Modern-Day 3 R's: Rules, Rules, Rules
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At Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, students can't just randomly stroll out to their cars to fetch a textbook or some other forgotten item. They need a pass because authorities worry about what might be stashed in the parking lot.
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The O'Reilly Network has a new article posted for all of those out there that are looking to make writing large documentation/publications much simpler.
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Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:
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Aaron Wall at SEObook has put together a thought provoking post on current linking techniques, structure, and how Google reliance on trusted sources &#038; domains is in jeopardy as those resouces become more and more abused. Finding the Most Powerful Links Anything that has been greatly trusted has been abused. The difference between the current abuse and [...]
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A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:  At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read.  I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof.  The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further.  The ruby-prof articles are:  Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof:  getting specific. Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside.  They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20).  There have been a lot of interesting entries so far.  It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up. We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post.  RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly.  If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering. O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook.  It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust.  Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf. APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way.  They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them.  They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post. No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises.  I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog.  If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'. The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line.  James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book.  It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels. Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming.  Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer.  Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.
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DevShed continues their series looking at some of the fundamentals of working with PHP in this new tutorial posted today. It looks at one of the flow control statements the language has to offer and a very useful data structure - the switch statement and arrays.   In our last exciting adventure (back in early November), we braved crocodiles, ravenous editors, most of the PHP statements, and beginning loops. In this edition we'll cover the final statement, the Switch, and discuss arrays. So sit back, order your R2D2 robot to bring you a cold, frosty Jolt Cola, and let's get cracking.   They start with a simple example of a switch statement (to echo out strings) and follow it with a detailed description of the different sorts of arrays - numeric indexed, associative and multidimensional versions.
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Sandro Groganz has a quick note posted on his blog about the online availability of the text of his article "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition".   I just found that my article entitled "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition" is now available online. It has initially been published in the International PHP Magazine.   He quotes a bit from the introduction to give you an idea of what the article's about, but defers the rest of the article to the International PHP Magazine website. There's lots of good content, screenshots, layouts and plenty of related links as well.
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Here's a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News. Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs. I hope this isn't too confusing!  "cheesecake" PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they seem to be able to copy each other, so mistakes propogate.  We've made so many accomplishments, both before and after the coining of the term, Karp for example starts with VIgnette. In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn't have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn't believed.)  They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. Jorn Barger used my software to do his "web log" -- why isn't that part of the story? Well it isn't if all you think is important is the choosing of the name.
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Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.  Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.  But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.
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The rules for the 300 movie contest.
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An introduction to XML and DocBook: what is it and why should I learn yet another data format?
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Fast, intelligent, automatic spam detector using Paul Graham style Bayesian analysis of word counts in spam and non-spam emails. Filtering adapts to personal tastes automatically. No manual rule creation required. This release adds the final missing pieces to the new parser code.  MBX files and Content-Length headers are now supported.  Database cleanup when signals are caught has also been improved.  I would like to move 1.1 into the stable branch fairly soon so if folks would test out this release and report any problems it would be a big help!   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61201&package_id=73566
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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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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Nick Halstead has posted the runners up in the PHP programming competition he conducted:   Finally we have a result, it has taken weeks of judging and lots of hard work. The scores are ready and today I will first announce the runners up from the Top 6. I will then tomorrow announce the 3rd place, then day after that second, you get the idea. The scoring was based upon a point system in which each judge had to rank the top 6 in order. The points from each judge were then compiled and the final scores calculated.   The project was to write a script that helped a user find the shortest "distance" between two words by replacing one letter at a time. The three that were the runners up were created by:   JB Maurice Fonk Rob Haynes   Come of the judges comments are also included in the post to get a feel for the thinking behind the rankings.
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Letters: On the need for a code of behavior for the Internet.