2025 Dec 20
In memory of Ryan Weaver: For his son
Ryan Weaver, who was the Symfony Documentation lead and founder of Symfonycasts passed away on August 25, 2025 from glioblastoma.
User Profile: gizmola
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- gizmola (forum profile)
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Blog Posts
gizmola has written a total of 18 blog posts.
2018 Jan 24
Should you be using MariaDB or MySQL?
MariaDB started life as a fork of Oracle MySQL, and offered some important new features and performance improvements. As a project from MySQL's founder ("Monty" Widenius), and initially advertised as a drop-in replacement for MySQL, MariaDB got a lot of traction in a short amount of time, and for largely political reasons, it is now in some linux distributions, what you get when you do a package installation for MySQL.
2017 Jul 16
PHP Mysql support: mysql or mysqlnd?
"So you are installing a modern version of php using one of the alternative repositories, and suddenly you are confronted with a confusing choice. You want support for mysql (mysqli or PDO-mysql) in your php program. But which one to choose?"
2017 Jul 5
The battle for Net Neutrality continues
It seems we have to keep fighting this war to keep the Internet a fair and open system for all.
2012 Oct 15
You probably don't know REST
As Web developers, most of us have either utilized a REST Api to integrate with services like Flickr, Facebook, Amazon or Twitter, or created one to allow others to integrate with our systems. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) on the surface, seems to be simple which perhaps explains why so many REST api's are largely incorrect and not RESTful at all.
2012 May 13
phpFreaks on Facebook
We have a facebook page, and will be using it to provide updates on interesting happenings at the phpfreaks community. Show your support for the site by liking us, and telling your friends about the site.
2012 Jan 14
Proem framework hits milestone 0.1.0
Phpfreaks admin Thorpe has been working on a new framework which has as its goal, use of the latest and greatest php 5.4 features. It's important for the php community that people endeavor to explore these features if PHP is to continue to evolve and thrive. Proem has the goal of being small simple and fast. It's still in the early stages.
2011 Nov 1
The problem with hover based menus
Nice article on solving a common problem I see with website drowdown menus, authored by one of phpfreaks great moderators.
2011 Jul 22
Congrats to phpfreaks member phpSensei for winning 2011 Skills Canada Web development competition!
He beat out a host of other high school and college competitors from across Canada to complete a "facebook" clone and take 1st place in the 2 day competition. He'll be representing his country at the World Skills competition next, so stop off and congratulate him and wish him luck at the Worlds. [url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php?topic=339304.0]http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php?topic=339304.0[/url]
2011 Apr 11
Developing HTML Emails
"Email clients over the past few years really haven't kept up with the pace of today's developers. When developing emails, it feels like you've stepped back into the late 90's, writing out-dated code. Below are some tips & tricks I've found helpful over the past few years of developing emails...."
2011 Feb 20
Support the fixing of the XDebug profiler!
If you read my recent tutorial on the use of the excellent XDebug profiler, you may be aware of what a truly a great FOSS PHP extension it is, used by countless developers over the years. Unfortunately the cachegrind format is not quite right, because when XDebug was developed Derick Rethans had no documentation of the format and had to reverse engineer it and make some educated guesses. Derick is truly one of the PHP communities heroes, and taught many of us about PHP's internals through his articles, and projects like XDebug and Vulcan.
2011 Feb 5
How to setup LAMP using Ubuntu Linux
This tutorial takes you through the steps of setting up Ubuntu Linux and getting Apache, MySQL and PHP installed and running.
2010 Nov 21
Tutorial: XDebug for developing, debugging and profiling PHP
XDebug is one of the essential PHP extensions for PHP developers. In this tutorial I'll attempt to cover installation, and most of XDebug's standard features.
2009 Nov 22
Installing a Centos LAMP Dev Server under VirtualBox, Part 2
This covers updating your Dev server to recent versions of PHP and MySQL, as well as setting up an Apache VHost, and using the Hosts file to provide development server naming.
2009 Jul 21
Install a Centos LAMP dev server under windows using Sun Virtualbox
This article covers the installation and configuration of a LAMP development environment on a windows laptop using Sun's free VirtualBox. http://www.gizmola.com/blog/archives/95-Run-a-Centos-Lamp-development-server-on-XP-using-VirtualBox.html
2009 Apr 25
Too much information about the MySQL TIMESTAMP
Everything you need to know about MySQL Timestamps, and probably some things you didn't want to know.
2009 Apr 20
Atlassian offering licenses to Confluence and Jira for $5
Atlassian has made a name for itself with its java based opensource development tools. Confluence (an Intranet Wiki tool) and Jira (a bug tracker) are two of the companies Flagship products. Calling this their "Atlassian Stimulus Project", they are offering 5 user licenses for $5 each, and donating the proceeds to "Room to Read".
2009 Feb 13
Article on MySQL Number columns and UPDATE statements on numeric types
This article talks about the behavior of MySQL when it comes to Updates on a numeric type when it's initialized to NULL.