Second Thoughts for a Designer of Software That Aids Conservation
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Some believe that simpler rules may be more effective than computer models when it comes to protecting the environment.
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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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Science & environment: If your photos fail to impress a simple online photo-editing program could bring them up to scratch
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Software maker aims to fix one place where leaks could occur, but the proposal itself may not be so bulletproof.
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Open source is not always the best software.  When it's not, use something else.  Is this complicated?
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Design and performance issues hold back this very cool idea.
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Review Can it appeal to novice and pro alike?
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Elizabeth Smith has posted a new item to her blog today with information about a PHP-GTK2 framework that she's been working on (and with) called the Callicore Desktop.   Donât look at me like that, I havenât lost my mind. Itâs not really a framework in the traditional MVC web application sense. Instead itâs a group of fairly loosely coupled widgets and classes with an emphasis on clean code.   With the help of several singletons, multiple widgets and a modular structure, the Callicore Desktop makes working with this parts as simple as calling it on the command line (with limited setup). If you'd like to get a look at the current version of the framework, check out the Callicore site or just head straight to the code.
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Blog: Exploring future product opportunities using the iPhone's components
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.   My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.    According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.
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Ushering in a new term of sorts today is this new article from Nick Lo on the Zend Developer Zone talking about the Zend Framework and the "New Hybrid Designer":   While a good sense of aesthetics is important, it does not in itself directly equate to a well designed product. This is particularly true with web design, as a recent Web 2.0 Expo session entitled "The New Hybrid Designer" put it; "modern web design requires the coding savviness of a developer coupled with the aesthetics and user awareness of a designer".   The idea behind the article is to propose a simple setup of the Zend Framework that developers can use as the powerful system that it is and the designers can get into and understand how to use (things like building forms and templating the site). He touches on a few topics including the MVC pattern the Framework follows, security in the application and the "pretty URLs" that it allows.
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Felix Geisendorfer shares, in this new post to the ThinkingPHP blog, some of his experiences with writing his code using test driven development.   So far I've had tons of fun trying to create php code using test driven development. It caused my code to become a lot more structured/consistent because writing the tests shows you interfaces problems right away. This is because the process of writing the test forces you to think a lot more about *how* you want to use some class / piece of code vs. your traditional "how can I get task x done"-thinking.   He also points out another benefit - it makes refactoring the code even easier (so there's more of a likelyhood that you'll use it again and again). He talks specifics about a library that he's been working on and the processes he's gone through to make things work with the testing versus his normal development cycle.
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A new initiative seeks to improve old products.
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Can a computer program generate new works from long dead legends? By Douglas McGray from Wired magazine.
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Will a nonprofit-driven browser tackle the behemoth from Redmond?
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.