Wolfgang Drews' Blog: Very Last Chance: get two eZ Components Trainings for free!
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Wolfgang Drews reminds (German) readers that tims is almost up for their chance to attend two eZ Components training sessions for free.   If you understand german, here is your very last chance to participate at two very, very free training-sessions about eZ Components! Session One will find place on 20th of september and will cover the essentials of eZ Components. Session two comes to you just two days after on 22th of september and will look in detail at eZ Mail and eZ Template. Tobias Schlitt will be your instructor and show all that fine stuff practically with an example-application, just written for the show!   The training is being offered by phpzertifizierung.eu and the eZ crew. You can sign up now for both session one and session two if you'd like to attend.
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Today, Pierre-Alain Joye has fomally announced his "retirement" from working with the PEAR project as a lead developer. He's making a shift to work mainly towards other graphics/imaging work he's been developing and to continue work with his current extensions (and a few new ones on the way).   I spoke with him on some of the things that had lead up to making this decision and he mentioned it as a two-fold reason: one was some personal conflict between other PEAR developers and himself and the other an issue of time and interest in the project. He still wants to see it succeed, but just doesn't see the time in his life right now to do his part. Pierre will continue to work with the PECL extensions and on the PHP internals groups to help improve and develope them towards future versions. Some of the extensions he lists as the ones currently in his development are things like GD, xmlwriter, Zip (of course), and filter.   It is just a normal process, things and people change. I would have preferred a slower switch, as I was working on my leave (giving lead for many of my packages to other friends).   Pierre's PEAR work can be seen on this page of his blog and includes all of his PEAR and PECL work as well as PHP internals and Pimp/Cairo/GD development work.   You can also check out the decision in his own words over on his blog.
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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast today - this time, it's hosted by Cal Evans himself and talks about ways to kill a software project.   We use the analogy "train wreck" for so many things including software development projects gone horribly wrong. I've managed my share of development projects both successful and failures in the past 20 years. Along the I've learned a lot about what it takes to succeed and what it take to fail when building software. Many good books out there will show you how to succeed few have dared to tackle the subject of how to fail. So today I'm going to step out on a limb and do just that.   You can either subscribe to the feed and have the show brought to your front door or you can choose one of two alternate methods - listen right on the page in the embedded player or just download the show on its own and sit back and enjoy some great PHP content.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted this month's Zend Newsletter for those wanting to keep up on all things Zend-ish.   They have kindly allowed me to republish the most recent issue here for your enjoyment. If you want to read it on a regular basis though you are going to have to subscribe. So take a moment and head over to MyZend, login (or register) and on the preferences panel you'll find the checkbox to subscribe. Go ahead, we'll wait.   This edition is just a preview of all of the news that Zend provides each month on its activities, events, product updates, updates to the DevZone, and offers promotions you might want to be aware of.   As Cal mentions, though, you'll need to sign up to get future releases of the newsletter - they won't be posted over on the Zend Developer Zone.
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Padraic Brady has posted today about a subclass of the Zend_Loader package (in the Zend Framework) he had written up to handle Dependency Injections - it was submitted but ended up being replaced with a Zend_Di component instead.   I realised someone had proposed a novel new component called Zend_Di, and that small change was since accepted by Federico into his DI buster. This is a quick overview with very simple use cases - read the full proposal for even more gory details about your object innards using DI.   He talks about what DI (dependency injection) is and what it can be used for and includes a simple example set around a controller in the framework that uses the Zend_Di component to make a "mock Zend_Mail" that can be used in testing too. Examples of these sorts of tests (with PHPSpec) are included too.
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Aaron Wormus is back today on the Zend Developer Zone with another in his "Hidden Gems" series. This time, he takes a look at the "Zend Plumbing", those bits of connective code that help you make your Zend Framework applications work.   The functionality that he covers in this article are some of the min parts that a lot of ZF coders use every day and might not know it:  the Zend class (providing a suite of helper methods) built in Wrapper functions:  loadFile loadClass loadInterface isReadable dump exception  the Zend registry  Each of these is briefly described with some sample code for the loadFile, loadClass, exceptions and the Registry to give you an idea of how to use it all. As always, you can check out the Zend Framework website for all the details on each of these functionality bits.
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I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser.
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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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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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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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Recently I had lots of time on my hands visiting relatives and in-laws. Most of the time I was able to get an Internet connection. Sometimes I had to leech my connection from unsecured wireless access points. Some of my relatives and friends posted videos on youtube.com but they wanted to save other flash videos on their hard drive or USB drive. At first this can be frustrating if you don't understand what is going on. So I decided to download them the hard way. For the faint-of-heart, you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the article for the easy way to download flash video and audio files.    Why do this the hard way?  First I wanted to understand why it was less than straight forward to do. I understand why proprietary software developers are scared right now. Software is slowly moving to Internet applications. As most of you know, the Internet is wide open, even SSH and SSL to some degree.    With youtube.com, Google video and some of the more popular video sites you can download and install software to automatically grab the video or audio flash file. However, I had a lot of time on my hands and there are many sites where a video downloader does not work for the particular site.    If you find doing it yourself interesting then here's one way to download flash video files. Keep in mind this only works with embedded flash video or audio streams.
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According to this new post from Derick Rethans, the eZ Components group has release the latest edition of their component set - version 2007.2.   Today we released the next version of eZ Components. In this release, there are two new components.  These two new components are:  Tree - enables you to create, manipulate and query tree structures (with multiple compatible backends for gathering the data from) Webdav - allows for the quick and easy setup of a WebDAV-enabled server.   You can find out more about these components and many more included in the component library at the project's website (as well as this latest download).
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Monk and his IT junk What you really get on those Microsoft, Novell and Cisco courses...â¦
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Rojo  is trying to hire a few Engineers .  Rojo is an amazing company to work for.  We're working with some really impressive technologies and doing some really cool work.  If you're interested in RSS/Atom, Social Networking, Open Source, Java, Linux, etc then I'd highly recommend that you come and work with us.  If you suggest someone to Rojo, and we hire them, we'll give you a free iPod. At the very minimum its a nice gesture for your help.  Also if you want a free invite to Rojo please let me know.  We'd love to have more feedback.
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Chris Shiflett has a new posting on his weblog today that might interest anyone out there looking to take (and pass) the Zend PHP Certification Exam.