PHP

After upgrading a Debian install to use PHP 5.4, I ran into the following error:

PHP Warning: Unknown: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your timezone. in Unknown on line 0

OpenAtrium is a Drupal "distribution", a pre-packaged Drupal installation which targets a particular niche. I was told to consider it when I went looking for a support ticket package a couple of years ago. That project fell by the wayside but I did have a demo installation on my system and now that I do need to install a ticket management system again, I looked at resurrecting this installation and updating it for some snazzy new features.

While setting up Drupal on a friend's Ubuntu server, I ran into the following error message:

PHP Fatal error: Undefined class constant 'MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY' in /var/www/mysite/includes/database/mysql/database.inc on line 42

This basically simply means that the PHP PDO extension has not been installed. It can be installed via something along the lines of:
sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

While you are at it, make sure that all the other PHP extensions that Drupal requires are also installed.

Good luck :)

After an upgrade from Lucid to Precise, my PHP install started complaining about a library:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/gd.so'

While I've got a hunch that the actual problem is related to issues I had during the upgrade, turning this error (and other similar ones) off is as simple as going into /etc/php5/conf.d and renaming the file, in this case gd.ini to something like gd.ini.bak.

PHP provides a number of different versions for install in Windows. There are versions which are tagged with VC6 and other with VC9. There are also thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions of the installer available for download. After some digging and trial & error fiddlery, my conclusion is that VC9 and non-thread-safe are for the Microsoft IIS webserver while the VC6 and thread-safe installers are for Apache and other non-IIS webservers.

Hope this helps :)

So, what do you make of the error message in the title? I ran into this while coding in PHP and thought that I must've installed a dodgy version of PHP or might have been h4xx0r3d. But a quick google revealed that PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM represents the :: operator in Hebrew.

Crazy dudes.