May 9th, 2012

Recently, I received a message with 6 lines of text out of 10 missing in SquirrelMail. When I click the "Download this as a file", the message displayed entirely. No need to say my girlfriend was pissed that I didn't understand her message... Since my mitigated success upgrades, I'm using PHP 5.4.2 with a recent snapshot of the SquirrelMail code base (v1.5.2). The team at SquirrelMail had already made a good job porting the tool to PHP 5.4.

While investigating, I realized that the htmlspecialchars function from PHP is responsible for deleting the information when displaying the message. This is due to the fact that, as per the PHP doc, the charset parameter "Defines encoding used in conversion. If omitted, the default value for this argument is ISO-8859-1 in versions of PHP prior to 5.4.0, and UTF-8 from PHP 5.4.0 onwards."

I fixed it by modifying the charset_decode function in include/languages.php lines 219 - 220 to the following in order to reflect the default parameters in earlier versions:

if ( ! $force_decode && $charset == strtolower($default_charset) )
    return ($save_html ? $string : htmlspecialchars($string,ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401,'ISO-8859-1'));

This did the job for me, until I receive another e-mail not compatible encoding wise. Anyhow, I hope this will help you avoid spending too much time debugging.

ConFoo thought big... but last edition for me.

First, let met thank all the volunteers that contributed to another successful conference. They were over 20 to join us this year, giving their time, some of them by choice, some of them despite the student strike. However, mission accomplished! On another note, I find myself leaving the organisation team, mostly because I strongly disagree with some decisions that have been taken in the past, and the lack of ethics and integrity that resulted from that. After 10 years of conference organisation and voluntering, it is time for me to retire and leave space for youger bloods.

Thank you all for this wonderful experience!

The first edition ever of the ConFoo Conference reached an unexpected success.

With over 450 attendees to the conference et over 1300 visitors to the job fair, I guess we could say the conference was a success. Apart from a few issues with the wi-fi network, pretty much everything went well. I would like to personnaly thank all and each one of you, sponsors, volunteers, speakers and visitors who allowed us to reach such an event. "Some day, Montreal will be known for something else than the olympic stadium."

See you next year!

ConFoo.ca 2010 will take place from March 10th to 12th 2010, at the Hilton Bonaventure hotel, downtown Montreal.

This new event, an evolution from Conférence PHP Québec, is a joint effort project from many user groups and local communities. The goal is to offer one of the most complete conference on Web technologies. PHP Québec, Montréal Python, Ruby Montréal, W3 Québec as well as OWASP are working together to dig out the best speakers who are willing to come and share their experience with the different communities. The conference board is actually looking for :

• Speakers: Session proposals are accepted until November 13th, 2009.
• Sponsors: An OSBL organization ran by volunteers could not survive without the generous contributions of sponsors.
• Visitors: Register now and get early bird discount rate for the conference tickets.
• Recruiters: An IT job fair and cocktail will be held during the conference, on March 10th and 11th 2010. Access to the job fair and cocktail is free and opened to everyone, both recruiters or job seekers. Kiosks are also available to rent for those who would like increased visibility during the event.

I personaly wish to thank all those who allowed the 2009 edition of the Conference PHP Quebec to reach such a success level.

Around 240 peoeple took part into the Conference and over 600 people attended our jobfair. Thanks to all our sponsors, the speakers, the volunteers, the organisation team without forgetting all our visitors without whom, such an event could not become possible. I'm curious to find out what other suprises awaits us on the corner of 2010. You would like to get involved into the organisation or you have any suggestion to make? Feel free to contact us to discuss it.