James Titcumb

PHP4 for me since starting at Netbasic has been a mere lifeless form of PHP that I used to get into web development. But reading this article reminded me that PHP4 will soon die.

Well, as I said recently, on a day for the PHP community dubbed as “8-8-8″ (referring to 8th August 2008), PHP4 will officially be halted. This means there will be no more development done for PHP4. Any new bugs will remain forever. Any developers still using PHP4 won’t get the support they used to. There won’t even be any security updates to seal up loopholes and hacks.

But on the upside, PHP5 will be the choice. We’re already on PHP 5.2.6 (stable), and the next version is well on the way. Now the article I linked to poses several questions:

• What if in 2 months time, evil hackers will find a bug in PHP4 that is exploitable?
• What if they write a spider that crawls the internet in search for applications that run PHP4?
• What if they target all those sites with malicious code?
• What if indeed there will be no fix for this exploit?
• What are you going to do?

There’s a simple answer to all these questions :- people really need to upgrade to PHP5. It’s really that simple. For developers, I think there’s actually very little to do (the odd thing is listed in the PHP5 Migration Guide). My move from PHP4 to PHP5 was simple and very very pain free (perhaps I was lucky?). Personally, I think it’s the web hosts that need to get their bums in gear. Following my article about Newnet, they’ve actually started using PHP5 for new hosts, and are offering free migrations from PHP4 to the newer PHP5 UNIX servers, so good on them, I fully back Newnet 100% in this descision.

At the end of the day though, a day will come when web hosts really do NEED to upgrade, perhaps because of some horrific bug that will destroy the universe. If I were those web hosts, I’d do it sooner rather than later. But as is the way with some companies – they use the ethos “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I used to think that, but I’ve learnt recently that with some things, even if it ain’t broke, you can make it more secure, work faster and work better.

Thankfully, here at Netbasic, we use PHP5 already, so I’m happy as chips.

At lunch, I asked Sii (one of our design guru’s here at Netbasic) to see what he thought of my new theme. He said pretty much straight away to get rid of the solid black lines, so I’ve replaced them all (except the date by the post titles as I stupidly put the border in the image itself…) with more subtle greys. So if you’re still seeing solid black lines around stuff, clear your cache and enjoy the new easier-on-the-eye greys. Cheers Sii!

Am I lazy? Yes, probably. Now that my Twitter digest posts are working again it tells me how much I’m not posting… and I haven’t posted here in a whole 4 days! Oh noes, whatever will become of me… Truth be told, I’ve not had much of a chance to blog to be honest, even about things I’ve wanted to blog about at work or at home.

I have just recently got back from a meeting with one of our partners in (stupidly busy, traffic-wise) Farnham, which ended sooner than I thought. I also thought I’d have little-to-no envolvement as I didn’t think I’d have any idea what anyone was talking about. On the upper hand, I actually had a reasonable amount of input (at least when the other tecchie guy came in), and knew more-or-less what they were talking about. All-in-all, a successful meeting I think.

Well, I’m back in the office now anyway, after getting aggravated at all the stupidly slow drivers on the A32 (30mph in a national speed limit, anyone?), and we have an hour to go ’til we depart to Southampton to check out the delights of the masterful Bon Jovi. Should be fun to see the classics such as “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Bad Name” and “It’s My Life”, amongst others. I’ve never been a huge fan of Bon Jovi, but I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to see him for free, courtesy of Netbasic! Looking forward to it though.

Oh, and while I’m bloggin’, check out dis shizzle: Rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs. A few of them are quite funny, but I think you have to know about the music to get some of them. Some gentle lols came out of me anyway…

OK, so after a couple of comments today about the slowness of loading the new Total Carange site, I’ve decided to stop using the Ext JS library. It’s very nice and all that, but on my slow server, it’s slow as hell. I’d much rather stick to some simple Javascript that I wrote myself and limit it to just that. It’s a simple site, and should load quickly, not in the 20-30+ seconds it has been today. Maybe one day when I get a fast upload speed I’ll look into using it again, but for now, it’s a no-go.

Anyway, after working at the IFE company I used to work for and dealing with enormous amounts of Javascript in web applications, I’ve had enough of masses of JS. Use JS to enhance, not as a basis.

Something I’ve defended in conversation for some time has been my choice to quit college before even attaining AS Level qualifications. I maintain still that it has been worthwhile doing this and building my career in development by hard graft. And it has been hard for me, but I’m so happy with the results I’m getting.

Lets take a look for a moment at what would’ve happened if I’d have followed the standard route of A-Levels, following that onto Uni. I would’ve done finished my Media Studies, Mathematics, Computing and Physics A-Levels. Congratulations, 2 years in college, only marginally increased prospects of a job. I would’ve then gone to Uni, most likely a Computer science or IT-related degree. Three or four years later, I’ve got a degree. And a whopping big debt. And most likely, no job. I’d find a job to tide me over, something I’m not interested in doing (like 1st-line tech support for example), and tried to find a better job. I’d still have a big debt. By luck one day, I land a junior developer job for a company. I’d get paid in the region of 16-20k salary I expect. Not bad for a 21/22 year old. I’d still have a massive amount of debt though. Plus because I’d be earning over the student loan repayment threshold, I’d have to start paying it off. So that would start coming out my pay packet. In this situation, I imagine looking into the future and seeing myself earning 30k+, slowly paying off my debts accrued from student life. Not bad.

Now look at what I’ve actually done. I quit college 4/5 months into the first year. I got a crappy job at Burger King. I moved out on my own at 17, started working at Marks & Spencers for a month or two. I found a Junior test job at a software developer firm in Chichester, getting paid a pitiful £9,600 / year salary. Within a couple of months, I’d proven to them that I could code, and I was quickly promoted to a software developer. I went on to gain 4 years of professional experience in PHP, Javascript, Linux, and loads of other bits. Armed with this experience, I went off to find a new job. I dabbled in .NET for a couple of months, and didn’t like that. So I got my job here, and I won’t say how much I earn as people who I work with read this Nevertheless, I’m 21/22 now, and earning more than I would’ve done had I gone to Uni at this stage in my life. I worked really hard to get here, but I think it was worth it. My future now, is the same as above, minus the huge debt acquired from student life.

I do have debts, but thats because I was rubbish with money. But that’s a different story.

I read a very good article on degrees and the value of them on MSN news, so have a read of it yourself and draw your own conclusions.