For my coding work i mostly use Zend Studio. And i am a big fan of this IDE. But i also do a lot of work in the shell. And that asks for at least basic vim knowledge. My colleague is a big vim fan. And does most of his work in vim. So last week i was compiling a cheat-sheet for my self. And came across a slideshow of one of Andrei Zmievski‘s talks. This slide show got me inspired enough to start playing around with vim a bit. And this is the result of it.

We need to have vim installed of course.

$ sudo aptitude install vim

Vim doesn’t seem to create the user folder automatically. So we need to create these our self. We’ll start off with a folder for plugins, color schemes and syntax settings.

$ mkdir ~/.vim
$ mkdir ~/.vim/{syntax,colors,plugin}

Most of the time i will be editing .php files. So i want some good syntax support for that. Vim has a nice plugin system. And there does seem to be a syntax file for PHP available. It’s a bit outdated. But will do for now. The only thing to do to enable it is copy it to the plugin directory.

$ mv php.vim ~/.vim/syntax

Now we have a very powerful but basic PHP editor. That’s nice and all. I would like to at least have some sort of a project manager. And there is a plugin for that as well. Download & copy!

$ mv project.vim ~/.vim/plugin

Ok that’s pretty cool. But it still looks like crap. Time for some theme sugar. It actually took me quite some time to find a theme i like. Guess i am picky. The theme / colour scheme i settled for is called wombat. The original file didn’t do much for me. But i found a good 256 colour version.

$ mv wombat256mod.vim ~/.vim/colors

That’s starting to look like a pretty nice setup. Time to make some settings permanent and to enable some other features.

$ vim ~/.vimrc

And add some settings

set rule
set wrapscan
set number
set backspace=start,indent,eol

set t_Co=256
colorscheme wombat256mod

autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP

In the meantime i found this interesting post on Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s blog about using ctags , VIM and PHP. That looks like interesting stuff. So let’s add it. With ctags it’s possible to scan a source tree. And compile a sort of index file that vim can use for lookups.

$ sudo aptitude install exuberant-ctags
$ mkdir ~/.vim/tags

Creating an index file is a piece of cake. Move to a source directory and issue the following command.

$ cd /some/path
$ ctags-exuberant -R -f ~/.vim/tags/filename -h “.php”
–exclude=”.svn” –totals=yes
–tag-relative=yes –PHP-kinds=+cf
–regex-PHP=’/abstract class ([^ ]*)/\1/c/’
–regex-PHP=’/interface ([^ ]*)/\1/c/’
–regex-PHP=’/(public |static |abstract |protected |private )+function ([^ (]*)/\2/f/’

This will scan the whole directory structure recursively while using the regular expressions to extract useful information from the source files it finds. When done and when the parameter –totals=yes is used the following output is displayed. But probably with different numbers.

2375 files, 466018 lines (14628 kB) scanned in 11.7 seconds (1246 kB/s)
199296 tags added to tag file
199296 tags sorted in 0.00 seconds

Time to enable tags. I want to use multiple files. Some standard files for common frameworks / libraries. And a tag file per project.

$ vim ~/.vimrc
set tags=tags;~/.vim/tags/filename

So let’s start vim and have a look at what we have so far. The first thing we do when vim has started is launch the :Project plugin.

$ vim
:Project

The project plugin took some time to get used to. But it’s a very convenient plugin. And easy to get the hang of. It’s possible to create the project settings by hand. But the plugin comes with a build in tool for this. While in :Project mode and hitting \C will make it easy to create new projects.

$ vim
:Project
\C

This will guide you through the process with a few short and simple questions.

Enter the Name of the Entry: [ project name ]
Enter the Absolute Directory to Load: [ absolute path ]
Enter the CD parameter: [ path to move into ]
Enter the File Filter: [ file filter : *.php ]

When that’s done the screen will be in edit mode inside the .vimproject file. Displaying something like this.

Project name=/path/to/project CD=/path/to/project filter=”*.php” {
filename.ext
folder———————————————————-
}

It’s possible to alter the project setup here. Like adding more files. Or even adding files from other locations outside of the project.

Project name=/path/to/project CD=/path/to/project filter=”*.php” {
filename.ext
folder———————————————————-

External=/some/other/path CD=/some/other/path filter=”*.php” {
filename.ext
}
}

When done editing. Just do like normally in vim.

:w

Pretty cool we have a project browser on the left. That is easy to navigate with the arrow keys. And a work canvas on the right.

Time to test the ctags created index files. Place the cursor at the beginning of a string that you want to lookup. And hit CTRL + ] and CTRL + T to get back. Another cool way to open the source file is by using horizontal split windows by using CTRL + W ].

Testing auto-complete is just as easy. Type some php core function name partly str_ and hit CTRL + x and CTRL + o. This will display the following scrollable drop down..

That’s about it. I had good fun exploring all the features and possibilities. And have only scratched the surface. One more thing i found on Matthew’s blog was a way to test and run PHP script from vim. Awesome stuff. You can read about it here. Although i like vim. I don’t think i will be leaving ZS any time soon.

While trying to load a very basic XML template with DOMDocument::load() i ran into some issues last Friday. During the weekend i completely forgot about this. Thank god :) But since it’s Monday i have no other option then to solve it. The problem i was experiencing was page loads took about 2 minutes for every controller action in the application. My first thought was that it would be related to permissions. The application not being able to write certain files. But after checking all permissions the problems still remained.

The logs weren’t showing anything. No errors, nothing. Time to enable the XDebug profiler. And after doing a few requests and loading them up in KCachegrind i found the root of the problem quite fast. A call to the mkDom method was causing the slow load.

But because there are no errors or other indications something is wrong. I added some debug statements to the code in question. And found out that it was PHP’s native DOMDocument::load() that was taking two minutes to load a 200k XML template. That’s not good. So what’s going on here?

First let’s check why there are no errors. Turns out that for some specific reason LIBXML_NOERROR is set. And after disabling this i was presented with an error.

Caught exception: ErrorException: DOMDocument::load()
Entity ‘nbsp’ not defined in /some/file.tal.html, line: 363

WTF? HTML entities inside a XML template. O well. So i changed the  ’s inside the template to their XML equivalent  

Reloaded the page and everything is fast again. This solved my problem. But i wasn’t happy yet. Nobody else was experiencing this issue in the office. So there had to be some other issue. That’s when Geoff notified me about the fact that DTD checks are disabled by using LIBXML_NONET. For this to work however there needs to be an extra W3C package installed.

This was one of those hard to track errors. But it’s fixed and everything is running smooth again.

In the spirit of Ideas for March i should really be blogging more. Somehow i just can’t think of anything interesting at the moment. Will give it a shot anyway.

Last week i created my first ever WordPress plugin. It’s an extremely simple one. And for sure nothing new or special. But it was a fun experience. I have always dreaded the WP code base. The mixture of OO and procedural programming just looks plain ugly to me. But i don’t want to be bash WP. I use it myself. So i took the dive and spend a few hours hacking and reading. And the result is my DWOTD (Dutch Word Of The Day) plugin.

To get some inspiration for this i took a look at some plugin code available on the internet. This gave me a basic understanding of how the plugin system works. Together with the docs writing a plugin wasn’t that hard. The code that i saw however was pretty bad. And i wanted something that at least looked better then all the global statements swarming around. So i created a small OO wrapper for the plugin. The basic plugin structure looks something like this

– plugin
—– css
———- dwotd.css
—– lib
———- Dwotd.php
———- Widget.php
—– template
———- Widget.php
– dwotd.php

The file in the root is the bootstrap file. It includes the main plugin class and registers the widget class. The two files in lib contain the plugin and Widget classes. The rest is self explanatory i think.

The first lines of the bootstrap file contain a comment block that is used by WP to show some more information about the plugin inside the admin.

/*
Plugin Name: DWOTD
Plugin URI: http://lenss.nl/projects/dwotd-plugin/
Description: Dutch Word Of The Day including English translation
Author: Thijs Lensselink
Author URI: http://lenss.nl/
Version: 1.2
*/

Then the plugin class file is loaded and the a plugin object instantiated.

require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/lib/Dwotd.php');

$DWOTD = new DWOTD_Plugin();
wp_register_style('dwotd', "{$DWOTD->getPluginDir()}/css/dwotd.css");
wp_enqueue_style('dwotd', "{$DWOTD->getPluginDir()}/css/dwotd.css");

If the logged in user is a admin hooks for installing and uninstalling the plugin will be activated.

if ( is_admin() ) {
	register_activation_hook(__FILE__, array($DWOTD, 'install'));
	register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, array($DWOTD, 'uninstall'));
}

And finally register the Widget class

add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'return register_widget("DWOTD_Widget");'));

The Widget class is a simple wrapper around the plugin class. It basically instantiates the Plugin class and after that the widget() method gets called. This method calls the Plugin and finally renders a view for the widget box.

class DWOTD_Widget extends WP_Widget
{
	protected $_dwotd;

	public function DWOTD_Widget()
	{
		$this->_dwotd = new DWOTD_Plugin();
		parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'DWOTD Plugin');
	}

	public function widget($args, $instance)
	{
		$result = $this->_dwotd->getFromCache();
		if (!$result || $result->used_on != date('Y-m-d')) {
			try {
				$result = $this->_dwotd->fetchRandomWord();
				$this->_dwotd->writeToCache($result);
			} catch (Exception $e) {
				return new WP_Error('broke', __($e->getMessage()));
			}
		}

		$this->_renderView($result);
	}

	protected function _renderView($data)
	{
		ob_start();
		include $this->_dwotd->getTemplate();
		ob_get_contents();
	}

	public function update($new_instance, $old_instance)
	{
		$instance = $old_instance;
		return $instance;
	}
}

All real work is done inside the the Plugin class. This has all methods for talking to the database instance. But also contains the hooks for the WP install and uninstall actions. Some of the contents of this method are listed below.

require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/Widget.php');

Class DWOTD_Plugin
{
	public function __construct()
	{
		global $wpdb, $table_prefix;
                // set some class vars and include some files
	}

	public function install()
	{
                // create database and insert data
		add_option('dwotd_quote','1');
	}	

	public function uninstall()
	{
		$this->_dbh->query("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `{$this->_dbName}`");
		delete_option('dwotd_quote');
	}

	public function getPluginDir()
	{
		return $this->_wpContent.'/plugins/dwotd';
	}
}

The code is just a small part of the real code. Which you can download here. After that it’s quite easy. Create a folder for the plugin in wp-content/plugins and copy the files there. Enable it from the plugin manager and enable it in the widget menu (which didn’t work for me because my theme has no sidebar.. well not the wp one :)). So i had to use a manual approach.

After copying the files to the plugin folder login to wp-admin and browse to Plugins/Plugins. Search for the plugin and click activate.

Enabling the widget from the admin panel is easy. Browse to Appearance/Widgets. And drag the widget from the left to the sidebar panel on the right.

Enabling it the manual way is also easy. But required a bit more work. For this to work the correct theme file needs to be edited somewhere in wp-content/themes. And the following code needs to be added in the spot the widget should appear.

$args = array ( 'title' => '' );
$instance = array ( 'title' => 'DWOTD', 'number' => 1 );
$widget = new DWOTD_Widget();
$widget->widget($args,$instance);

That’s all. The result can be viewed on the right top side. I build the plugin for fun and use on an Intranet. So don’t go blaming me if it breaks something. Besides that everybody is free to do with the code as they please.

This post has been waiting in my draft list for a few days already. And March is almost over. So better get it out now. Christ Shiflett has an good post about the fact that a lot discussions have moved from the blogosphere to twitter. And this is sad but true. Chris calls for a blog revival. Which i think is a great initiative. And i already blogged a bit more this month then i normally do. I have never been a big fan of twitter my self. Most of the time the stream of information is mind boggling. But i do follow a some interesting people. Which does keep me updated in what happens in the web development world. I prefer a good blog post over any twitter message though.

So Chris Shiflett’s idea is for people to create a blog post called Ideas of March that:

• Lists some reasons why you like blogs (Read below)
• pledge to blog more the rest of the month (Working on it)
• share your thoughts on twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag (Done!)

I like blogs because ..
they offer me a platform where i can express my self without any limitations. And because more people tend to have this need to express them self. It leads to a great flow of valuable and creative information. Combine that with the ability to interact with a user base. And you have a great platform for having discussions. No need for rushed answers. You can just sit down and reflect your thoughts in a comment and start a discussion with the author. In short i offers freedom.

And ..
It’s also a great exercise platform. I myself are not native English speaker. So by blogging in English i tend to improve my own English language knowledge. Plus way more people speak English then Dutch. The second reasons is to improve once writing skills. Not that i have aspirations to become a write one day. but it never hurts to improve your skills.

Besides that it’s a great way to harvest your own thoughts over a period of time. And always have them at your disposal.

So if you read this. Write the Ideas of March post your self. And pledge to do more blogging this month. Some people who have already taken the time to express the thoughts on this initiative can be found below.

http://www.eschrade.com/page/ideas-of-march/
http://allinthehead.com/354
http://jontangerine.com/log/2011/03/ides-of-march
http://www.davidrhoden.com/eecore/index.php/weblog/ideas_of_march/
http://www.cvwdesign.com/txp/article/450/ideas-of-march
http://jeremycook.ca/2011/03/16/ideas-of-march/

Finally back online again. Somewhere today the site went down. And i couldn’t reach the server. Which resulted in me jumping the gun and write an pissed off tweet about Amazon’s EC2 service. Which turned out to be false. After i noticed i tried to login to the AWS dashboard. But instead of my running instance i was presented with a validation screen. I had to validate my account by phone. That’s weird. I came to conclusion to early and thought Amazon had suspended my account for what whatever reason possible. It turns out it’s the annoying Amazon password bug that bit my ass. After poking around i came to the conclusion i have two Amazon accounts on the same email address but with different passwords. One has EC2 enabled the other doesn’t. Good to know. But the site was still down. So on my way home i missed a call from the Amazon support desk (really more companies should act like Amazon does). But got into an email conversation with them later on. After i apologised for the tweet. The Dev at Amazon figured out the server was running out of resources and was swapping. And just couldn’t do much more then that. Only a reboot resolved the issue. Hey! It’s not a micro instance for nothing.

I might as well write a post about the move to the Amazon Cloud late last year. Ever since this website went up in 2008. It has been running on one of my own servers. And this has done the job well for two years. Some people would say if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it. But i like to try out new things. And running a server isn’t cheap. So if i can find a more affordable way of hosting this site i may be interested enough to move. So where do i move this site too. Some other hosting provider? Let’s try something different and host it from the cloud. I didn’t really want to go over the whole hassle of finding a suitable hosting provider. And i was doing some small project with Amazon Web-services. So my choice was made quite easy. Let’s try the wide array of options Amazon’s Web-services have to offer.

No way i was going to pay a fortune to set something up. So after some reading and some googling of course. I came to the Free Usage Tier page. This basically is a way to get familiar with the AWS system. And it offer quite a nice set of features to use. One year of free usage as long as you don’t go over the limit set for this microsystem.. Read more about the terms here . Some of the highlights are:

So that looks like a pretty nice offer from Amazon. Of course you don’t have to expect some multi core system waiting for you. But maybe it will do. I was interested enough to give it try. After logging in the place to start is the ec2 control panel. The first thing i did was create a new instance running Debian.

Make sure the right region is set in the region box. I logged in after creating my first image and couldn’t find it anywhere. Because the default region was not the one i used. From the dashboard i can just click the launch instance button and it gives me a list of different images to use as a virtual instance. There is plenty of flavour to choose from. I picked a community Debian instance.

The next screen is important because it sets the instance type to use. The Micro (t1.micro) is what i am looking for this time.

The rest of the install is quite self explanatory. At the end somewhere download the private key that will be used for setting up an SSH connection to the instance.

The next thing i did was setup a EBS storage volume for .. well .. storage. I made the choice for the EBS volume simply because it scales well. From the ec2 dashboard go to EBS instance and then create instance. Simply select the size and / or load it up with an image.

That pretty much does it. For the ec2 dashboard. The only thing left to do here is setup an elastic IP address so the instance is reachable from the outside world. This is basically assigning a ipv4 address to the instance. Click the elastic IP link and then allocate new address.

If all is well i should be able to login by SSH.

$ ssh -i [key name].pem ec2-user@[ip address].eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
$ sudo bash

That’s it. I configured the instance using Zend Server and didn’t even bother to setup an RDS storage engine. I just installed MySQL. And used that for the site. Last but not least. Open port 80 on the firewall. This is easily done from the EC2 dashboard. I also opened up ports 10081 – 10083 bound to my home IP address so i can control Zend Server.

I was quite impressed with the AWS interface and the possibilities. But the cost is pretty high. The first month was nearly free. But while traffic keeps growing the cost keeps rising. This ended up me paying more for a single instance a month then for a complete server on which i can run multiple sites. So while extremely easy to use, flexible and just plain cool to work with. It’s not for this site. I thank Amazon for the available possibilities. And the Support i had today. But i am moving back to my own server as we speak.

A while back i was contacted by Vijay Laxmi. Vijay is a Sr Partner Marketing Manager over at Zend Technologies. And she was interested in doing a podcast like interview about the brand new and shiny VMWare & Zend Studio integration. And because i am a big fan of this feature. I didn’t see why not. So we had a few chat sessions. Along the way Joshua Solomin from Zend and Michael Paiko from VMWare joined the party. And after some preparation we recorded the session. Considering i have never been much of a speaker. This was quite fun to do.

Michael send me the end result. And everybody seemed happy with it. After that life resumed and i have been incredibly busy every since. So i kinda forgot about the whole thing. Till Vijay mailed me today (ty! Vijay). VMWare put the recording on their website. And a customer mailing has been transmitted over the wire. Cool stuff!

2011-02-07 VMware-Zend VOC Podcast

Kevin Schroeder has a nice post about the current state of PHP in the TIOBE index. And i have seen this TIOBE index pop up every now and then in blog posts. It never really interested me. I am not a big fan of trend statistics and certainly don’t care for what is the hottest language of the moment. But reading Kevin’s article got me interested. He mentions the fact that if you do manual searches on different search engine with a query like +”PHP programming” vs +”Python programming” you will get a different view then what the TIOBE index is displaying. And this is true. So let’s give that a try.

+”PHP programming”
Google : 1.460.000
Yahoo : 132,000,000
Bing : 133.000.000
Baidu : 100,000,000

Let’s do the same for Python.

+”Python programming”
Google : 952.000
Yahoo : 22,700,000
Bing : 27.200.000
Baidu : 1,860,000

But this only displays the fact that there is way more content about PHP on the web then there is about Python. It does not reflect the current request and interest in the two subjects. Plus i know some Python programmers. And i also know for a fact that the demand for Python developers has been growing slowly. More conferences are popping up. So the community is live and kicking. So how about the PHP community? There is still a steady flow of fresh content, blog posts, new and old conferences, activity in php.general (dropped a little), new versions are delivered, php.internals is busy as always and the demand for PHP developers is at an all time high. At least here it is. So this community is live and kicking as well.

So this got me reading the TIOBE Programming Community Index Definition to see if i could figure out how they calculate the final result. I am by no means a mathematics person. But the formula seems straight forward. What happens inside the hits() and hits50() function is not clear however. So matching their findings against mine is not really possible.

((hits(PL,SE1)/hits50(SE1) + … + hits(PL,SEn)/hits50(SEn))/n

So how else can we see the current state of PHP then. Let’s try Google trends. That’s what it’s there for.

Compare search requests for “PHP” vs “Python”

Interesting results. This shows that the interest for PHP has been steadily dropping since somewhere around 2004. When people started getting scared of PHP5 i assume. Python on the other hand is nearly visible but steady.

Let’s try a more precise query “PHP programming” vs “Python programming”

That will display something i did not hope for. But something i was expecting non the less. The interest for Python programming has risen over the past years.

One more comparison for the road “PHP developer” vs “Python developer”

Well that’s kind of a relieve. It shows the demand for Python developers is growing. But they have a long way to go to catch up on PHP :)

Conclusion for me is. I still have no clue what the TIOBE index does. Google trend shows a drop in PHP’s popularity and a rise in Pythons Popularity. Personally i don’t see much change in the PHP community compared to resent years. And i have no real opinion of what is going on inside the Python community. But i am happy to stick with PHP anyway.

What should have been a simple assignment turned out to be a hair pulling endeavour. The ultimate goal was to read the client side certificate data in PHP. I am by no means a system administrator. And the SSL part will probably be done by somebody more experienced. And the certificates will be signed by real CA’s. But for developing locally i need something functioning.

So i spend the last hours trying to get client side certificates working. With absolutely no luck. I found a bunch of posts by doing Google searches. But none of them seem to offer the proper information for creating good client side certificates. Creating the CA and the server certificate is no problem at all. But creating a client side certificate seems impossible. Some of the post i tried:

http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.7/ssl_faq.html
http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Apache/apache-SSL.html
http://www.linuxconfig.org/apache-web-server-ssl-authentication
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/httpd.html
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/securitymonkey/howto-securing-a-website-with-client-ssl-certificates-11500

You would have thought that something like this would have been documented pretty well by now. But no luck for me. This only resulted in

[debug] ssl_engine_kernel.c(1879): OpenSSL: Read: SSLv3 read client certificate A
[debug] ssl_engine_kernel.c(1898): OpenSSL: Exit: failed in SSLv3 read client certificate A
[info] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xx] SSL library error 1 in handshake (server lab:443)
[info] SSL Library Error: 336151570 error:14094412:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate Subject CN in certificate not server name or identical to CA!?

So after almost giving up i found the CA.sh script hidden in /usr/lib/ssl/misc this little sucker seems to do the job pretty well. Creating a CA, server certificate and client side certificate is extremely easy. So i settled for that.

Creating the CA

$ cd /usr/lib/ssl/misc
$ /CA.sh -newca
CA certificate filename (or enter to create)

Making CA certificate …
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
…………………..++++++
………………………………++++++
writing new private key to ‘./demoCA/private/./cakey.pem’
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Verifying – Enter PEM pass phrase:

And fill out some basic certificate data

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:NL
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:NH
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Purmerend
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Bluesignal
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:lab
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:lab
Email Address []:my@email.tld

Creating the server certificates

$ ./CA.sh -newreq
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
.++++++
…………………………………………………………………………++++++
writing new private key to ‘newkey.pem’
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Verifying – Enter PEM pass phrase:

Fill out the same basic certificate data

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:NL
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:NH
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Purmerend
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Bluesignal
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:lab
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:lab
Email Address []:my@email.tld

Sign the sucker

$ ./CA.sh -sign
Using configuration from /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf
Enter pass phrase for ./demoCA/private/cakey.pem:
Check that the request matches the signature
Signature ok

The only thing left to do is creating the client side certificate

openssl pkcs12 -export -in newcert.pem -inkey newkey.key -out username.p12 -name “Client Certificate”

Time to configure Apache2. I used the standard default-ssl virtual host and just reconfigured it

SSLEngine on
SSLProtocol -all +TLSv1 +SSLv3
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM
SSLProxyEngine off
SSLOptions +StrictRequire +OptRenegotiate +StdEnvVars +ExportCertData

SSLCertificateFile /usr/lib/ssl/misc/newcert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /usr/lib/ssl/misc/newkey.pem
SSLVerifyClient require
SSLVerifyDepth 1

SSLCertificateChainFile /usr/lib/ssl/misc/demoCA/cacert.pem
SSLCACertificatePath /usr/lib/ssl/misc/demoCA/certs
SSLCACertificateFile /usr/lib/ssl/misc/demoCA/cacert.pem

reboot Apache2

$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The server side is ready. But it is still impossible to connect at this moment. We need to install the client certificate inside Firefox

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > View Certificates

Choose import and browse to the newly created *.p12 certificate file.

Now i can finally connect based on my client side certificate and read the pieces of data i was looking for. Which can easily found by doing

print_r($_SERVER);

Some of the stuff i was looking for

[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_C] => NL
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_ST] => NH
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_L] => Purmerend
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_O] => Bluesignal
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_OU] => lab
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_CN] => lab
[SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_Email] => my@email.tld
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_C] => NL
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_ST] => NH
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_O] => Bluesignal
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_OU] => lab
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_CN] => lab
[SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_Email] => my@email.tld

Now it’s time for the fun part.

Just found this nice little project Cal Evans is doing. It’s called Voices of the ElePHPant. The name i guess is dedicated to Vincent Pontier the creator of the elePHPant. The goal is to shine a light on a special PHP community person. And the kick of is done by Jeremy Kendall. Be sure to check back often for new updates. Or nominate somebody.

Because i was so happy with my new 3 monitor configuration. I decided to refresh my development environment as well. Normally all my files would reside in the Devspace older in my user folder under the /home directory. Now i used a new 500 GB SATA drive and formatted it EXT3. Moving your workspace in Zend Studio has the minor inconvenience that the local settings like fonts / syntax colours are lost. I still haven’t found a way to export this. So i decided to take this opportunity to create a nice new dark theme.. My friend Bart (still no blog?) was friendly enough to let me know how to export the theme related data in ZS. And was nice enough to send me his zenburn theme.

File > Export > General > Preferences

File > Import > General > Preferences

Bart’s zenburn theme:

Most developers i know don’t seem to care much about the colour of their screen and the font they use. But considering the fact that i spend an insanely amount of time behind a screen. It would be nice if this environment i am in all day put the least amount of constrained on my eyes as possible. So i choose to take time and configure this for optimal viewing pleasure. This starts with the font. For years i have been using the Envy Code font by Damien Guard inside my IDE. This all started i think with a post by Jeff Atwood It’s a great font that is extremely easy to read even for terminals. Although still in beta. I advice people to use it when possible.

The second thing i configure are the colour schemes my IDE uses. The standard colour always has a white background. White makes sure things are clear. But staring at a white screen for more then 6 hours always resulted in headaches for me. So the darker the better. And with a dark background you are forced to change the rest as well.

Changing the font is first

General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts
Font : Envy Code R Bold (11 pt)

Second up are some general text editor colours

General > Editors > Text Editors
Line number foreground : #787878 (120, 120, 120)
Current line highlight : #35353D (53, 53, 61)
Background color : #25252D (37, 37, 45)

And finally the PHP syntax coloring

PHP > Editor > Syntax Coloring
Decprecated : #000 (0, 0, 0)
Fields : #FFFFFF (255, 255, 255)
Heredoc : #008282 (0, 130, 130)
Keyword : #DE5727 (222, 87, 39)
Multi-line comment : #557F5F (85, 127, 95)
Normal : #FFF (255, 255, 255)
Number : #FFCECE (255, 206, 206)
PHP tags : #DE5727 (222, 87, 39)
PHP Doc : #FEC601 (254, 198, 1)
PHPDoc Comment : #FEC601 (254, 198, 1)
single line comment : #FEC601 (254, 198, 1)
static fields : #FFFFFF (255, 255, 255)
static methods : #FFFFFF (255, 255, 255)
String : #B3C0C8 (179, 192, 200)
Task Tags : #FEC601 (254, 198, 1)
Variable : #0B91B7 (11, 145, 183)

The result can be viewed below

There are much more configuration options to do but for now this is what i came up with. Setting up the theme is a since in ZS. But one thing bothered me. The function / property name highlighting when you select an element inside the IDE. Was a very light colour. And this made it impossible to read the contents of the selection.

So after searching for a while and setting every possible setting in the configuration tabs. I finally figured out how the set the colour for these two actions. This is done from the Annotations setting in the Text editors panel under the general tab. The two options to change are PHP elements read / write occurrences.

For now i settled with a dark colour. But maybe i will change this in the future since it is not very readable

That’s it for now. This of course only sets up the PHP environment. The syntax colours for XML, HTML, CSS and Javascript still have to be changed. But i will leave it at this.