New UI toolkit for libPirate

After six month, I have to say my Gtk toolkit is really going the wrong way. It was a great time to discover this, as the new Winbinder was just released.

Winbinder, for those who don’t know, is an extension to PHP which allows it to bind to Win32 GUI elements to create applications. Essentially, it is to Windows as PHP-GTK is to … well, every platform with Gtk, including Windows.

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Graphical WineLocale on the way

Good news for anyone who wants to use non-Latin characters in Wine: my graphical version of WineLocale is almost ready.

I have improved all the registry hacks so no fonts should be missing now for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Russian support have not changed substantially in this update.

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Why the PHP5 GD library is insane

For anyone using PHP5’s GD library, you may want to update your copy with the one from the Pirate Repository. By the end of this post, it should be clear why.

At some point along its development, whoever maintains the PHP5 GD extension made a very bad decision: to drop half the extension when linking against external GD.

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I’ve updated gPHPEdit

Since the author doesn’t seem to respond to forum posts — even his own where he asked for suggestions — or emails, I decided to sit down and update gPHPEdit myself.

My updates include a full function rip from PHP 5.2.0’s manual. It has every single function from the manual, as well as a script to extract the function list from the plain text PHP manual. There’s also an update to add an “Execute” command in addition to check syntax. This makes it useful for developing CLI, or especially GTK applications with PHP.

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Terrors with php memory and fileio

In my unending quest to eek more speed out of things, I took the PHP manual as gospel and believed it when it said it creates a new value in RAM when using the assignment operator.

Big mistake, it doesn’t.

This essentially renders my RAM disk class useless. I had spent the past three nights designing an incredibly powerful class that accesses raw RAM using the new memory stream introduced in PHP 5.1. There is a lot I learned in the process.

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Running NANA on Linux

Neil Corlett’s NANA is still the best tool around for finding graphical data in a binary. Unfortunately, it’s DOS only.

If you’ve been around my site, you’ll see I’ve written a loader for using NANA on Windows via DOSBox. That code, however, relied on Windows “DIR” for detecting the DOS8.3 name of the file to ‘nana’.

I tweaked the code to work on Linux with Linux DOSBox.

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Planning to checksum in PHP?

I am rewriting NINJA to use the block scanning part of the rsync algorithm for binary differences, so I needed to figure out which checksum would be fastest to achieve in PHP. rsync normally calls for Adler-32, but any checksum algorithm should work fine.

Below are the results of several checksum/hash algorithms in PHP. Clearly, PHP’s native crc32() function is the fastest of the group:

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Making AjaxWp and Lightbox play nice

You may have noticed this entire site is now AJAX based. That wasn’t easy to pull off, but finding AjaxWp helped a lot.

Contrary to what the top of the page suggested, AjaxWp did not work with my Lightbox 2.0 install at all. Thinking perhaps 2.0 wasn’t supported, I tried 1.0. That didn’t work either.

It took me about three hours of fiddling with FireBug’s DOM inspector, but eventually I realized two things:

1. Lightbox was not accessible to new content coming in from an AJAX load.
2. When Lightbox was accessible, all navigation links within the lightbox were being arrested by AjaxWp.

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The flakiness of int64 in PHP 6 nightly

In an effort to improve libPirate to take full advantage of PHP 6.0 with its new int64, I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to solve some problems. The primary problem is as of now, int64 support sucks.

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Setting up PHP-CLI on Windows XP

This is just a quick one, but something I found information about strikingly absent.

All the PHP-CLI guides explain how to install it so typing “php -v” gives you the expected CLI response, but nobody bothered to explain how to link PHP scripts so you can run them like an EXE without having to type PHP first.

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