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In an attempt to get some of the negative attention off of Windows Vista, Microsoft starts a marketing campaign called 'The Mojave Experiment'. In this campaign, users who don't want to upgrade to Windows Vista are shown the new Windows version, codenamed 'Mojave', which is actually Windows Vista in disguise, and they are recorded with a hidden camera while being asked about their feelings about Windows Vista, while they see a demonstration of the 'new' Windows Mojave, and when they are told that Windows Mojave is actually Windows Vista with a different label on it. A few days ago, Microsoft published these video's, to convince everyone who doubts that Windows Vista is a good choice, that it actually is a good choice. Read on to see why this experiment horribly failed, and only has the potential to make Vista's reputation even worse.

Today the PHP site announced the results of the QA TestFest in a wrap up article on the php.net site. First of all, I must admit that I was extremely disapointed with the amount of people that participated. Only 30?!? Of the huge world-wide community?!? That can't be justified... Either way, it appears that the dutch PHP usergroup team has done their job quite well. One of the participants (felixdv) turned out to be the top submitter of the whole TestFest. Now that's something to be proud off, and I'd like to congratulate him via this way. Besides that title, there was also a raffle to give out ten elePHPants. Four of the ten stuffed animals were awarded to participants of the dutch PHP usergroup! So also a congratulations to Skoop, DragenBE, Rein V, and Marc V. with their family extension! I believe those guys deserved it most, as they went through all the trouble of organizing everything and giving all participants a great day (wrap up of my experience of the dutch PHP usergroup TestFest '08 event). I'm looking forward to the TestFest next year, and I really hope the turn up will see a growth as exponential as the PHP community's growth. If you can't wait till next year, and want to know more about it right now, please read everything you want to know about the TestFest and how you can be part of the solution on the PHP QA TestFest site.

~RW

For a specific reason, I needed two photo's taken, and I needed them on a very short notice. So, as usual, I call a guy who usually takes pictures for me if I need them, and set up an appointment to have them taken. Before the appointment was due, it was already very clear that he was going to bail on me, and later on, it proved to be true. So I had to find something else. Since I didn't knew anybody else with a decent camera, and I had the deadline within 24h, I decided I had to buy one myself. Which immediately raised the biggest question: which...

While checking if there was already a new IRL race on UseNet (only 2 more weeks till I have Sport1!), my mouse jumped, just before I made a click. This happens quite often on my Imac, and I know the solution is to buy a mousepad, but I just keep forgetting that. This jump made me click on one of the ads on the side, which happened to be for some webcam site, and of course I was taken straight to there. While being stunned about the amazing high payrate (80 eurocents per minute(!!!)), and wondering if there actually would be people desperate enough to call such a line, something remarkable caught my attention. Although the site clearly says "All models on this site are 18 years or older", the girls on this page were being advertised as being 17. To the best of my knowledge, that's illegal in the whole world, except for maybe some Scandinavian(sp?) countries. One of the 2 is a lie. Either they are advertising a wrong age (which is false marketing, you don't get (to see) what you pay for), or these girls are underage, and it could actually be a crime to watch them on their webcam...

See the (not recommended for work) image after the jump... (Click 'Read More')

~RW

On May 10, 2008, in a little place called Roosendaal (Netherlands), somewhere near the Belgium border, on an extremely sunny day for the time of the year, 10 developers gathered together with a similar goal in mind: improving PHP. Seated in a l low-lit room in a fancy hotel, they booted their laptops to reach their goal. One man had traveled all the way from Germany by train, just to instruct those 10 on how to accomplish their goal. Two people had traveled all the way from Belgium just to take part in accomplishing this goal. And I was there too... Read on...

As announced in my previous post, I went the next day (April 22nd) to PHPSeminar.NL, organized by Ibuidlings (yes Ivo and Skoop, I *can* spell it correctly, I just don't want to :P) and Sogeti. Not everything went as smooth as I wanted, especially with the Public Transport, which caused me to drop in just before the second-last talk ended.

UPDATE (2008-04-22): Photo added.

Tonight I had dinner in Amsterdam, with some of the people I admire most. At the informal 1980-ish restaurant "Moeders", I shared the table with people who need no further introduction: Cal Evans (calevans), Ivo Jansch (oeli), Stefan Koopmanschap (skoop) and Michelangelo van Dam (DragonBe). It was fun, really fun, to say the least. And before we could even start with the spare-ribs, Cal decided to play Santa Claus, and grabbed his goodies-backpack. In there was the set of PHP-collectors cards for me. And, since he only brought one copy with him, later on, back at the hotel, also a personally signed copy of his book "Guide to Programming with Zend Framework". I love such gifts, especially when they're signed. I would've bought the book anyway, but having it signed by Cal himself just makes it invaluable.

So you are using the kick-ass Eclipse IDE? And you already have a deployment workflow based on SVN? Good. But you also want to add in an external development server that mirrors the production environment, but has your latest changes applied to them? Changes that aren't even good enough to be committed to SVN? You're tired of using the reluctant Export feature over and over again, just to get all the bugs ironed out? Look no further, I found what you need! (Also if you use FTP or SSH to access your server, instead of SMB)

Since day 1, I've been using content moderation for any comments posted to this site. This basicly means I have to manually approve a comment, before it will show on the site. I get a nice email as soon as someone leaves a comment, asking me to either approve or deny the comment. It does introduce a delay, but since almost nobody reads this site, and even less people leave a comment, it works for me, and it's a failsafe method to keep the spam away.

While I was hacking godiva again, I was listening to the livestream of Hard.fm. I have no idea which DJ was on, or which record (s)he was playing, but at a certain point, the music came into a 'break' stage. For the less-music-technical people: The 'break' stage in a dance song comes after the 'body' or 'main' stage, and before the 'buildup' stage where the music builds up in strength to reach the 'climax' stage. In other words, the 'break' stage is where the music reduces in intensity, usually drops the bassline or slims it down drasticly, and in a lot of tracks, where the real lyrics are and/or the beautifull musical intermezzos are released. Anyway. Since the music decreased in intensity, there were actually moments of little to no music at all. And in those moments, I heard a really remarkable sound.