Monthly Archives: June 2014

Random XMPPHP note with autobiographical footnote

If you happen, for Sekrit Reasons, to be playing with XMPPHP and you get the error message:

Fatal error: Cannot access protected property XMPPHP_XMPP::$disconnected

What you need to do is go into XMPPHP/XMLStream.php and change line 85 from

protected $disconnected = false;

to

public $disconnected = false;

It’s possible if not likely that people who know more PHP than I(1) could have figured this out for themselves. But I had to quack it, and the only answer was in a Spanish-speaking forum (¡muchos gracias!), so I figured it may be worth putting a translation into the eyes of the search engines for folk who didn’t happen to study Spanish for a few years there.

(1) I went through a stage of learning whatever human languages I could get my hands on, and every few years make an attempt on a new Latin grammar, but I was always most successful when there was a purpose to the learning, like reading novels or translating a Star Trek episode into French or talking to the girl in Mongolia who alerted me to my pocket having just been picked.

When however it comes to computer languages, I’ve never been sufficiently motivated to learn something just for the heck of it, or to embark on a sufficiently gigantic project that my ordinary task-oriented learning methods have accrued much more knowledge than the basics. If I knew more I’d probably use it a little more, but with the kinds of things I tackle, what I know is generally enough to either:

  1. solve the problem;
  2. help me figure out how to quack the problem; or
  3. decide that I didn’t care that much about the problem anyway.

Which I feel is a valid solution, given how many other things there are to do in the world than just code.