Magic mushroom directive 'fudged'
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Two men arrested on suspicion of illegally selling magic mushrooms are told the law is too unclear to put them on trial.
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Idiot 2.0 passes judgement on idiots This crock crock by CNET blogger Steve Tobak must take the award for 2007's most self-righteous, sanctimonious bollocks. Read on:â¦
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You cannot help but like someone like Greg who is honest and humble:  "I am one of the core developers of the PEAR package who has joined the game relatively late... The base PEAR class is one monstrous mistake, and PEAR_Error is pretty close. Everyone knows this. I designed an error class that is much, much more flexible and it is part of PEAR 1.3.1 (PEAR_ErrorStack) - check it out. "  Sadly it's just not true that everyone knows that PEAR class is big mistake (Jeff Moore has more on why PEAR.php is awful).  Given that PEAR is both an important framework and a worthless class, the confusion in names will  definitely  cause the value of the PEAR class to be overestimated. Just read any article on PEAR and you can see what nice words they have to say about the base classes :-(     I once said once that too many PEAR developers were journeymen. This might have offended  some people, but I was trying hard to be diplomatic. I must say that today the PEAR group is definitely more mature, and they have learnt a lot about library design. What would really make my eyes light up  would be an PEAR2 initiative that kept the existing classes, but dropped the bad seeds such as PEAR.php (e.g. the PEAR and PEAR_Error classes).   And in case you were wondering, I do think there's great value in the PEAR DB API. API's are important for interoperatability. For example, ADOdb has a PEAR DB compatibility mode. I would certainly be flattered if PEAR DB had an ADOdb compat mode too :-)
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Rob Richards mentioned in a previous book review about some of the issues he was having getting the Oracle extension enabled on his Fedora 8 system. Well, he's come back after doing some more testing/compiling and has found some resolution to his issues.   I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results.   He steps through the process he followed - tracking down the missing libaio files, correcting an issue with SELinux loading the Oracle libraries and his realization: he just needed to allow text relocation. Included in the post are the command line calls that'd need to be made to make it all happen.
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Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager for the current PHP5 series, has announced the posting of the latest release canidate - PHP 5.2.0. RC4.   Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.   You can grab the files here:  BZipped GZipped
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Tycho: New one's up, for last week's "The Spore Cult." Feed is here. (CW)TB
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Tycho:  We have done things in the past which were not "for" you, or anybody else for that matter.  That isn't what's goin' on now.  What's going on now is we are shoveling dense chunks of fanservice into the site's iron belly, and increased fervor in that chamber makes each comic bend and groan to please you.
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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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Ziff Davis - Vulnerabilities in LibTIFF and Xpdf could allow remote system compromise.
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Plus, from zero to Hero, and stale Wonder Bread?
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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Latest PEAR Releases:Console_CommandLine 0.1.0Services_Amazon 0.7.1Testing_Selenium 0.4.2HTML_Table 1.8.2Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Pager 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_HTMLTable 0.1.4Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.11Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.11Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_XML 0.2.0Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBTable 0.1.7Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_CSV 0.1.6Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_Array 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid 0.9.0Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_XUL 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Smarty 0.1.4Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_HTMLSortForm 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DataObject 0.2.1OLE 0.6.1PHP_CodeSniffer 1.0.0Console_CommandLine 0.1.1Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_PDO 0.1.0Net_FTP 1.4.0a1
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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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Chris Hartjes has posted again about the "rebirth" of a Zend Framework component he's worked on - the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler.   So, dear readers, I received some nice emails and comments from those you have used Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, along with having a nice email conversation with Wil Sinclair from Zend.   He still wants to "rip things up and start over", but has decided on a slightly different route - mapping the older function calls to the new ones via a __call catch and including a message stating that the older function call would be deprecated.
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On PHPEverywhere today, there's a new posting from John talking about a little "scare" he's had with the defaults on his switch statements.
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this NetBeans module add a custom action to filesystem nodes to launch an OS explorer pointing the directory referenced by the node. It can be customized specifying an implementation of net.sf.efhnbm.Launcher or a command.   With NetBeans 6.0 finally out i updated the module making it compatible with the new preferences API.  If you're a good old 5.x user please keep the 0.4.1 version:  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156239&release_id=477404
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By E.J. Mundell, HealthDay Reporter    HealthDayNews -- The new federal dietary formula may offer sweet rewards for following its guidelines, an idea that's not settling well with nutritionists...