PHP is a sufficiently rich programming environment that it is not common that I truly need to execute external programs on the server on which it executes. However, every once in a while, this situation does come along, and for these, it is important to understand the options that PHP provides, what their differences are, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

There are four primary choices for executing external programs in PHP:

• The system function.
• The exec function.
• The shell_exec function or its syntactic analogue, the backtick operator, ( ` ).
• the passthru function.

Today I had a glimpse into the future of Apple’s Mac OS X, and I was more than a little frightened.

When I think about why I use my Powerbook so much and shun Windows whenever possible, the reasons are not what most people might think. I don’t care about the cost (okay, 200$ USD for Windows is a bit much, but I happily paid 130$ USD for the 10.4 “Tiger” Upgrade to OS X on our 12” Powerbook), and while I’m more than a little alarmed by the security problems endemic in Windows, I can avoid many of them by using Firefox, and Microsoft is slowly learning how to do the automated patching game.

Sorry for the long pause in updating. I have spent the last couple of months writing a new blogging engine to power the Chipmunk Ninja web site. The problem with comments and extremely annoying process via which I would post new articles was getting to be a real problem.

The new system, while superficially quite similar to the old one, has a number of major new features: