In a new post to his blog Brian Moon describes a need he had for detecting if the client or user calling a PHP script was using an interactive terminal (TTY) or not:

Let's say I am trying to find out why some file import did not happen. Running the job that is supposed to do it may yield an error. Maybe it was a file permission issue or something. There are other people watching the alerts. What they don't know is that I am running the code and looking at these errors in real time.

Since the errors were being sent to the log file, they were lost to the client/user on the other end left staring at their script wondering what went wrong. He ended up with a solution (a pretty simple one too) that uses posix_ttyname and posix_isatty. He includes the little snippet of code he puts in his prepend file that checks for errors then checks for a TTY. If both are there, it turns off logging the errors to the file and sends them direct instead.

In an interesting post to his blog Rob Morgan shows how you can log in to a terminal from a Zend Framework application (on OS X) with the help of NodeJS.

NodeJS is a tool designed to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. By using the I/O capabilities of NodeJS, I have built a simple TCP server that writes log messages to the OS X terminal (via STDOUT).

He shows how to take his example script and run NodeJS as a server on a local port (like 8003). You can then use his log writer plugin in your Zend Framework app to write directly to the waiting NodeJS server.

The PHP-GTK website has four new posts highlighting three different widgets and a Timer class to make working with delays in applications simpler:

• CommandWidget - a terminal like widget for php-gtk
• Dial widget - a graphical widget to display an analog value
• ScrollingLabel - a funny label widget with scrolling capabilities
• Timer class : simplifying gtk::timeout_add

Keep an eye on the Code Snippets section of the PHP-GTK website for more helpful tips and tricks.