I am one of the 10 jury members for the first international Hackontest. Basically this is a 24 hour open source coding competition that takes place on September 24/25 here in Zurich. However in order to make it to the competition a first hurdle is to get "past" the jury, which includes Jeremy Alison and Bruce Perens, who get to select the top 3 most promising teams on August 1st. So if you think you got what it takes, head on over to the Hackontest site and register your team! All my favorite OSS projects (PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL) have not registered teams yet.

A while ago someone join #php.pecl with some XDebug issues while using Doctrine. What ensued were a series of (very helpful) rants on the do's and don'ts in regards to large libraries, HTTP headers and maxclients settings in Apache. I have asked Rasmus permission to keep a log of the discussion and post them in my blog. In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).

Back in 2005 (wow already that long ago?), we started talking to some key PHP application projects to get them to get more involved in the QA processes around release candidates (RC's for short). This was a list of projects maintained on the old PHP todo wiki. Recently Wez finished setting up a proper mailinglist for the primary qa testers as a replacement to the wiki pages. This list is setup to allow posting only by release managers (RM's for short). All replies are send to the php-qa mailinglist.

As I was sitting for hours on the bus somewhere between Maceio and Receife on my trip to Brazil, waiting for the the bus to reach the other side of the road blockade that was setup in protest by local sugar cane farmers, a thought began to materialize in my head: We really should have an advocacy group around PHP! The first code name was found in that very first traint of thought: emPHPower!

I have been quite vocal at every opportunity about how surrogate keys suck. However I must admit, as vocal as I may be, I have not really been good at working towards not using them myself. So briefly what are surrogate keys? They are usually those meaningless integer identifiers you see everywhere. Yes like in the url to this very blog post. People have come to love them however, especially people that use tools to generate SQL for them. But general wisdom tells people that everything is faster with integers. I keep hearing the same story over and over from self proclaimed MySQL, PostgreSQL or whatever kind of RDBMS they are flying experts. Index reads, joins and of course development since most tools are optimized (or should we rather say oversimplified things) towards integer surrogate keys. Now I keep repeating the same complaints, that surrogate keys are usually not faster in any meaningful way, that they sometimes can actually be slower due to unnecessary joins and that they are meaningless to end users and developers alike (always fun when trying to read log files of queries full of surrogate keys).