PHP on Google App Engine

Earlier I blogged about GAE and the PHP implementation in Java called Quercus. There is still no official support for PHP on GAE. I was wondering about the possibility of combining these two to run PHP apps on GAE, and it seems like it's already been done. See here and here. A google search will return tons of results on it.

Hopefully this will make GAE apps a little more portable between the truck loads of web hosts that support PHP.

Update: there is a whole blog about running PHP on GAE here.

Redundant Advertising?

tpl: Simple, Lightweight Serialization for C

"There are no library dependencies. You can compile its source code (one file) right into your program."

Should come in handy when you want to do some quick serialization/deserialization but doesn't have the time or is overkill to bring in a heavy duty player (or if you are working in pure C). The API looks simple and elegant. License is BSD.

Site: http://tpl.sourceforge.net/

Cool Transforming Flash Drive

Waaah! I want one!

United At Last!!

How historic is today? I don't think I can do justice in describing. I will only say that, it is as a greater day as the day World War II ended to a Briton, or the day the American Civil War ended to an American. Certainly it is the greatest day in the last 30 years of Sri Lanka's history, and that is longer than my lifetime.

Sphinx: SQL Full-Text Search Engine (GPL)

More info:
http://cplus.about.com/b/2009/05/11/sphinx-search-fast-text-searching-in-c.htm
http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

Quercus: PHP implemented in Java (GPL)

For Java buffs.

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

Why anyone would want this described here.

Star Trek

I'm no Trekkie, but the trailer looks awesome. (would have embedded it, but the video has embedding disabled.)

More trailers.

YQL: Yahoo! Query Language

Query the internet like SQL.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

7-zip: Better Than WinRAR?

I knew 7-zip was an excellent open-source compression program (and library), but the last time I checked (which was years ago), WinRAR was slightly ahead in text compression ratio. However, I downloaded the latest one and tried today, and it seems to have overtaken WinRAR.

I compressed the JDK 6 documentation from Sun, and the sizes were:
Uncompressed - ~265MB (12499 files, 851 folders)
Zip (original download format) - ~56MB
RAR (v3.71) - ~25MB
7-zip (v4.65) - ~20MB

Mind you, this were all text files. I didn't try with binary files but as I recall, last time I try with binary files and 7-zip did compress binary files better than WinRAR. Also the WinRAR version I have is not the latest, while the 7-zip version is the latest (cheat!). You might also notice that both RAR and 7-zip beats the pants off standard zip.

Anyway, that's enough convincing for me: fully open source, with a permissive license, good GUI, and now possibly the best compression ratios of all: I'm switching over to 7-zip. So its Goodbye to shareware WinRAR and Hello to open-source 7-zip!