During the past few weeks I have been working on a brand new PHP extension to provide an easy object oriented interface for the GeoIP library from MaxMind. The original module (that I did not write) had two main issues. First the directory to find the databases could not be changed except in PHP.INI before PHP loads (so not even ini_set would work). Second was that it was old school and not object oriented. Another issue (so that really makes three) is that it will throw E_WARNINGS for dumb things like records not being found. If there is no record found when you ask for it I would much rather just be handed a FALSE.

[update 2011/10/26] Official GeoIPo manual/documentation is here.

This new one is nearly complete, but I am still waiting to be accepted into PECL. However it works and I have the source available for use on GitHub. Here is a little how-to on how to set up the GeoIP database and use this module.

Why use GeoIP?

• Perhaps your project has support for English, German, and Polish languages. With GeoIP you can try to guess what country your visitor is from and if they are from a country with a language you support you can set that language default for the user. Things like that go very far towards user experience.
• If you have a website, I doubt many people can honestly tell me they are not curious what country their visitors are from. GeoIP is an important part of determining your reader demographics. You know all those maps that show dots about where visitors are from? You need GeoIP info to do that.
• And the bane of all internet users – lets say you are the owner of YouTube/Spotify/iTunes and you need to prevent a certain country from viewing/watching/listening to specific content because of license restrictions. You are going to piss people off, but I guess for legal reasons it just needs to be done.

These are only three of the many valid reasons you might need GeoIP information. Over here I have a page demoing the readout of the server and visitor’s GeoIP info, with a link to the visible source at the bottom.

Continue reading about setting up and using php-geoipo

In this part of the series we will add the ability to accept input from named pipes to the queue server, an important feature so that the queue can actually be given things to do. Again, I would like to point out that it is assumed we are running on a Unixesque operating system such as Linux, BSD, or Solaris.

What are Named Pipes?

Named Pipes are special files that the kernel can create allowing for buffered byte streams. They operate on the principle of FIFO, where the first thing put into it is the first thing it spits out. This is perfect for our queue system as we want to process the first thing put into it first. To store data into a named pipe, it is as easy as `echo lol > /path/to/pipe` and reading the data back out is as easy as `cat /path/to/pipe`. An interesting note about named pipes is that by default they block until there is both a reader and a writer. This means the echo command will hang until another terminal is opened and the cat command is executed.

Here is a quick video demonstrating how the queue system will work by the end of this post. We will be able to launch the server, and send input to it from another terminal via the named pipe.

Continue reading about using Named Pipes

So to be hip, I am going to write one of these multipart blog things that describe building a simple project from start to finish. Are you ready? O.K. here we go.

What is a Queue Server?

A queue server is a server that processes a queue, which is why it is so aptly named. You send it a list of things to do and it does them over time based on your parameters, be it “as fast as possible” or “when system resources allow” or “once an hour” it is your call.

Over the course of the next week or so I am going to demonstrate building a simple queue server that will be able to fork itself off as a background daemon, accept input through a named pipe, and process things as fast as it can until it runs out of things to do – and when that happens it will sit there waiting with the upmost desire for you to provide it with more jobs.

Continue reading about this project…

To continue on with the previous post, On the speed of functions and namespaces, it was brought to my attention that namespaces should be faster with aliasing. Also how does it compare to static functions? The news was not good for either. Another thing that was brought to my attention that to avoid a lookup when in a namespace functions like filter_var should be absolute referenced, so we/I tried that too.

Continue reading to see the additional test

This is an update to a document I wrote 4 years ago about compiling PHP-GTK on any Unixesque system you could get your hands on, but this one only for Ubuntu 10+. At the time of writing I was using a freshly installed Ubuntu 10.10 system to do this, so for the sake of completeness we are going to assume the system has nothing we need as though it was fresh off the installation disk a few minutes ago.

Here is an overview of what we have to do. The order is very important. If you do not follow the proper order things will not work right. This becomes very important when it comes time to build PHP-GTK itself.

• Install subversion.
• Install PHP5.
• Install GTK development packages.
• Install the Cairo module for PHP.
• Get, patch, and compile PHP-GTK.

And here is how we do it. You are going to need a terminal window.

Continue reading about compiling PHP-GTK on Ubuntu