Entries by luckec :: a programmer's best friend

Since we started hosting our sites on our own server we had some nasty cracker-attacks (most often certainly script-kiddies) causing lots of traffic by hosting crappy italian movies or by installing rootkits. To at least have a chance recognizing whether the system had been compromised we started to use aide some time ago. Aide keeps track of changes in the filesystem and provides us with a human-readable report once a day.

However, sometimes changes in the filesystem happen because of (security-)updates and not because a cracker exchanged your ps binary against his own personal version. Of course aide has no chance to identify such valid and unvalid changes. 3rdPEARty's Util_AideAnalyzer is a solution to that problem - read on if you're interested.

The past weekend Stephan spent some time to fix all filed bugs for Date_Holidays. The result was the release of version 0.15.2. Meanwhile I finally managed to install all the tools on my new MacBook I needed for PHP development. Wasn't that easy because I had a hard time deciding what IDE I should use. Since my old Zend-Studio 3.5 couldn't be installed on the MacIntel and I was not willing to spent the money for the current version I switched over to PHPEclipse. I didn't yet try whether debugging and more advanced stuff works, but it's for free and keeping that in mind it's pretty good (IMO better than the Zend PHP-IDE, at the moment). The switch from ZendStudio to Eclipse wasn't a problem as I develop a lot of Java and like Eclipse very much - it's a great platform. Anyhow, as I coded a bit to test the features PHPEclipse offers I implemented a feature-request for Date_Holidays that allows to create drivers not only by a unique driver-id (until now this was the only way to create a driver):
$driver = Date_Holidays::factory('Germany');
but also by using an ISO3166 country code:
$driver = Date_Holidays::factoryISO3166('de');
as well as:
$driver = Date_Holidays::factoryISO3166('deu');
I published this some minutes ago and the 0.16.0 release can be found at the PEAR package home.

Some minutes ago I released a new version of Date_Holidays (now it's version 0.13.0). This package is quite powerful in calculating holidays and other special days.

I am writing an article about it for the upcoming issue of the International PHP-Magazine. This gave me the reason to add some useful new features:

• I adapted some of the existing calculation drivers and added a new one that calculates the birthdates of the PHP geeks who sent me their date of birth (look at this)
• I implemented filter-objects that allow detailed filtering of the calculated holidays. This includes blacklists, whitelists and composite filters.

Big thanks goes to Stephan Schmidt who patiently proof-read the article and gave me some hints.

If you ever stumbled across the problem of calculating holidays and didn't find a good solution at all, this article will certainly be worth reading. I hope the people of the PHP-Magazine will provide it as online-article because it would be a great addition to the documentation of this package.

Hi folks,

would you mind telling me about your date of birth, please? You want to know why I am interested?

I want to write a driver that calculates the birthdates of all php.net-people for Date_Holidays. I want to use this driver for some demonstration purposes for an article in one of the upcoming issues of the International PHP-magazine. You'll see the result when it's done.

So again, what I would need: Your

- name
- date of birth
- country where you live

Would be really great, if you could mail me this information to luckec -at- php -dot- net. Thanks in advance...

Finally I managed to release Date_Holidays 0.12.0. You'll find some new language-files (German translation for USA-holidays and Italian translation for Christian holidays).

Additionally the getHolidayForDate() method has been vastly improved. Lorenzo sent me a cool patch which makes this method much faster.