I have had to install Xdebug on a few systems now and I always find myself spending time going down the wrong, or should I say the harder, path. Which is to try to install via PECL as recommended. For some reason the PECL install on OSX does not work as designed. The built extension ends up being of the wrong architecture. My guess is that it is built as a 32 bit extension instead of 64 bit.

It is sometimes useful and necessary to run a symfony task from within an action. I have found that it is a good practice to keep the amount of code in a task to a minimum by putting all your logic into a class and then simply instantiating an object of that class in a task and then calling a method to which you pass the task arguments and options to get your work done.

UPDATE (May 21st 2015):

In the comment by hk0i you will find a simpler way of doing this by installing the coreutils via homebrew

A little while ago I came across a problem in PHP where I had to process large amounts of data from Google Analytics. If I choose a date range that was too large, PHP would run out of memory. I was not able to resolve the memory leak issue caused by parsing very large XML documents so I settled on writing a shell script that would process the data one day at a time by essentially calling the PHP script over and over instead of having it process all data during a single run. I got as far as confirming that this was not a case of simply not having enough memory to do the job, rather there appeared to be a memory leak in a library that I used to process the GA data.

I recently made the switch from the dark side and wonder almost daily why I did not get a Mac years ago. Getting this new device meant learning a whole bunch of new things. I have compiled a list of useful applications, browser plugins and some mobile apps I have come across in the last few months. Not all of them are specific to the Mac.

CodeWorks is a relatively new PHP conference organized by the folks at php|architect Magazine. Now in its second year, it has been considerably scaled back in scope compared to the first conference. The Florida event was hosted in Orlando this year, which was a lot more convenient for me since it is smack in the middle of the state and a bit easier to get to than Miami. The idea behind this conference, which takes place in multiple cities throughout the US, is to bring a conference to people who usually do not attend events of this nature because they are either too far away or they are simply too long. According to Marco Tabini, the purpose of this event was not so much to educate in a particular area of PHP, but to inspire attendees and encourage them to come away from the conference with more questions than they came with.

Update, 2011-11-16: Added some troubleshooting info

There are many reasons why you would want to install ssh2 for PHP on your server, mine was to allow me to use SFTP on a WordPress installation because my web host does not allow the use of FTP. Even if your host allows FTP I strongly urge you to use SFTP instead, since it uses SSH to encrypt all your data transfers. FTP sends your username and password as plain text!