Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

PHP CodeSniffer: Ignoring rules

PHP CodeSniffer is a great tool for making sure all your code is consistent with a set of rules and guidelines. However, there are cases, when you need to ignore the rules for a particular code snippet. For example, when you are working with third-party frameworks or libraries.

CodeSniffer provides a number of ways to do this. Until today, the following worked well for me:

// @CodingStandardsIgnoreStart
echo "Here goes some code that breaks the rules";
// @CodingStandardsIgnoreEnd

This is particularly useful for code within functions and methods. But what if you need to ignore a particular rule for the whole file, especially in places like method names, which are difficult to surround by starting and ending annotation tags?

Here’s an example that worked for me (thanks to this comment for the solution):

<?php
/**
 * @phpcs:disable CakePHP.NamingConventions.ValidFunctionName.PublicWithUnderscore
 */

The only bit that you’d probably need now is an easy way to find the name of the rule from the CodeSniffer output. The usual output of “./vendor/bin/phpcs” looks like so:

FILE: src/Model/Table/KeysTable.php
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 1 ERROR AFFECTING 1 LINE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 53 | ERROR | Public method name "KeysTable::_initializeSchema" must not be prefixed with underscore
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But if you run it with the “-s” flag (thanks to this comment), CodeSniffer will add sniff codes to all reports. Here’s the same example with “./vendor/bin/phpcs -s“:

FILE: src/Model/Table/KeysTable.php
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 1 ERROR AFFECTING 1 LINE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 53 | ERROR | Public method name "KeysTable::_initializeSchema" must not be prefixed with underscore
    |       | (CakePHP.NamingConventions.ValidFunctionName.PublicWithUnderscore)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And that’s the code sniff rule that you can add to the ignore annotation tag at the top of your file, like I’ve shown above.

Joe Rogan Experience #1368 – Edward Snowden

All episodes of Joe Rogan Experience podcast are nearly three hours long, so I usually just watch the highlights. But this chat with Edward Snowden was well worth the full length watch.

Edward Snowden is one of the brightest and bravest people of our generation, and his story is fascinating. I think that this lengthy podcast episode provided a good channel for him to tell it. It’s not a tweet or a blog post, and it’s not strictly framed corporate media.

I also think that Joe Rogan is one of the finest interviewers today. In this episode, he shows that very well, but remaining silent for almost all duration of the show, with an occasional steer of the conversation.

I wish there were more content like this online.

Oh, and just for the record, “Permanent Record” is the book that Edward Snowden has written and is heavily referencing in this talk. I’ll definitely be buying a copy.

Git tips: disable diff prefix

Pure gold.

DNSFS and PingFS

The other day I came across this fun read – DNSFS. Store your files in others DNS resolver caches. And this bit in the article really cracked me up:

This is not the first time something like this has been done, Erik Ekman made PingFS, a file system that stores data in the internet itself .

This works because inside every ping packet is a section of data that must be sent back to the system that sent the ping, called the data payload.

Because you can put up to 1400-ish bytes in this payload, and pings take time to come back, you can use the speed of light in fiber as actual storage.

Now obviously this is not a great idea for long term data storage, since you have to keep transmitting and receiving the same packets over and over again, plus the internet gives no promise that the packet won’t be dropped at any time, and if that happens then the data is lost.

However. DNS has caches. It has caches everywhere.

Obviously, neither DNSFS, nor PingFS should be used for anything serious, but both are excellent experiments, demonstrating the flexibility of the TCP/IP and thinking outside the box.