Bits from Beyond Binary--Dec. 12, 2007
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Is Microsoft-served ads slowing down Web sites? Plus, what is Ask erasing, and what are the others keeping? And a 'Knight Rider' comeback and more.
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Tony Bibbs, in the wake of last week's surprise from Microsoft to Yahoo, has posted a few of his thoughts on the matter.   I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?   He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.   So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.   She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:RefreshinglyBlue Blog: PHP vs Ruby - Practical Language DifferencesAndreas Gohr's Blog: Determine StumbleUpon RankingsPHP.net: PHP 5.2.4 ReleasedThe Bakery: Five New Posts - Custom Views, CSS, ViewInFile, ActsAs and Email ValidationPHPBuilder.com: File uploads made easyStefan Mischook's Blog: Turning on display_errors in WAMP - Video Tutorialphp|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Newscast for August 2007MT-Soft Blog: Creating a secure PHP production environment from Source CodeCommunity News: Andi Gutmans to Present at AjaxWorld 2007HowTo Forge: How To Set Up A Facebook RSS Feed Reader
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What high-powered, high-design, graphics-oriented, Unix-based computers are beloved by their fanatical users? Clue: It's not what you think. By Jason Walsh.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)
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Chipmaker looks beyond upcoming quad-core tech to a "teraflop" processor with 80 cores. Also: Steeley chip to cut UMPC prices.
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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
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Luke Welling takes a humorous look at something he misses in PHP - register globals being set to on.    I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company [...] so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them. I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.   I really like register_globals in PHP.    He reminicies about the days gone by of being able to assume that register_globals is turned on, the days of simpler, lighter code that's even easier for the newbies to get into. Anyone for a tshirt?
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Here's a glimpse at just a few of the products and projects Linux Journal editors are buzzing about this month:  Zonbu PC 1.0 (upgrade) read more
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Is the traditional puzzle cube any better with lights and games built in? Plus: Romantic geeks can now exchange binary wedding bands. In Gadget Lab.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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This third and final article in the Metasploit series covers the msfcli scripting interface as well as the intuitive web interface to the Framework. The article also discusses what's new with version 2.2, and then introduces the exploit development process through an example.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Chapter 14: Kernel Debugging Techniques, reprinted with permission from Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach By Christopher Hallinan, Published by Prentice Hall
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk