Why Borland trashed its spreadsheet
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Finds hidden meaning Myths and legends Always remember, the compiler is your friend. Programming is stressful but no matter how many f**ks and b***ocks you might occasionally feel the need to insert into the comments, the compiler will always strip them out. It's great.â¦
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).
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In a new blog entry today, Matthew O'Phinney talks about updates (and refactoring) that he's done to a PEAR package he's developed, File_Fortune.   Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.   The package is designed to make an interface between the casual PHP user and the fortune files common on most *nix machines. To illustrate he update, he includes some code that grabs the fortune file, parses it to grab a random one and echoes them out. Also included is the save() method so you can add your own to the list easily.
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InfoWorld - Borland Software on Tuesday will refresh the Silk application testing product line it acquired last year.
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Hoping to get some work done on a recent train trip to New York, I kicked back, opened my laptop, and clicked on Microsoft Excel. Up popped a prompt asking for the original program disk. Same thing with Word and PowerPoint. Nothing would run.
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By Mark Kellner, The Washington Times  Feb. 20--In the early days of PC computing, there were all sorts of  little programs that made life easier. One was Borland Software's Sidekick  that let people keep vital information at hand on their computers.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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The results of the latest International PHP Magazine are in and posted today on their site. The question this time was asking developers and visitors alike what they think sucks about PHP.   Choices included "No lexical scoping", "PEAR", and "Worst Configuration System" but one climbed to the top far above the others - "No namespacing". Trailing that at a distant second were two, getting the same number of votes - "No lexical scoping" and "Can't afford a vowel" (hmm, interesting).    Up for this week is a new poll that asks those out there that have used the Symfony framework to cast their votes about what they think is the best feature the project has included. Check it out and cast your vote today...
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In filtering through the mass of projects that he's collected around him, Padraic Brady has decided to cut one loose - the Zend Framework package he'd been developing to introduce YAML parsing and functionality to the framework.   I've been going through all those open source projects and cutting the dead weight. [...] One of the victims of this review has been Zend_Yaml. Earlier this morning I found an odd comment on the Zend_Translate_Yaml proposal by Thomas Weidner that he was erasing his proposal on the basis that there had been no progress on Zend_Yaml.   He's removed the proposal from the Zend Framework proposal pages after receiving an email noting that the package would not comply fully to the YAML 1.1 specification and couldn't be included. With the introduction of the Syck extension into PECL, it could support it but Padraic opted to just tell the ZF group about this functionality rather than working on the build himself.
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I was reading LWN where there were reports of security holes in a dozen different packages based off Mozilla's Gecko. Someone complained about the lack of a universal library that they should all use so that users would only need to update the library and not each program separately. Apparently such a library exists as libxul, but its use is uncommon enough that the bugs were reported as being for the several separate programs and not for "libxul".
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(InfoWorld) - Borland Software surveyed its own customers to get a snapshot of the ALM (application lifecycle management) market and found heterogeneity rules in application development.Â  The company polled more than 300 customers in May and June. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they support two or more development platforms, and 42 percent deploy to both Java and .Net. Half are using four or more ALM tools, and 33 percent have tools from more than three different vendors. Sixty-six percent of respondents use both open-source and commercial ALM tools. Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said they use two or more software development processes with agile methodologies and custom processes receiving the highest percentage of votes. "One of the reasons we're seeing folks actively move to the agile space is so they can be more responsive," said Marc Brown, Borland vice president of product marketing. But some user sites may not use agile processes if they have so many people trained on a particular process and gauge that change presents more risks than benefits, Brown said. According to the survey, the top priority in delivering software was meeting the needs of the business or customer with 59 percent selecting that priority. Some 25 percent ranked delivery of high-quality software as their top goal. Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to implement process improvement initiatives as their biggest ALM projects for the coming year, Borland said. Integration of tools received 21 percent of the vote. The survey also found that organizations are challenged in effectively managing the end-to-end process of software delivery to achieve the full potential of ALM. Among the issues cited were disconnected processes, lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, poor interoperability between tools, and lack of metrics and functional silos. Borland has re-focused the company from development tools to the ALM space with its Open ALM strategy that aims to accommodate existing software development assets in delivering software.
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Great news -- your stock just got downgraded!
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Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.   Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.   He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.
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TechWeb - A government report is blaming a botched software project for the loss of $318 million, which the IRS mistakenly paid in bad tax refunds.
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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In a new post to his blog, Jacob Santos talks about why object oriented programming just "isn't easy" - including a few of his dislikes about OOP in PHP.   Functional developers have it easy. Damn straight and I wonder why so many developers choose to write functions, when they can opt for more beautiful classes instead. [...] It is easy to get functions right, all you have to do is prefix them and name them properly and you're done.   He notes that most people get OOP up to a certain point - that being the "has-a" and "is-a" relationships - where things start flying over their heads. He expresses his dislike of the way that Singletons are used (or not used) and places some of the blame on the tutorial and book authors out there trying to teach novice programmers with analogies that don't make sense in a codign situation.
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How a seemingly simply Microsoft bug betrayed its author's disdain for a wide range of secure coding principles.