Category Archives: Software Development

Using Lucene with PHP

A new article at phpriot walks through using the Zend_Search_Lucene which is part of the new Zend Framework. I’ve been playing with Xapian recently and liking it a lot, but Lucene is next on my list. There’s a scholarly comparison sheet (PDF) which compares several open source IR engines, which suggests the information retrieval performance is between Xapian and Lucene is broadly similar. However, it will be interesting to benchmark the two to see what differences in speed there may be.

Pastebin clipboard support

I had a feature suggestion to add a “copy to clipboard” link to pastebin.com. This was easy for IE, but I had a hard time getting Firefox to play ball. There’s an article at MozillaZine covering the issue, but I wasn’t able to get the technique to work. If anyone knows how, let me know!

I know clipboard access is a potential security vulnerability, but Firefox has the right idea in explicitly granting sites access to the clipboard rather than IE’s rather dumb “yeah, clipboard, here you go!” approach.

Anyway, for the time being, a bit of javascript during onload will figure out if your browser can do clipboard copies and will insert a “copy to clipboard” link when you’re looking at a post. Seems like a handy feature.

There’s also been a few bug fixes since the release a few days ago.

Download pastebin.tar.gz (130 KB)