My last words ...

... about my study that is!

After seven years of attending college I am no longer a student anymore. It still has to sink in a little bit, but I will probably get used to it very soon. It is quit confronting to transfer all of your (bank-)accounts to a non-student one :(

Thesis

I defended my thesis yesterday morning in front of a crowded room. Although I was a bit nervous before the talk this feeling faded away when I started the presentation. I thought it went reasonably well and this was confirmed by my supervisor(s). Please allow me to thank Johan Jeuring and Jurriaan Hage for their time and effort to supervise me.

If you are interested in the final result of the thesis you can visit my thesis page, or just download the complete thesis here. The slides of my presentation can be found on this page. Even though the project is finished (in the sense that I am not obligated to work on it anymore) I am still interested in remarks and comments you might have.

Work

And what do people usually do when they graduate college? Right, they take a vacation!

In my opinion I already had some vacation the past couple of weeks. I finished the major part of my thesis at the end of August, so in September I only had to integrate comments from my supervisors. This gave me lots of spare time which I used to relax a little bit.

Therefore, I took some time to found a nice job. After visiting several companies I decided to accept a job at the Software Improvement Group. During the interviews I got the feeling that this is a challenging job where I can learn a lot. Whether this feeling is correct is something that only time can tell us.
I will just wait and see what happens Monday morning!

A little migration helper

You probably already heard about it, but support for PHP version 4 is partly dropped as of 31-12-2007. And after 08-08-2008 the support ends completely.

Luckily, the PHP documentation team provides you with a set of migration guides. Going through these guides can take some time, but it enables you to upgrade your code easily to be PHP5 compatible.

To make your life even easier, the PHP-tools project is extended with the tool test-migration. This tool performs some checks that are described by the migration guide to detect whether the code can be run under version 5 of PHP. These checks include:

• Is there a function definition with the same name as a function newly defined in PHP5?
• Is an object created without the class being defined first?
• Where are the functions strrpos, strripos and ip2long used?
• Is there any place in which there is reflection within PHP that uses changed behavior?

The first two checks are rather easy to understand, PHP5 will simply halt execution with an error when these issues are detected at runtime. Therefore, the warnings that are generated for these kind of patterns are shown with a 'serious'-level.
On the other hand, the last two checks do not find constructions that can halt execution. They detect places in which certain constructions are used. These constructions where already available within PHP version 4, but their behavior changed in version 5. To easily find these constructions they are flagged by a 'minor'-warning. More details about the changed behavior can be found here.

The first version of this tool is quit basic and performs only a few checks. If you would like to see more check included, don't hesitate to drop me an email or put them in the comments.