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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Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
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A cadre of unknown designers shapes everyday human-machine interactions. By Andrew Blum from Wired magazine.
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For years, Thom Mayne was known as L.A.'s countercultural, hard-to-work-with architect. Now he's the government's go-to guy. The evolution of an anti-bourgeois builder.
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HOUSTON -- Maxime A. Faget, a pioneering NASA engineer who designed the original spacecraft for Project Mercury and whose work helped create every human spacecraft the agency has launched since, has died.
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.   So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.   She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Though it contains no code, this new article on PHPBuilder provides a good perspective for those looking to get into PHP and what to expect to find.   A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article.   The author talks about the methods followed to get into the language, including making smaller goals at first, just to get used to things. The manual is also suggested as a "best friend" for a developer and looking at other people's code can provide insight into your problems.
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At 70, Tom Perkins had made a fortune and conquered Silicon Valley. He decided to build the world's biggest, riskiest, fastest, most technologically advanced, single-hulled sailing megayacht. That engineering dream, the 289-foot Maltese Falcon launched in 2006.
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By Max B. Baker, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Feb.
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Plus: At 80, fractal discoverer Benoit Mandelbrot says he has much math work left to do. [News.com Extra]
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A little while back Matthew Turland posted about something that some developers moving over to PHP from more strict languages have an issue with - variable typing - and how its evolved in languages over time.   Without a little background in programming languages or computer science in general, it's entirely possible that typing systems are not something that have crossed your mind. I thought I'd take a blog entry to share some of my thoughts on how itÃ¢ÂÂs affecting the creation and evolution of languages.   He walks through history a bit, mentioning C, Java, Python and PHP and how they differ in their default type handling. He especially focuses on the "blurred line" between strong and weak typing and how some if offers special features to the language that uses the method.
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Guilherme Blanco is proposing an interesting idea in his new blog entry - adding built in functionality to the PHP core that would allow a developer to register their own custom suprtglobals.   Currently, we deal with a lot of interesting situations of web applications, and some really interesting are the superglobals variables. Seems there will be a change in superglobals soon and that's why I decided to post about it here.   His example of the need for something like this is as an alternative to using the Singleton pattern to work with multiple database connections in an application. His proposal is that, by including this register_superglobal functionality, it would make it easier to share these kinds of connections. He even includes a simple code example of how it might look.
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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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By Pfaffman, Jay  A Crazy Man's Dream  In 1985 Richard Stallman, a computer programmer, released "The GNU Manifesto" (Stallman, 1985) in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs.
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Faget designed the original spacecraft for Project Mercury and played a role in the design of every US human spacecraft from Mercury to the space shuttle.
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Given at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006