MySQL Full Text indexing

It’s very easy to mess up your performance when you are using Full Text Index on MySQL. We were working on a system that used full text indices recently. The database had about a million records with long textual data fields. The search was taking around 5 minutes and our job was to optimize this! […]

PHP based RSS Aggregator / Planet

I have been looking for an online planet system written in PHP for the last few days. The goal is to collect multiple RSS feeds and show them on a single site. Now it is possible to write up a script for this, and there are a few available. But I wanted something with more […]

PHP Certification

We talked about a community driven PHP certification at Foss.In/2005. I thought more about this and did some research. Surprisingly, Zend Certification has created only 977 ZCE’s till date. I took a Brainbench PHP4 test years ago and looks like they still have the same test up. The other PHP certification I found, was on […]

Funny characters, Webservices and UTF8

I was importing the Foss.In speakers and talks data into Glancer, and it started giving me some strange errors. This is what I got in OpenLaszlo: error: java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence. And when I tried using PHP, this was the string: SOAP-ENV:Server SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: string ‘some string here’ is not a […]

WSDL Blues

Most of the day went into debugging WSDL problems for Glancer. Returning complex data types can get tricky. Especially for me, since I don’t have the time to get into the details of WSDL/SOAP and XML specs right now. I have seen how quickly WSDL can be generated (well, actually automatically) on .Net and ColdFusion. […]