Wales@Westminster weblog
80732
Greetings from Bournemouth, where the Liberal Democrats have just opened their annual conference.
365371
The Uefa president gets up to a lot more than we thought according to your efforts. This week's lucky winner is David Squires, who wins a Â£100 bet with BlueSquare. Second prize, Carlton Books's The England Cricket Miscellany, goes to John O'Reilly. Next week we want to see your takes on Lord Coe's Olympic logo shenanigans. Send them to gallery@guardian.co.uk by 6pm on Tuesday June 12 as a jpeg or gif, complete with a TITLE and CAPTION. Anybody who forgets will be made to listen to Sir Alex Ferguson's iPod.
442953
Events in Ukraine continue to dominate the European papers. A Budapest daily takes everyone to task over the invalidated referendum on citizenship for ethnic Hungarians abroad. Two German dailies comment on Mr Schroeder's visit to China. And in France a sniffer dog forgets to sniff!
611981
Bonjour mes amis! If you post a twit with my name in it following an at-sign that is exactly 140 characters in length, my little script will pick it up and add you Le Club 140. (Practicing my French!) For example... @davewiner, you are a very nice person and I enjoy sending you replies. I have actually nothing to say, but when has that stopped me before? If you posted that, your name would appear here... http://club140.org/  Of course you will be more original, won't you?  Meanwhile, in other news, Club 140 has caused at least one person to swear off Twitter forever. Too bad so sad! :-(
256943
Jimbo: 'I am your spiritual leader' Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has brought the Wikipedia ethos to his very own internet search engine. But he insists it will be far more trustworthy than search sites offered by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.â¦
328409
Reporters without borders We have some bad news for those of you who woke up this morning thinking you were Welsh: as of right now, you're English, and you'd just better get used to the idea:â¦
636915
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:RefreshinglyBlue Blog: PHP vs Ruby - Practical Language DifferencesAndreas Gohr's Blog: Determine StumbleUpon RankingsPHP.net: PHP 5.2.4 ReleasedThe Bakery: Five New Posts - Custom Views, CSS, ViewInFile, ActsAs and Email ValidationPHPBuilder.com: File uploads made easyStefan Mischook's Blog: Turning on display_errors in WAMP - Video Tutorialphp|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Newscast for August 2007MT-Soft Blog: Creating a secure PHP production environment from Source CodeCommunity News: Andi Gutmans to Present at AjaxWorld 2007HowTo Forge: How To Set Up A Facebook RSS Feed Reader
129684
Tycho:  Page Two of "In The Service Of The Queen" will be available shortly, as he's taking the process very seriously.  Writing ridiculous poems used to be something I did with much more frequency, though it still happens occasionally. I did, at one point, seize the entire site to host a comic musical about TRON.  The urge just rears up sometimes, swiping at the air with its claws, and I must feed it tender, rhyming couplets to bed it back down.
72885
By Abram, Stephen  Feedback is serious business. Getting it through the Web is easy and, with many services, free.  Time for a fun column to start the New Year-I thought I'd disclose a small secret this month. I have an ego.
324115
Well, this is some news I've been wanting to share for a while, but I've had to wait until everything was ready.  During the summer, I spoke at RubyConf*MI, one of the first regional Ruby Conferences (I think San Diego held the only one earlier than the Michigan folks).  At the time, they filmed all the presentations.
361246
By WG Caddick  WHAT a lovely surprise I had in the post this morning - two vouchers for pounds 5 to be rendered at Argos.   Following a phone call to your officers, I was told that it was because I had taken the Birmingham Mail for some time now.
481653
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....
635699
Prague OK too, with modifications The EU has ruled that Wi-Fi deployments in Wales and Prague do not constitute state aid, as neither will compete with commercial hotspot deployments.â¦
457780
Does anybody know what&#39;s happening please? I appreciate that, traditionally, Bank Holiday Mondays are dank and gloomy affairs, but this has got to take the biscuit.
658541
They talk about them all the time on the news shows, every day the major Presidential candidates have conference calls with reporters. It seems much of the real action in the campaign happens here, but we (voters, taxpayers, citizens)  have no access. I listened to an MP3 of one of the calls, with the chief strategist and communications director of the Clinton campaign. It was fascinating, gave me a picture of how the press and the candidates relate that I had never seen before.  Now I want more -- I want it all!  I've been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters, and so far have come up with nothing. So I'm bringing this issue to as many people as I can think of who might either know how I can get them, or apply pressure to one or more news organizations to make them public. I'd of course like to see them made available as an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures, so it will be accessible to everyone with a podcast client. I would help create this, even host the feed if necessary. Anyone at a major media organization would have access to this content. I'm pretty sure it's all on the record. Any help would be much appreciated.
49126
A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:  At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read.  I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof.  The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further.  The ruby-prof articles are:  Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof:  getting specific. Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside.  They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20).  There have been a lot of interesting entries so far.  It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up. We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post.  RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly.  If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering. O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook.  It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust.  Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf. APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way.  They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them.  They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post. No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises.  I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog.  If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'. The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line.  James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book.  It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels. Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming.  Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer.  Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.
60553
And Vodafone rejigs data tariffs O2 is considering introducing business tariffs for customers who want to use iPhones at work.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing