echo $myxml->thisnode" and get a string that it's really a string, but PHP automatically typecasts and converts as needed - except in the case of storing in a session variable.

There's an easy solution. Use explicit typecasting when trying to store an XML result string in a $_SESSION[] variable:

$_SESSION['myinteger'] = (int)$myxml->myinteger;
$_SESSION['mystring'] = (string)$myxml->mystring;

OpenID is the hot topic for 2009. Believe me, if you don't have an OpenID login yet, you'll be picking one up soon. More and more web services will be using them for authentication.

If you have an AIM, Yahoo or several other accounts, you can already use OpenID, but what if you run your own domain and you would rather authenticate against your own server? No problem! There's several OpenID solutions available that you can run yourself.

If you only need to authenticate yourself and not a ton of users, there's a great little script called PHPMyID. It's really pretty darn simple to configure and install, is very bare-bones and gets the job done.

With those scripts you can use your own OpenID URL of http://www.mydomain.com/openid (or whatever you want.) If you move your domain from server to server you can easily carry it with you as long as you still hold the domain name. You're no longer dependent on an OpenID provider like Yahoo not deciding to change their mind on their authentication methods or flat out dropping the service.

The hardest part is that the author includes no method of hashing your password server-side, so you must generate your own md5 hash before uploading the script. Not a problem in Linux, probably a bit more of a challenge in Windows.

I use Eclipse with PHPeclipse for software development. While trying to set up my new laptop for devel, I noticed that I couldn't install the PHP plug-in for Eclipse the same way I had before.

Turns out they've changed the URL you would need to use - and it's not documented in their wiki or website that I could find.

Now, instead of using the /update/releases URL for installation, if you're running Ubuntu 8.04 (and likely a few older versions that run Eclipse 3.2.x) you can install by using the following URL:
URL REMOVED FOR YOUR SAFETY

UPDATE:

Yeah, don't do that. Seems the latest "stable" for Eclipse 3.2 doesn't exactly WORK with 3.2. It relies on some features only available in Eclipse 3.3.

Why do I still use PHPEclipse? Those idiots do this kind of compatibility crap all the time. Unfortunately when it works I love it. I ended up burning a CD of my svn and php plugins on my desktop and using those on my laptop.