OPML 2.0 freezes on Thanksgiving Day
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Mark your calendar: November 22. That's the day, barring something unforseen, that OPML 2.0 will move from a draft to a final frozen spec. If you plan to use OPML 2.0, or you're already using it, please set aside a few hours to carefully review the spec, between now and the end of September, or at the latest early October, to be sure it makes sense to you.  We're doing this very slowly and carefully so people will believe in the quality of this spec. If you don't think it's a good spec, now is the time to say why. Speak now or forever hold your peace. You may not like the format, that's not the issue now -- it's the spec we're trying to finalize.  Thanks for your help!
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Update fixes crashes caused by incompatibility with hidden advertising app.
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On Christmas day, after the potlatch subsided, I headed out for a run. When I flicked on my MP3 player, however, I heard ... nothing. Glancing down at the display of my Creative Nomad MuVo TX I saw an unwelcome message: "File system error." Grrr.
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Christopher Jones has posted to his Oracle blog today about the release of a new beta for the PECL Oracle (OCI8) drivers for PHP.   I've created a PECL OCI8 1.3.1 Beta bundle of the code with Connection Pooling support that I mentioned in http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/01/31.  You can get it from http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.  The README contains the details.   Of course, it's still in beta, so any testing and feedback is more than welcome. This bundle also includes several other "non-DRCP related bug fixes" including an issue that caused constant pinging for persistent connections.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Net_Ping 2.4.3Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_XLS 0.1.3Console_CommandLine 0.2.0
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Latest PEAR Releases:PHP_FunctionCallTracer 1.0.0RC1XML_Query2XML 1.4.0Validate_LV 1.0.0Validate_LV 1.0.0RC2PEAR 1.6.2
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The Department of Water Resources (DWR) scheduled snow survey scheduled  for today (February 28, 2007) at Phillips Station has been postponed  because of a mudslide on Highway 50.  Conditions permitting, the survey will take place at 11am on Friday,  March 2, 2007.
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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....
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Successor to the well-known Windows blue screen of death, the 'green ribbon of death' crashes Vista when the progress bar freezes an Explorer window. Here's why it happens, and how to make it stop.
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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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Food, friends, and elf figurines add up. Here's some advice on how to handle the holiday tab.
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In How to sponsor an open source project?, Dave Winer says, I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux... and floats the idea of a bounty for the job.  He's taking comments here. Guidance: I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project, Dave says.
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Christopher Jones talks today on his blog about a bug he's just corrected and integrated into the release of the Oracle Instant Client that lets PHP correctly take advantage of the temporary LOBS functionality.   When PHP is done with the temporary LOB, it needs to tell Oracle to destroy it. If this isn't done, then the temporary LOB will hang around using DB space until the connection is closed. I just merged a fix worked on by Krishna Mohan and myself for bug 43497.   Example code is included showing two instances of its use - a normal use that frees the memory correctly and the other showing how to create the temporary lob to hold the data as needed.
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By The Idaho Statesman, Boise  Sep. 15--The Idaho State Linux Users Group will host a Software Freedom Day celebration Saturday in Pocatello.
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Sunday, September 2 is the deadline for ISO member countries to vote on Microsoft's Office OpenXML -- the result will determine if it's approved as an international standard. Name calling, finger pointing and muckraking have sparked a debate over current standards-approval procedures and how they're affected by corporate influence. All this excitement over office docs?
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The charting component is probably the least satisfactory part of OpenOffice.org. A few minutes with the issue tracker shows that, since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, 62 issues have been filed for charting. By contrast, the bibliography component and the formula editor, two other problematic subsystems that are comparable in size, have nine and 27 issues files against them respectively. Work has begun on many of the issues about charts, but complete relief is unlikely to come until the final release of Chart 2, the rewriting of the charting component that is due to be part of the as-yet unscheduled 2.6 version of the office suite. However, those who are impatient to see what changes are coming can get a few ideas from the recent release of Milestone 8, an alpha version of Chart 2 that gives the first glimpse of what improvements to expect, not just in the way of bug fixes, but, more importantly, in interface improvements.
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Latest PEAR Releases:PHP_CompatInfo 1.4.1HTML_Progress2 2.3.0RC1pearweb_phars 1.1.0pearweb 1.4.0Auth 1.5.0HTML_QuickForm_altselect 1.0.0RC1PEAR_PackageUpdate 0.6.1PHP_Beautifier 0.1.13pearweb 1.4.2Structures_LinkedList 0.1.2pearweb 1.5.0RC1Console_Getopt 1.2.2Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Flexy 0.1.0HTML_CSS 1.1.3Text_CAPTCHA 0.2.1PHP_CodeSniffer 0.4.0