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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By Mark Fagan, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan.  Dec.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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David Pogue explores the time-saving qualities of macro software.
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Is optimisation the root of all evil - or, at least, many bugs There was a time in my career, in the 1960s, when optimisation wasn't optional. System memories were measured in kilobytes, instruction times in tens or hundreds of microseconds. We planned our programs around those limited resources.â¦
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Arts & entertainment: Some of the most radical buildings ever made owe their existence to Cecil Balmond. Jonathan Glancey salutes the engineer who defies belief.
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Maxime Faget conceived and proposed the development of the one-man spacecraft used in Project Mercury, which put the first American astronauts into suborbital flight, then orbital flight
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If you weren't able to make it to this year's just passed php|works conference in Atlanta, you missed out on the keynote that Marco Tabini, founder of php|architect gave at the start of the conference. Fortunately, he's posted the video of it on his blog:   What they didn't tell me, however, is that they had arranged for a simple (but, as you will see, very effective) web-based system that allowed members of the audience to submit "captions" to the screen as I was speaking. The results were, of course, hilarious - mostly because they "forgot" to tell me about the idea until a few days after.   Be sure to check out the video of the video for some great one-liners.
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An implementation of the famous Snake game written for MS-DOS in Pascal. This is a project from my early days of programming which I wish to update and develop as it's a bit rough around the edges and relies on libraries more than it really should. Othe   Although this program is in version 2, I have had it since long before my SourceForge.net days and have just decided to take another look at it after 6 years on the shelf.
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P&aacute;draic Brady has a suggestion for all of the PHP readers out there - two articles in the latest edition of php|architect magazine, the May 2007 edition:   The two that stick in my mind are Jim Delahunt's "Unicode and PHP: A Gentle Introduction" and Jeff Moore's "Test Pattern: Model View Controller". Both are something those seeking illumination on these topics should certainly read.   The first presents an introduction to one of the hottest topics in the PHP world - Unicoding - including a few same scripts to get you going. The second article, a look at the Model/View/Controller pattern that really gets more to what the pattern is about rather than just talking about its structure.
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Playground SDK to help casual game makers create multiplatform games.
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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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Keep Your Project Moving by Robert F. Abbott
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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As a boy, Will Wright liked to fiddle with models. The man behind The Sims phenomenon liked to make ships, planes, and most things mechanical.
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Alain de Botton's 'The Architecture of Happiness' shows how buildings can be beautiful and work well.
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In this new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to combine the Zend Framework and Phing to create a simple, quick setup utility for future ZF projects.   After spending too much time on directory and view script shifting to align an 'older' Zend Framework application to the very useful ViewRenderer Action Helper of the follow-up releases I crafted a single Phing buildfile to stick to the recommended conventions and to have a nearly 'one-button' setup solution for any upcoming projects.    He'd found some other packages that did something similar, but wanted to do it with Phing. He includes the requirements (the software) features that the buildfile makes easy to include and some future improvements that could be made to the install to make things even easier. The buildfile is included and any path or configuration changes that might need to be made.    Phing is a "make" replacement that uses XML build files to define tasks in classes.