Bits from Beyond Binary--Dec. 12, 2007
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Is Microsoft-served ads slowing down Web sites? Plus, what is Ask erasing, and what are the others keeping? And a 'Knight Rider' comeback and more.
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A new device capable of detecting and throttling encrypted BitTorrent traffic hits the shelves. The game of cat and mouse between ISPs and BitTorrent users continues. In Monkey Bites.
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Also: Nasa's Mars rovers--'biggest breakthrough' in science in 2004. [News.com Extra]
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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To prepare the way for the upcoming PEAR book from Packt Publishing correctly, Stoyan Stefanov has posted this info about the book and where to find the latest details on it.    Here's the link to publisher's page dedicated to the PHP Programming with PEAR. Guess who wrote the chapter for MDB2? ;)   It's an honour to me to be in the company of the other authors, people who have done a lot for the PEAR community    He also mentions some of the topics that the book will contain, including accessing databases with MDB2, creating and parsing XML documents, and accessing web APIs. The book is coming out in September, so keep on the lookout for it at your local bookseller soon.
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Luke Welling takes a humorous look at something he misses in PHP - register globals being set to on.    I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company [...] so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them. I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.   I really like register_globals in PHP.    He reminicies about the days gone by of being able to assume that register_globals is turned on, the days of simpler, lighter code that's even easier for the newbies to get into. Anyone for a tshirt?
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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PHP was a great year for the PHP community and had both his high moments and its lows (just like any other community on the web) so, in lieu of our usual monthly recap type of year en post, we present a summary of some of the things that happened this past year:  2007 Gave us:  Plenty to talk about on namespaces GoPHP5 EMFs (Even More Frameworks) the mysqlnd driver lots of new tutorials over 2,500 new PEAR and PECL package releases Several new PHP releases (5.2.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 5.2.2, 4.4.7, 5.2.3, 5.2.4 and 5.2.5) The End of Life for PHP 4 The Month of PHP Bugs A move for PHP in the Enterprise a renewed effort for Unicode support releases from the major framework players like CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Solar IBM and Oracle working together with Zend Over 130 new job postings Increased interest in running PHP on Windows (FastCGI!) The creation of and episodes 1 through 30 of the Zend Developer Zone podcast PHP Abstract   Books:  The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites PHP and MySQL by Example PHP Solutions PHP Programming with PEAR PHP in Action Pro Drupal Development The eZ Components Developers Handbook The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition) Learning PHP Data Objects Enterprise PHP Development (announced)   Conferences:  5th Annual eZ Conference Vancouver PHP Conference php|tek 2007 Dutch PHP Conference SymfonyCamp php|works 2007 Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2007 (including the Unconference) DC PHP Conference 2007 PHP London 2007 Conference   I know there's stuff out there that I've missed, so comment away and let the community know! (I might come back and link all of these things later on)
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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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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:onPHP5.com: Clickable, Obfuscated Email AddressesJacob Santos' Blog: PHP BlackjackThe Bakery: RESTful Web Services With CakePHPDeveloper.com: Developing a Ajax-driven Shopping Cart with PHP and PrototypeGreg Beaver's Blog: Mac OS X ships with security hole-laden PEAR - how to upgrade immediatelyNexen.net: English Articles and a Single Distribution ResourceJob Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Several LAMP Developers (Charlotte, NC)The Bakery: Checking for duplicate records (unique record)DevShed: The Basics of Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5NewsForge.com: A DIY calendar control in PHPDevGuide.net: Dynamic Bitmap Graphics with PHP and GDRichard Heyes' Blog: Browser DetectionInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: Which is the Most Important Feature of PHP 5?Builder.au: Dynamic XML document construction with the PHP DOMCommunity News: PEAR Version 1.5.0 Released
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Elizabeth Naramore points out the recent publication of the latest International PHP Magazine issue for July of 2007:   I was happy to contribute to their recently released June edition. I did an interview with the new PEAR Group on the future of PEAR. I'm glad to see such enthusiasm and collaboration among the newly elected group.   You can check out the issue and order your copy from the International PHP Magazine website (here's the table of contents too showing the rest of the articles/columns in this month's edition.
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)
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In this article I've selected what I consider to be some of the past year's outstanding achievements in the world of Linux music and sound software. It's not really a "Best Of 2007", it's just my personal choices for what I found most interesting and significant in the past year.  read more
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.read more
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The eagerly-awaited Ubuntu Studio has been released, adding another entry into the expanding list of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but interested readers can peruse some installation screenshots or check out the latest news and information on the Ubuntu Studio Wiki. I plan to review the distro in a future column, along with an update on the latest version of the venerable PlanetCCRMA, but in this entry I'm focused on another very exciting new release. Ardour 2.0 is now available for download. This version is a significant improvement over the 0.99 series (1.0 was never released), with many new features and enhancements to performance and stability. The following article profiles the new Ardour as I employed it for three projects, all involving the program in the processes of composition and arranging as well as the more typical tasks of recording and editing. I've described each project in some detail, and each description includes a link to the final audio output.