-Posted by david.berlind @ 8:17 am
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Research in Motion has announced its latest BlackBerry phone, aka the BlackBerry 7100t.ï¿½ The phone isnât due to ship until October and test units are just getting into reviewersâ hands (Iâm waiting for mine right now.
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... but I am as confident as I am   that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists.   After all, we have the children to think about.    It seems that David Clark, who led the development of  the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there  even was a '70's? -  wants to     create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the   current Internet is plagued with.  The New Internet's engineers will be  much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than  the first one did.    I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones  who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.      If one is able to find any   privacy or anonymity in this New Internet,   it will be because of some undiscovered     security hole, which will be   quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision.    Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out   is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n,   peer-to-peer filesharing and   left-wing political activism.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql
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Tycho: Our third book is now available on the store, if you haven't purchased it elsewhere. Entitled The Warsun Prophecies, it incorporates all the strips from 2002. I'm usually scared to read something I've written once I've written it, which may help you to understand the state these posts sometimes arrive in - but I think this one turned out really well.I've just now finished the final edits on the fourth book, which will be released... in the future. Also, on the very same store, our Fire Sale continues to rage - with the heat of a thousand bargains! Huge savings in every department, etc.(CW)TB
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Tycho: The whole reason I wrote that other post was to link the new article about it at 1up, and I didn't even manage to do that - here you go. In a way, I'm glad I didn't link it before - in the intervening period, a new episode of the 1up show has dropped that has a ton of interview and video material for every part of Episode 2 - including TF2 and Portal. It's the top video on this page. Unbelievably delicious.(CW)TB
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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Chris Hartjes has posted an update on the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler package for the Zend Framework, including writing the unit tests to ensure it's complete functionality.   In my spare time I've been banging away at writing the required unit tests for the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler component that Derek and I had started. I finished all the unit tests for the user based functions, which is a nice milestone. Then I decided to go back and actually read the comments made from the proposal. Oops. I discovered there were a bunch of changes that the folks at Zend said needed to be made in order to accept them. I agree with most of them.   He also lists some of these comments/changes/suggestions for the package that were given to help it fit in better with the rest of the framework.
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You know itâs been a strange week when youâre mulling over cellular plans for your pet. But I seem to be doing just that. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based PetsMobility Networks is developing a phone that clips to your dogâs collar. Fido can hear his masterâs voice and, I suppose, respond in kind. Iâm not entirely convinced this is a good idea. I can just see Apache running up my cell bills with crank calls (âDo you have Alpo in the can?â).
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Tycho: You might have heard that NASA was trying to gin up an MMO. We just received a mail from a human being involved in the project, someone who wants to make sure they collect the best ideas from the best people. Naturally, she thought of the readership here. Her mail follows:I know how incredibly unpleasant this could end up being if we don'thave the right minds behind it, and would just like the chance to get itin front of as many potentially talented people as possible. Would youguys consider posting a sentence on this in the news section soon?"The purpose of this RFI is to solicit information from organizationswith proven immersive synthetic environments expertise who areinterested in potentially forming a MMO platform development partnershipwith NASA. We are currently targeting releasing a Request for Proposalin March 2008."Here's a couple of run-downs in English from people outside NASA:http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/nasa-seeks-inpu.htmlhttp://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/would-you-play.html#previouspostAnd the NASA sites:http://procurement.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/synopsis.cgi?acqid=128415http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/submit.htmlNASA gets surprisingly tiny amounts of money (about $17B/yr) to go tofreakin' space and do a whole lot of discovering of varioushumanity-impacting things. And a lot of people just don't know theamount of awesomeness we do for that. We're working on many things totry and communicate to people better about what we do (that's part ofour forming mandates, actually), and this is one initiative.And I think it would be cool if it wasn't a big mess, or even just an"eh" thing. I'd like to see it be *good*.For the space program, guys?Oh, but darling: you had us at immersive synthetic environments.(CW)TB
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By Scott Streater, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Feb.
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By Mike Dougherty, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.  Jun. 22--thingsthatwere.blogspot.com   I love old stuff, and this blog has scads of pix of old stuff that once was. Some of it is still around. Lots of it isn't or is in a serious state of disrepair. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.
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At the public demo on the 17th, I will talk about the idea of the Networked Living Room built on RSS. Low-tech, open, all moving parts replaceable. Not just photos, that's step one.  Sign up on Upcoming. Still some space left.
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Davey Shafik has posted another update on his web services component he's working up for the Zend Framework, the Zend_Service_Server.    I have been working closely with Matthew Weier O'Phinney for the last week on bringing my Zend_Service_Server proposal to fruition.   There have been several changes, but the core has not moved too far. Matthew, Andi and I have decided that we will first implement the different server/client libraries.    He lists the libraries they'll need to tackle first and talks about an "exercise" he did to work up a JSON server component that works in a similar fashion.
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Tycho: The recently conducted Xfire chat has now been collated into this easy to digest transcript. In case you wanted to digest it. In addition, the latest page of our insane Prey project has now gone online. Just click the link on the left, for "We Have Visitors."  Also! Your mom is trying to get a hold of you. You should give her a call.(CW)TB
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Nikon leads SLR market in Japan...gaming the Creative Commons...new geotagging tech...30-minute Olympus E-3 video...Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 3...Microsoft Popfly video humor