Shell ends dual-entity structure
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LONDON Royal Dutch/Shell Group said Thursday that it was merging the two publicly traded entities that make up the company and unifying their boards, ending a nearly 100-year-old corporate structure.
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Amir Saied has posted an update to his PEAR Services_Ebay project sa have been comitted to his CVS repository.   As I posted earlier, I'm working on the PEAR package Services_Ebay. To update it to new eBay XML schema, I've done some of the Calls/Models/Examples and touched the request skeleton to be compatible with eBay's new schema and finally committed them to the PEAR CVS. But unfortunately I can't continue with this job as before.   He notes that the version is not production ready, and since he won't be able to work on it as before, he's also including a progress file to help keep track of where the project stands.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Text_Wiki_Creole 0.5.1HTML_QuickForm_Renderer_Tableless 0.5.3PHP_Archive 0.11.0pearweb_phars 1.3.1PHP_Archive 0.11.1pearweb_phars 1.3.2Validate_FI 0.3.0Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.10Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.10Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBTable 0.1.6File 1.3.0Tree 0.3.0pearweb_index 1.0.0RC1pearweb_index 1.16.2pearweb_index 1.16.1pearweb 1.16.0pearweb_index 1.0.0HTML_QuickForm 3.2.8
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The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post mentioning the use of YAML structure for creating configuration files in your application.   YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesnÃ¢ÂÂt support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.   He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.
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An enhanced multi-threaded syslogd, supporting reliable syslog over TCP and RFC 3195, writing to MySQL databases, fully configurable output formats (with great timestamps), ability to filter on anything, and on-the-wire message compression.   Hi all,  Rsyslog 3.11.2 has just been released. Now it has the ability to convert text files into syslog. This is done by the imfile plugin, which monitors text files. A new libdbi-based output plugin has been written. This adds six additional databases (including Firebird and Oracle) to the supported database set. Also contains small bug fixes. Version 3.11.2 is a recommended release for all version 3 users.  Doc for new Modules:    http://www.rsyslog.com/doc-omlibdbi.html    http://www.rsyslog.com/doc-imfile.html  Changelog:    http://www.rsyslog.com/Article175.phtml  Download:    http://www.rsyslog.com/Downloads-req-getit-lid-79.phtml  I hope this release is useful. As always, feedback is appreciated.  Best regards, Rainer Gerhards
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In a new post, Christopher Jones talks about some difficulty a friend of his was having with returning a connection type from Oracle back to a script. In his case, it was a Ruby script and, unfortunately, there's no direct support for it. So, Christopher jumped in to help out.    PHP's oci8 extension oci_bind_array_by_name() can bind collections but there is no equivalent in ruby-oci8.    Justin outlines a solution on his blog Ruby: Invoking a PL/SQL Package with Array args. His example relies on some company infrastructure so I came up with this standalone example.  This first SQL*Plus script sets up the scenario.     Stick with me on this one - there's some PHP right there at the end. He shows how much simpler the same kind of operation would be in PHP thanks to the oci_bind_array_by_name functionality understanding the return value. What took about 20 lines for just the Ruby code to handle the result correctly takes only five in PHP.
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John Lim has posted about an interesting bug he's come across when working with the output of two strings that should look the same:   Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem.   According to him, "if you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken". His example gives an interesting result for the first echo statement - not echoing the 9 in the first character like it seems would make sense. Check out his post for the code and try it out for yourself.
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Ivo Jansch has a recent post made the other day that takes a look at one of the recent offerings from IBM targeted at PHP developers - the functionality to allow PHP to run on their System i platform.   Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. [...] Recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming.   He makes mention of the db2 database extension you can use to access the database as well as a "i5 toolkit" to help with the same. He even links to an article talking about it.
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ICANN officially retires the .yu domain and assigns .rs to Serbia and .me to Montenegro. In this case the delay was political, not technical.
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ROYAL Dutch Shellâs dual structure has been blamed for troubles ranging from poor management to dodgy oil reserve accountancy. So its decision to meet shareholder criticisms by unifying its two holding companies
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!
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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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What happened to the guts in mainstream publications? I recall back in the 80s InfoWorld pressured Lotus into ditching its copy protection scheme by docking Lotus 1-2-3 several points in reviews because of the inconvenience. I believe Lotus was the first to buckle, but other vendors jumped on the bandwagon and abandoned copy protection. Fast forward to today. Not only has copy protection come back from the grave, it has risen like a juggernaut zombie bent on eating everyone's brains. Worse, many consumers and writers alike seem to be unscrewing their scalps and willingly offering up the meal. "I want the latest iThing, it's so cool!" Sure, you'll find appropriate outrage in Linux Journal and a handful of renegade publications like the Register. But what happened to the mainstream journals with the guts of yesteryear?
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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Apparently PHP5 RC3 is going to be the last release candidate. This is supposed to be coming out at the end of this week, so PHP5 will probably be released next month.  It's a bit like looking through a window into a candy store. The sweetener I most look forward to is the improved object assignment semantics.
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IBM rolls out a new version of its database software aimed at users of Linux and Unix. Also: Toyota and Nissan join to standardize car electronics & hellip;. Nokia launches three new camera phones & hellip;. and more.
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On his blog today, Lorenzo Alberton Talks about DBMS and the character sets they support and issues a call for help for anyone interested to help them (on the PEAR::MDB2 project) set up proper character set support for each database.    We're working on PEAR::MDB2 charset and collation support. That means that we're in the process of figuring out what's the best way to set the charset in each DBMS, and how to make it portable and consistent through all of them.   I'll try to explain how the various DBMS implement charset settings first, then describe the MDB2 status-quo regarding charset support. Finally, we'd like to get some feedback to implement a better charset support in MDB2.    He lists out the types of character sets - client, connection, database/table/field, and result - explaining each of their roles in the average connection. He then breaks out the different databases into the different settings they support for the different character set types.   The call for help comes in with him asking anyone out there with experience and skill in these areas to get in touch and help out if they can. Contact information is in the post. You can also check out some of Lukas Smith's comments over on his blog too.