SketchUp action

Over the weekend I finally gave SketchUp a try and got pretty wrapped up in it. I was up till 3 Tuesday night putting the finishing touches on my first contribution to 3D Warehouse. Of course it’s a skate spot.

Hubba Hideout

A great feature is that you can recreate a scene in 3D using a 2D image, but the problem is that your error goes up quickly as you try to guess angles and distances outside of the origin axis lines. You end up with a model that looks OK at the angle of the photo, but is more noticeably messed up when you shift the view. Most photos of the Hubba ledge aren’t at good angles to accurately map the perspective in SketchUp, so I had to tediously piece together the geometry based on several photos and a some guesswork.

So, when can I skate this?

Favorites of the php|tek 2007 slides

I didn’t go, of course (next year hopefully), but I can live vicariously through slides!

Ilia Alshanetsky had my favorites:

Also Jeff Moore’s presentation on the Dependency Injection (.pdf) pattern.

Derick Rethans (of eZ Components) has quite a few great presentations archived (though several are duplicates), including the best overview I’ve seen of PHP 5.2’s new native Date and DateTimeZone classes (.pdf) (and why date handling can be such a mess without them).

Running PHP on .NET???

Phalanger is a .NET compiler for PHP5. Yes, PHP code compiled into CLR running on .NET (or Mono), with access to .NET classes as PHP objects (!), and apparently running almost twice as fast as on the PHP CGI. And they’ve implemented enough native PHP functions identically enough to run fairly extensive apps (MediaWiki, WordPress, phpBB3) out-of-the-box. There are a couple PDFs in the docs that describe in intimate detail the intracacies of wrapping .NET objects so they behave as PHP objects do and vice-versa; the team knows the PHP5 object model inside and out and they’ve extended the syntax to allow importing namespaced .NET code.

The benchmarks look impressive (almost double the performance on phpBB), but certainly using a opcode cache or running on Apache or lighttpd would level the performance a bit. Then again, why would you use Phalanger just to run all native PHP apps? I guess if you’ve done a lot of PHP development and been itching to try out .NET, this is something to look into.