VT’s Tech Blog

I just came across a great tool for transcoding videos in Ubuntu. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. They’ve also got Ubuntu installers which make it easy to install this available in a GUI and a commandline version. Using handbrake you can convert your DVDs [...]

Here’s a free PHP Ebook from Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series. More about this book: In this book, PHP 5′s co-creator and two leading PHP developers show you how to make the most of PHP 5′s industrial-strength enhancements in any project—no matter how large or complex. Their unique insights and realistic examples illuminate PHP 5′s [...]

If you’re using Linux as your primary OS, here’s a useful too to check for broken links on your websites. gURLChecker is a simple tool to check for broken links on any website. It can work on a whole site, a single local page or a browser bookmarks file. If you’re using Ubuntu, it’s quite [...]

If you’re new to testing in PHP, and were wondering how to create and run automated tests, here’s an ebook which will help you get the basics right. Practical PHP Testing is an ebook which is a compilation of  articles from Giorgio Sironi’s blog on Practical PHP testing. This book takes you though the basics [...]

Ever since the upgrade to WordPress 2.9, I’ve been having a problem in the scheduled posts in WordPress. Everytime I set a post to be scheduled in the future, it used to miss the scheduled time and never get posted. When I checked the status of these posts in the posts admin area, each of [...]

XHProf is a heriarcical profiler for PHP originally developed by Facebook and then opensourced. The raw data collection component is implemented in C (as a PHP extension). The reporting/UI layer is all in PHP. It is capable of reporting function-level inclusive and exclusive wall times, memory usage, CPU times and number of calls for each [...]

Image via Wikipedia When I talk to developers about security in web development, I usually get the answer that the security is taken care by the systems team by securing the server and by using the https protocol. In reality that is just the tip of the iceberg on security. There’s much more you should [...]

Forum Nokia is launching Qt Mobility Contest,  for which the grand prize is a paid trip to the  upcoming Nokia Developer Summit that takes place in summer 2010 in the USA. To take part in this contest you have to create a working example of an application using QT and QT Mobility API. Don’t stop [...]

Over at his blog, Abhinav Singh shows how to use the following extensions to learn more about the internal working of the Zend Engine which powers PHP: Tokenizer: The tokenizer functions provide an interface to the PHP tokenizer embedded in the Zend Engine. Using these functions you may write your own PHP source analyzing or [...]

Zipped folder icon from RF Stock Images Igbinary is a  replacement for the standard PHP serializer. While the PHP serializer uses a texual format to represent the data in the serialized version, igbinary uses a binary format which is compact. This helps in brining down the storage size of the serialized data. This helps while [...]