PHP 5.4 comes with a built-in webserver, which can be useful for development and quick tests. It easily launched from the command-line, but if you’re running Linux Mint or Ubuntu, the PHP version, isn’t 5.4 but 5.3.x. If you don’t have the time/courage/energy to compile PHP 5.4 yourself, some nice fellow on the internet has done the work and made it available through a package repository which makes it a breeze to install.

So your current website - if running PHP - and it seems to work just fine. I am however working on a project, where the new servers are running on a 64 bit version of the OS. This change seem to cause a number of potential issues, and as there didn’t seem to be a resource collection the issues, I’ll try to post a few notes on the experience. Please feel free to add applicable notes and links in the comments.

Just a word of warning when using PHP and Mysql - if you’re trying to make efficient code and not utilizing all sort of frameworks and abstractions, you might be in for a small surprise in a default setting. Usually is slightly lazy and often use the mysql_fetch_assoc function. It provides each row as an associative array, and is quite convenient to work with. Recently however while optimizing some code, I figured I’d switch to using mysql_fetch_array assuming it should be more efficient.

In most web applications there’s a host of functions (or methods if speaking in the object-oriented world). It’s widely recognized, that it’s probably a good idea to name them something, which may suggest the purpose or functionality of what the function is doing, but often developers seem to fail at making a stringent naming convention. Before starting on your next big development adventure, here are a three suggested rules for naming functions.

I’m sorry but sometimes I really don’t get why even seasoned developers doesn’t learn the art of the commit message in version control system. All too often I’ve come across check-ins where the entire commit message just reads “bugfix”, “change”, “oops” or something just as mindless. The effort of writing a useful message compared to the potential benefit seems to be one the best ratios - but of course the pay-back is usually some time away - too bad.