Premature Optimization

Thanks to the miracle of Wifi, I can share the fact that I’m stuck in London Heathrow airport, waiting for my flight back home. It’s crazy as hell in here. It takes something like an hour just to get into the terminal, not to mention check-in and board.

My first leg to Frankfurt should have left an hour ago, and will probably delay at least an hour more.  This of course meens I will miss my connection to Tel-Aviv.

Anybody knows a good bench in the Frankfurt Main airport?

Just safely got through my first day in London.

It’s gray and rainy, and people are driving on the wrong side of the road. I almost got myself killed twice. But you just gotta love the British lingo, with words like “quid”, “bugger”  and “tosser”. People are actually using these words

I’ll be spending the entire week here, and fly back home on Friday night. Hopefully I’ll have some time to do some sightseeing, and if I will, I’ll post the pictures.

Happy Hanuka! (although it’s kind of merry Christmas here…)

After a short but focused discussion about the need of proxy support for Zend Framework’s Zend_Http_Client, I created a new adapter for this purpose: Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Proxy. If you’re not sure what Zend_Http_Client adapters are all about, see my previous post about it.

The new adapter is mostly an extension of the default Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket, which is based on PHP’s built-in fsockopen() function, and does not require any special configuration or extensions. The Proxy adapter however, will connect to a designated HTTP proxy server instead of connecting directly to the target site.

This will allow people who need HTTP access, or people who use other HTTP-based components of the Zend Framework, like Zend_GData, Zend_Service components, Zend_Feed components etc., to work behind a proxy server - whether it is for security or performance reasons.

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I usually read Marco Tabini’s blog looking for PHP related stuff. Today however, I came across a very well written post by Marco on holocaust denial - apparently commenting on current events in Iran.

Being an Israeli and Jewish, this is a very touchy subject of course. But beyond that, being a person who sees studying history from all it’s directions as a possible cure for the ignorance of mankind, I find holocaust denial an interesting an important subject.

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I just started getting the first comment spam attack on my blog today. For some reason, it seems that someone really thinks visitors to my blog are seriously into porn and gambling.. maybe they are?

Anyway, I thought the WP-HashCash WordPress plugin would be good enough to fight those, but it seems I was wrong. I’m doing a little research now to see what technique (or combination of techniques) will give me maximum spam protection with minimum user annoyance. Until I find that solution, you might see some spam around - I apologize in advance for that, but I prefer having some dirty, offensive spam around than blocking comments to registered users only for now.

Believe me, I’ve been under worse bombardments than this

Earlier this week, I finally (after long and hard work) pushed the Zend_Http_Client out of the incubator and into the core of Zend Framework, and it will be released with the 0.6 preview release.

Now that it’s mostly done, I had some time to do some benchmarking. But first, maybe a short explanation about the new client’s adapter architecture:

One of the things we introduced in the new client is the “connection adapters”: The idea is that there is a different object in charge of performing the actual communication with the server. This “adapter” object can be replaced, and this way you get the same interface (the Zend_Http_Client interface), with a different method to connect to the server.

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