The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode co-hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler - "Episode 12: Irish Eyes Are Always Smiling".

Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it's episode 11 when it's actually episode 12, but hey!

They talk about the Apple vs. Android functionality gap, Rackspace's recent issues and the definition of "guiding principles in an open source project". They also mention another PHP community member Brian Deshong who has volunteered to help out with an iPad app for the show.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed (or on iTunes).

David Walsh has a new post to his blog today with some code snippets that can help you detect iPad users when they come to your site.

The hottest device out there right now seems to be the iPad. iPad this, iPad that, iPod your mom. I'm underwhelmed with the device but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to account for such devices on the websites I create.

He includes three ways to get the job done by matching against the User Agent sent by the browser - Javascript, PHP and with an .htaccess file for an Apache server. As one commenter points out, though, you need to be sure if you already have a redirect on the word "mobile", the iPad's User Agent contains that too.

Ivo Jansch of Ibuildings has taken a look at a different sort of spin on Apple's iPad device and asked what potential it has to affect the PHP companies out there.

I see the iPad (and the non-Apple alternatives that already exist or are on the way) as a game changer. It brings new ways of consuming content and will reach audiences that the laptop has never reached. [...] In any case, the iPad is a game changer. What does this mean for the web and for tech companies such as us? First, it's nice to see that Apple is pushing open standards heavily with the iPad. [...] Second, the typical architecture behind most iPad apps (and other mobile applications for that matter) is to have a thin client on the device, and a rich API as the backend.

Ivo talks about the one of the key pieces of technology behind it all - the API that your service provides for iPad/iPod applications too hook into. Without a well-built, solid API to interface with, your application can be world class but not be very useful at all.

David Kent Norman has posted a new guide for those Drupal users wanting to get your favorite CMS up and running on the latest version of Apple's OS (Snow Leopard). The real issue comes with the stock Drupal install and the PHP 5.3 Snow Leopard comes bundled with.

Drupal 6 probably won't ever work right on PHP 5.3.0, which is what Snow Leopard packs by default. My feeling is that since Ubuntu LTS still runs PHP 5.2, Drupal 7 won't work at production level on PHP 5.3.0 either. For that reason, here is my PHP 5.2.10 install instructions for Snow Leopard. It will trash your built-in Snow Leopard install.

He includes links to the various packages you'd need to download and the configure command with a hefty helping of parameters to get things set up correctly. Also, as mentioned in one of the comments, there is a patch that can be applied to make the system work correctly with PHP 5.3.

A little while back Scott MacVicar wrote some thank yous to some of the larger and corporate groups involved with PHP and enhancing it as much as they can, both on their own hardware and for the community in general. Unfortunately, there seems to be one company that doesn't want to pay nice - Apple.

So if you've ever tried to compile PHP on OS X, you'll most likely have problems using the default system libraries and in the end you'll use macports to install libxml and iconv. If you're not trying to compile your own versions of PHP and want to use a PECL extension then you'll find that the binary has had all the symbols stripped. Mid last year I tried to get some of these resolved, and filed a bug report with Apple but was informed these weren't bugs.

He goes on to talk about the reception he got from the Apple Developer Connection and the brush-off he seemed to get when he tried with the same questions a few months later.

What was essentially asked for was help to improve PHP on OS X, but this has fallen on deaf ears. Apple are happy to take PHP but don't seem as keen to contribute anything back to the project. Yes they are perfectly entitled to do this, PHP is open source after all. But is waiving a $499 charge too much to ask?

Juozas Kaziukenas has reposted a video created by the RailsEmnvy.com folks (one of several, check out YouTube for more) that does a "Mac vs PC" Apple parody commercial of Ruby and PHP.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

Other videos include Ruby on Rails vs .NET, Ruby on Rails vs Django and, of course, Ruby on Rails vs ColdFusion.

The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.

As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.

Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with CSS. The end result shows your address groups, the members of that group and the selected member's information in the far right pane.

As always, the complete source can be downloaded.

Ivo Jansch mentions an interesting comparison that CNet made on security and levels of vulnerability in a new blog post today. Their article mentions PHP right along side Apple and Microsoft in their list of "most vulnerable software".

This article once again demonstrates the cluelessness that some people have regarding what PHP is. First of all, PHP is not a vendor, so "Apple, Microsoft & PHP" does not make much sense. Furthermore, the only reason PHP even is mentioned in this context is that Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress appear in the list. So PHP, a programming language, gets blamed for the security flaws that are in these packages.

By their logic (applications written in a language on the list means the language is more insecure), they should have marked C as a more insecure language given the ratio of PHP to C software.