At the end of OSDC last year I decided it was the right time to kick start my business and get out of cubeville. I’ve owned a company for many years now but it hasn’t done much since I stopped contracting. To get out of cubeville was going to require a new focus, new business plan, new customers and a new name.

While most people can get away with naming a company after themselves it’s a little harder when your name is Buggy. Can you imagine an IT company called Buggysoft, Buggy Consulting , Buggy Labs or Buggy Training? After tossing up names for months the company was renamed to Zoombug two weeks ago.

So what does Zoombug do? We provide LAMP consulting/development and PHP training. During the next six months the focus will be on growing the client base and releasing more code as open source.

Despite being released 3 years ago PHP 5 has struggled to gain market share. It’s been a vicious cycle of:

• Hosting companies holding off because a few applications still require PHP 4
• Applications continuing to support PHP 4 rather than risk loosing market share
• Hosting companies feeling no pressure to upgrade because applications still support PHP 4

Today I came across GoPHP5. The group is made up of projects and hosting companies pushing to make PHP 5.2 the minimum version by February 2008. Combined with the PHP Group ending support for PHP 4 at the end of this year I’m hopeful that we’ll soon be able to say goodbye to PHP 4.

Today Apple announced the release of Safari for Windows. Clearly this will not have any major impact on browser usage statistics. If Apple did not release it to gain market share then why did they? There’s a saying:

If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.

Apple didn’t released a Windows version of Safari for the average web user, they’ve done it for the average web developer. By releasing Safari for Windows they have significantly reduced the barrier that has, until now, prevented many web developers from checking that their websites work correctly with Safari.

But why now? Why not two years ago? Two years ago Apple wasn’t about to release the iPhone. To make the iPhone work commercially they need to sell it as more than just a phone that can play music. They need to sell it as a device that can keep you connected via email and the web. Most web developers are willing to check their web site with multiple browsers but didn’t have a way to check it with Safari. Apple has now provided this just weeks before the iPhone goes on sale giving developers enough time to download Safari and fix their websites so they work on the iPhone the day it is release.

Sadly, as a Linux based web developer I’m still left out in the cold.

I recently needed to make a page expire so that when the user clicked on the back button it didn’t show the page. This was required for two public computers used for registrations. While I could disable the back button the backspace key in IE continued to work as a keyboard shortcut for it.

Thankfully this only applied to two computers running IE 7. I tried all of the usual suspects to expire the page or disable caching

• Set Pragma: no-cache
• Set Cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate
• Expire the page in the past
• Expire the page at the time it was sent

What I found is that if you do any of these then IE ignores your attempts to expire the page. The solution that worked for me was

• Set Cache-control: must-revalidate
• Expire the page at least 1 second into the future

Every now and then it’s good to review your development environment. I’ve been thinking about updating mine for the last couple of month. I’m extremely happy with vim so it’s safe.

My main interest was in a new version control system. A friend recommended Subversion and after reading Practical Subversion I decided to switch to it. I thought I might stop at that until I saw the OmniTI Labs website a few weeks ago. I had heard of Trac before but this was the first time I’d paid any real attention to it.

Trac allows you to build a complete website for your project with a wiki, ticket system and code repository (using subversion). With all three components combined the result is actually more than the sum of the parts. You can view a time line showing changes in all three components, search across all three components and generate a road map based on tickets.

I’m off to build my own labs site

I was just reading the PHP 10.0 Blog when I saw a post called dirname(__FILE__). It’s a call for a new constant that provides the directory of the current file. Personally I think this is a brilliant idea and it shouldn’t be discouraged just because legacy applications will need to use dirname(__FILE__) instead of the new constant. Eventually those versions will disappear. After all, who still writes code that’s backwards compatible with PHP 3?

Let’s get this in now for PHP 6!!