Cray's Still Downloading
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Don't wait around for this one. It's time to reboot.
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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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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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Also: Windows worm travels with Tetris [News.com Extra]
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Latest PEAR Releases:MDB2_Driver_ibase 1.2.1HTML_AJAX 0.5.0PHP_CompatInfo 1.3.0PHP_LexerGenerator 0.2.2Auth 1.3.2HTML_QuickForm_Livesearch 0.3.1Net_GeoIP 1.0.0RC1PHP_CompatInfo 1.3.1Services_Delicious 0.5.0MDB2_Driver_mysqli 1.2.2MDB2_Driver_mysql 1.2.2MDB2 2.2.2MP3_Playlist 0.5.1alpha1MDB2_Driver_pgsql 1.2.2MDB2_Driver_oci8 1.0.2File_Bittorrent 1.0.2
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The clock is ticking for organizations that chose to delay the deployment of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Come April 12, 2004, a tool that temporarily blocks delivery through automatic updating will cease to operate, allowing the upgrade to download.
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Greg Beaver points out the numerous releases that were made in the PEAR community today - including an update to the PEAR website itself.   OK, today's release party wins.  I've just uploaded the 8th package for release, and it's a very significant day of releases.   The three updates made today are:  An update to the PEAR website that allows for patch tracking in the bug tracker The latest version of PHP_ParserGenerator - version 0.1.5 and the release of the first, full-featured parser for PHP - PHP_Parser along with a "companion", PHP_Parser_DocblockParser
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Sivar writes &quot;Ace&#39;s Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the &quot;Slowaris&quot; moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System).
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Latest PEAR Releases:Net_Wifi 1.0.0PEAR_PackageFileManager_Cli 0.2.1Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Flexy 0.1.3Mail_Mime 1.5.1Net_LDAP 1.0.0RC1Testing_FIT 0.2.0pearweb_index 1.16.6pearweb_index 1.16.5UDDI 0.2.4Mail_Mime 1.5.2pearweb_index 1.16.7Image_Canvas 0.3.1Benchmark 1.2.7PEAR 1.6.1Tree 0.3.1pearweb 1.16.1
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Chris Chabot has posted a PHP package he's worked up that functions as a daemon sitting and listening on a socket.   To deal with 1000's of concurrent, always on (comet aka hanging iframe) http (server) connections, and an equal amount of IRC client connections, plus being able to interpret and parse and delegate all the messages and events, i needed a very fast, stable, flexible and easy to use 'daemon' library for PHP.   He links to the tarball of the release and to the project page as well as including an example of its usage - creating a simple HTTP server with various hooks built in (like on_connect, on_read, and on_timer).
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A popular BitTorrent tracker is unresponsive for more than 24 hours. No official word or statement has come from the Demonoid.com administrators, but a Dutch news website reports the Canadian Recording Industry Association, or CRIA, is responsible for the downtime.
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Cal Evans has another update about the upcoming (Oct 8th through 11th) to the Zend Developer Zone today:   ZendCon is sneaking up on us fast. If you've not got your tickets yet, time is running out so you had better hurry. To whet your appetite, ere are a few blog posts or ZendCon mentions from speakers and attendees who will be there this year.   Included in his list are bloggers like Terry Chay, Brian DeShong and Mike Naberenzy and events like the Happy Hour 2.0 and the Unconference.
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Christian Stocker has an update on his blog today that Windows users will be happy to hear:   Frank Kromann applied some patches yesterday to the PECL sources of the uploadprogress extension to make it compile under Windows (almost the same as by SteveH provided in a comment of my post yesterday). Therefore, thanks to the pecl4win site, a compiled dll is now already available. Get it here (untested by me..)   He also mentions some documentation that was asked about concerning the package (and the patches), but notes that he "can't promise anything any time soon".
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Pierre-Alain Joye ha posted some great news about the Zip PECL package today on his blog - it's finally reached stable.   Zip is stable since two releases. I lacked the time to report it :) Three bugs were important. Once PHP 5.2.0 is out, I will focus on the new features. Write stream support, unicode (php6+ support), pattern based addition/extraction and crypting functions.   The three bugs he mentions were a problem with zipArchive::addFile, comment/cdir problems with new archives, and setting properties in extended classes.   You can check out the homepage for the project here or just view the Changelog for complete updates.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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Latest PEAR Releases:LiveUser 0.16.13pearweb_gopear 1.1.0pearweb_phars 1.4.0RC1Services_Digg 0.4.2DB_DataObject 1.8.8HTML_Template_Flexy 1.3.0HTML_Template_Flexy 1.3.1File_Ogg 0.3.0HTML_Template_Flexy 1.3.2Text_Diff 1.0.0pearweb_phars 1.4.0PEAR 1.7.0pearweb_gopear 1.1.1Net_CheckIP2 1.0.0RC2PEAR 1.7.1PHP_CodeSniffer 1.0.1
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Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.    While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.   My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal    He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.