stasm - Developer IT

What features would you like to have in PHP?

- by StasM

Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means and fix bugs for me" or "I wish any code would execute under 5ms") Something that doesn't require changing PHP into another language (not: "I wish they'd drop $ signs and use space instead of braces" or "I wish PHP were compiled, statically typed and had # in it's name") Something that would not require breaking all the existing code (not: "Let's rename 500 functions and change parameter order for them") Something that does change the language or some interesting aspect of it (not: "I wish there was extension to support for XYZ protocol" or "I wish bug #12345 were finally fixed") Something that is more than a rant (not: "I wish PHP wouldn't suck so badly") Anybody has any good wishes? Mod edit: Stanislav Malyshev is a core PHP developer.

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C IDE for Mac needed

- by StasM

I'm looking for heavy-duty C/C++ IDE for Mac that would satisfy the following criteria: Work with big projects (~5000 files, some of them 100K big) efficiently. Have good navigation both file-based and symbol-based - i.e. "go to file", "go to function" etc. with autocompletion support. Support for "go to declaration/definition" for symbols - functions, structures, etc. Auto-adding new files in folders already in the project. Support for code completion for values, function names, etc. At least rudimentary CPP macro understanding - i.e. #define foo bar then foo() should take me either to #define or to actual bar. I understand full CPP parsing may be hard, but I hope for at least the obvious cases. Support for displaying parameter names/types by function name, preferably - integrated with the previous item, for functions defined in the project. Support for libc would be nice too :) (optional) Cross-project search support (I can manage with grep -r if everything else works) (optional) SVN support, at least to some extent (update, commit, mark updated) Is there such editor around? Free would be nice, but I'm ready to part with some money if it's good enough. I'm using TextMate now but I'm not satisfied with it. Tried Xcode but it seems to not be able to handle a large project - it just crashed...

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Apple New Year alarm bug cause

- by StasM

As many people know, Apple has a bug in their iPhone that prevented alarms from going off at 1st and 2nd of January 2011. What is strange is how that bug might happen - i.e., as far as I know this bug happens in all timezones and nobody is switching off DST on Jan 1st, so it's not timezone or DST-related. Also, Jan 1st seems to be nothing special as a UNIX timestamp, so something like sign change or integer overflow can't be the reason. It is highly improbably that alarm code has something like if(date == JANUARY_1_2011 || date == JANUARY_2_2011) turn_alarms_off(); - that would be a sabotage and not a bug. So the question is - could you imagine and describe a bug that would cause the alarm to fail exactly at Jan 1st and 2nd everywhere while letting it work otherwise, without specifically referring to those exact dates? Of course, if somebody knows the real cause, that would be a definite answer, but if nobody knows it - I think it is interesting to think what might be the cause of such strange bug.

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What features would you like to have in PHP? [closed]

- by StasM

Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means and fix bugs for me" or "I wish any code would execute under 5ms") Something that doesn't require changing PHP into another language (not: "I wish they'd drop $ signs and use space instead of braces" or "I wish PHP were compiled, statically typed and had # in it's name") Something that would not require breaking all the existing code (not: "Let's rename 500 functions and change parameter order for them") Something that does change the language or some interesting aspect of it (not: "I wish there was extension to support for XYZ protocol" or "I wish bug #12345 were finally fixed") Something that is more than a rant (not: "I wish PHP wouldn't suck so badly") Anybody has any good wishes? Mod edit: Stanislav Malyshev is a core PHP developer.

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How successful is GPL in reaching its goals?

- by StasM

There are, broadly, two types of FOSS licenses when it relates to commercial usage of the code - let's say the GPL-type and the BSD-type. The first is, broadly, restrictive about commercial usage (by usage I also mean modification and redistribution, as well as creating derived works, etc.) of the code under the license, and the second is much more permissive. As I understand, the idea behind GPL-type licenses is to encourage people to abandon the proprietary software model and instead convert to the FOSS code, and the license is the instrument to entice them to do so - i.e. "you can use this nice software, but only if you agree to come to our camp and play by our rules". What I want to ask is - was this strategy successful so far? I.e. are there any major achievements in the form of some big project going from closed to open because of GPL or some software being developed in the open only because GPL made it so? How big is the impact of this strategy - compared, say, to the world where everybody would have BSD-type licenses or release all open-source code under public domain? Note that I am not asking if FOSS model is successful - this is beyond question. What I am asking is if the specific way of enticing people to convert from proprietary to FOSS used by GPL-type and not used by BSD-type licenses was successful. I also don't ask about the merits of GPL itself as the license - just about the fact of its effectiveness.

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Representing timezone list

- by StasM

I have a web application that allows the user to choose the timezone from the list. The list is very long (pretty much all CLDR-supported timezones). So the question is - how should I represent it? How should it be sorted - alphabetically or by timezone offset? What information should each item contain - offset, location, long name (like Europe/Zurich) or short name (like CET)? Should I display information about DST or only current offset? Let's say I can't right now do something like fancy maps OS configuration dialogs display, so the list is the only option. However I want to make the list look nice. Any best practices how it's done?

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Restore access to Cisco Connect after changing router settings

- by StasM

I have recently bought Cisco Valet Plus (M20) wireless router (which I recognize now was a mistake, but nevermind). It has two setup options - Cisco Connect software and web-based setup. Cisco Connect software allows changing very small set of settings, web-based setup allows access to almost all settings, except settings for guest network. The problem is that when I use web-based setup, Cisco Connect after some changes refuses to talk to the router, so I can't change guest settings anymore (since web interface doesn't allow to change them). It must be because of some config parameter not matching or some password set wrong - but I don't know where Cisco Connect stores them. So, does anybody have any idea how to make Cisco Connect talk to the router again once I changed the settings through the web interface?

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Homebrew build with different arch?

- by StasM

I tried to install mysql-connector-c recipe via homebrew, and it builds just fine, but produces x86_64 library: $file ~/brew/lib/libmysql.dylib .../brew/lib/libmysql.dylib: Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64 I however need i386 library for my project. I tried to give it CFLAGS and LDFLAGS like this: CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" brew install mysql-connector-c but nothing changes - it still builds x86_64 only binary. Is there any way to make homebrew build either dual arch library or i386 library? I have kernel architecture set to x86_64, if it matters.

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malloc()/free() behavior differs between Debian and Redhat

- by StasM

I have a Linux app (written in C) that allocates large amount of memory (~60M) in small chunks through malloc() and then frees it (the app continues to run then). This memory is not returned to the OS but stays allocated to the process. Now, the interesting thing here is that this behavior happens only on RedHat Linux and clones (Fedora, Centos, etc.) while on Debian systems the memory is returned back to the OS after all freeing is done. Any ideas why there could be the difference between the two or which setting may control it, etc.?

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How to make Mac OS X CrashReporter invoke debugger?

- by StasM

I have an appache module on Mac OS X that produces random crashes. I can reproduce these crashes with certain sequence of actions, and these crashes produce Crash Reporter dialog "httpd quit unexpectedly". Is there a way to cause Crash Reporter launch debugger (xcode, gdb, anything) instead of just displaying the backtrace? I've tried running httpd under gdb with httpd -X but the crash doesn't happen then - it happens only if many httpd's are running at once, and I found no way to attach gdb to all of them at once. So I was hoping maybe I can cause CrashReporter to attach the debugger when specific process crashes - is there a way to do it?

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