I recently came by this site WorldTimeEngine where users can search the local time of any place using the name, street address or just latitude and longitude. Since that time I was thinking how easily you can make your own. As long there are some good people over there (For Geocoding API) - its a not a big deal, you know?

His script pulls the location of the place (latitude/longitude) from the Yahoo! geocoding API and passes that back into the geonames web service to get the local time. The result is an array with the lat/long, address you submitted and the time output in a standard string.

Whenever someone asks me why PHP is more "agile" than Java, I tell them that in PHP you can break most of the rules your comp sci course told you about and get away with it. Of course this means that you need PHP developers to constantly clean up their code.

He talks about rules for developing in PHP, one being not to change a method so make it incompatible with its parent. He recommends one way to avoid this - the E_STRICT warning to protect against possible conflicts and issues (the same kind of functionality in PHP6 is in E_FATAL though).

Please, lets get the sense back here. Lets not make things that are not fatal an E_FATAL. Lets use E_STRICT for the pedantic, lets add a E_DEPRECATED for all things deprecated. Lets not kill what makes PHP more agile than those other languages that think they know what I should be spending my time on.

The ability to run two or more commands in parallel is totally sexy, but the Web is a different playing field and it doesn't make complete sense.

PHP loses control, once the output is sent and the connection is closed. Multithreading would probably make sense in streaming, but PHP already handles that for you where it makes sense for the function. Furthermore, mulithreading has its purpose in applications that continue to run and not something that closes and cleans up everything after the last command is issued.

He continues talking more about what multitasking is, a more real life example, the goods, the bads, and some of the issues that can come along with it. Finally, he suggests a feature to be added to the core of PHP - an "internal multitasking mechanism" to help aid these kinds of processes.

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So far, he's already gathered a few - two from Pxy, one from Stanford, and another from the Secure Systems Lab (at the Technical University of Vienna).

The concept's pretty simple - the form they build submits back to the page and writes the input out to a file. This file is then read by the controller for the LED they have connected and, with the proper input, will turn it on and off. The code for the PHP/web side of things is included, but it might take a little work to get the rest of the hardware interfaced (as the author saw as well).

True to the theme of the article, they introduce the Winbinder library - what it is, how it works, and links to grab the latest copy. Their first simple example is a "Hello World" window created with about 7 lines of code. They explain the parts of this code before moving on, up to an example that uses the event handler functionality to catch a button being clicked.

The game, 32cards is a digital card trading game with tons of data about each country for each card. On each turn, the topmost card is uncovered and five stats are compared. The player with the highest stats wins and points are awarded. You can gabs this great example of how flexible PHP really is (and try out a pretty cool game) by heading over to their site and grabbing the download.