I’ve created a new piece of code that allows people to grep through their database tables and fields. I regularily work on databases with more than 50 tables in the database. Each table has anywhere from two to twenty fields in them. To make things even more of a pain in the ass sometimes the fields are mispelled or do not match up.

As a result I created mysql_grep.php. You can download it from my newly created source directory. Check back often for more code/utilities created by me. Below is an example use of mysql_grep.php

jstump@zebulon:~$ php -q bin/mysql_grep.php -d joestump_net -e photo

The following fields match "photo"
  +-> photos_favorites
      +-> photoID
  +-> photos_images
      +-> photoID

The following tables match "photo"
  +-> photos_albums
  +-> photos_favorites
  +-> photos_images

The code does not support connecting to hosts other than localhost nor does it support changing sockets/ports. Furthermore, the code requires PEAR’s DB. And, finally, the expressions are passed directly to PHP’s ereg(). This means you should be able to pass "^[A-Z]" as an expression (remember to quote your complex expressions).

I’m currently working on a simple backup script and I wanted to make sure my backup server was up before I sent stuff from my laptop over to the backup server (which is housed here locally on a nice software RAID setup). It’s nothing ground breaking, but I couldn’t find a simple utility to simply ping a server, timeout gracefully and return a valid exit code. So, being the geek I am I made one.

<?php

  $timeout = 5;
  if (!isset($argv[1])) {
      die("Usage: php -q server_status ipaddress:port [timeout]n");
  } else {
      list($server,$port) = explode(':',$argv[1]);
      if (isset($argv[2]) && is_numeric($argv[2])) {
          $timeout = $argv[2];
      }
  }

  $fp = @fsockopen($server,$port,$errno,$errstr,$timeout);
  if (!$fp) {
      exit(1);
  } else {
      fclose($fp);
      exit(0);
  }

?>

When I worked at Care2.com we had a really cool web frontend to RCS that the developers and designers used instead of FTP for file management. It was cool for a number of reasons.

• RCS – It used RCS for version control of all files uploaded through the interface. A must have when you fsck up a file and need to revert to an older version.
• File locking – PublishTron300 (PT3K) allows users to lock files while they are aditing them. Only the user who owns the lock can work on that file while it is locked.
• Publishing – PT3K allows users to publish their files to a “live” site after they have verified the file is working on the developmental site.

Those are the main features of PT3K. It has quite a few others that makes managing websites with multiple developers a lot easier. The site isn’t up yet, but you will be able to download the source and learn more about it at http://www.pt3k.org.

A little history. PT3K was originally developed in house at Care2.com, where I worked from May of 2000 until September of 2002. Care2.com released the source GPL sometime in the summer of 2001. It was at this time I started using PT3K privately and at places I consulted. Now that I started Jerum it seemed like a good idea to use PT3K for file management, thus version 2.0.0 was born.

Slashdot is running an introduction to PHP5, which is utterly fascinating. It has all sorts of goodies like namespaces, *real* OOP, private/public/protected variables, static/final variables, and tons of other stuff.

I recently wrote an article for Zend.com, a leading PHP resource and community website, about the popular templating engine, Smarty. The article is titled Smarty: A closer look and covers some of the more advanced features of Smarty. If you have any questions please post them in the discussion forum. I’ll be trolling over the next few days.

My latest article on using PEAR in your classes and applications. This article mainly covers the PEAR, PEAR_Error, DB, and Log class included with PEAR. If you work with PHP you might want to check it out.

It took me a while, but I finally got off my ass and worked on PHPTalk. There are some major updates/upgrades in this version. I have ported PHPTalk to PEAR, included better support for i18n, fixed many minor bugs, and cleaned up a lot of the code. You can find out more about PHPTalk here.

It appears that my favorite scripting language PHP has been infected with Microsoft .NET. I haven’t looked into this technology yet, even though it’s been supported by even some Open Source people. I guess I’ll have to now.