Max Faget: Master Builder
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One day last November in Houston, three men met for lunch. Two of them -- Russian cosmonauts in training for an upcoming joint US-Russian space mission -- had never met the third, a slightly built American gentleman in his seventies.
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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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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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On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook has written up a book review of a popular book from Sams Publishing - "PHP 5 in Practice" by Elliott White and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer.   This is a very good book, actually one of the best recipe books I've read period. You can tell that the authors are still actively writing code - you can feel it as you read the chapters.   The review also lists out some of the contents of the book including sample recipes and the "quick hits" section.
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Keep Your Project Moving by Robert F. Abbott
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Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.
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The masters of the plastic universe are baffled. From their imaginations, their computers, from their calloused fingers, magnificent kingdoms have sprung. They can re-create the Seven Wonders of the World in a literal snap. But now they huddle in their model shop of Legoland California and contemplate the seemingly impossible:...
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By Mark Fagan, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan.  Dec.
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[T]rane's diary entry and the later MLP discuss the life and death, primarily the latter, of Chris McKinstry, better known around these parts as mindpixel. His Mindpixel Project was an AI experiment; but in that I was never terribly interested. I was more interested in his theories on cognition and the brain as a hypersphere, optimised for surface area.
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Matt Cashner provides a high-level introduction to POE, the Perl Object Environment, examining the concepts that POE brings to bear when designing long-running Perl applications.
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Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".   My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.   You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.
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There was a time when Hans Reiser was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Theo Schlossnagle's book from the Developer's Library series "Scalable Internet Architectures".   I had the pleasure of meeting Theo Schlossnagle at OSCON 2006. He gave me 30 minutes to peek inside his brain and do an interview. 30 minutes just was not enough time. So when I received his latest book in the mail I was excited. Finally a chance to get more in-depth on some of the topics we covered. I've taken the time to collect my thoughts for you here so you can decide whether this book is a good one for you.   Cal talks about how he hated the book (from a reviewer's perspective, not a developer), the contents of the book, and his personal favorite section - "Distributed Databases are Easy, Just Read the Fine Print". His only critism is that the book seems to come across in a "demanding" tone (misunderstood by those that don't know Theo's style as just being matter of fact).
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It is easier to optimize correct code, than correct optimized code.--Yves Deville
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At 70, Tom Perkins had made a fortune and conquered Silicon Valley. He decided to build the world's biggest, riskiest, fastest, most technologically advanced, single-hulled sailing megayacht. That engineering dream, the 289-foot Maltese Falcon launched in 2006.
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A GNOME 2 frontend for the Visual Boy Advance emulator.
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By Pfaffman, Jay  A Crazy Man's Dream  In 1985 Richard Stallman, a computer programmer, released "The GNU Manifesto" (Stallman, 1985) in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs.