Labs

On a recent PHP project, I was having trouble with the somewhat ridiculous PHP error handling and Alec, a developer here, pointed me to the terminal "tail" command.  This command keeps a persistent connection open to a file and reads the contents into a terminal window.  Using it I was able to tail the php_error_log file, which gave me a full readout of errors regardless of 17 different ways to set PHP error levels. This technique can also be used for debugging Flash content.

When it was announced a while back that Zend was going to include AMF (Action Message Format) functionality supported by Adobe, I was excited to hear that there would be an "official" way to use AMF with PHP, as I had used AMFPHP, an unsupported implementation, with mixed success. I experimented with Zend AMF a little when it was released, and there were two things that annoyed me about this implementation as compared with AMFPHP, but I revisited it this week and discovered remedies for both issues.