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For my job, I need to fill out a form monthly. Till a short while ago, I opened Microsoft Publisher for this (the form was designed in this app), filled out the fields, saved as .pub file, export as PDF file and finally mailed the form. Given that the contents of the form are fully computable in 99% of the cases, there had to be a way to automate it. After some digging around, I settled on a work-flow where I would create a PDF of an empty form once, use that as a template and use Zend_Pdf to 'paste' the text on top of it, saving the end result as a new PDF. Read on for a description of how I achieved this.

This article is a response to Ed Finker (AKA funkatron)'s blog post: "We're the Stupid Ones: Facebook, Google and Our Failure as Developers". If you have not read it yet, please read it first, as this post won't make much sense if you haven't read it.

Ed Finkler makes two points in his post. First of all, a small one, which tells us that, in his opinion, Google is making a mistake in indexing. It doesn't select the most relevant page as the first result, but a somewhat relevant page, which confuses users. Secondly the main point: developers should create UI's which interprets user input the way the user naturally would expect it. I'd like to give my opinion on both.

Sometimes you just need a resultset in CSV (so non-geeks can read it in XLS format). MySQL has several options for that. First and foremost: SELECT (...) INTO OUTFILE. This is probably the most common one, and the easiest to use. However, this does not work if you're on a remote client, as this will create a file on the server. You may not have access there, or the server may even be restricted to that, by not giving you FILE permissions. Read on for a solution.

365,25 days and 500 tweets ago, I registered for a Twitter account. I was already one of the last people in IT to do so, but I did beat Oprah to it. While some of you may think they will never reach 500 tweets, I know most of you can't even remember when they reached that number. People who don't use Twitter don't get it. People who use it, often don't get it either. So the big question is: would I have joined Twitter a year ago, if I knew what I know now?

In an office, the workers open their thin clients and netbooks to start the day. A network connection is provided at every corner, and there is wireless too, so you can work everywhere you want. All applications run on some big systems, and they just connect to it through their browsers. As soon as they authenticate, they have their own data, and their own work, no matter on which system, or which location they logged in. They can even work at home, or on the road, as long as there's a connection to the network. Without a network, the whole system is down. Sure, there are some caches, and they can work a bit in advance, but for anything not in their cache, they need a network connection. Picture sounds familiar? Did that just describe cloud computing in it's essence? Or was it a copy from a computer networking textbook about centralized computing?

Recent news tells the world how little the average kid in a US high school actually knows about the country. The results in itself are a major disgrace. As we can see on this results page, none of the 1000 kids could answer all 10 questions, taken from the US citizen test, correctly. Something is wrong there. Looking further, none of the 1000 kids could even answer 8 questions correctly. That is bad, really bad. By adding up a little, we quickly see that only 108 of the 1000 students had five or more (7 being the max) questions correct. That is a disgrace; especially for a country that emphasizes that it is the best country in the world. Even I, non-American, European, had eight of the questions correct (I failed the number of judges, and thought George Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence). However, if this was not bad enough, it actually gets worse!

As a fervent multi-monitor user, I ran into issues with the latest Ubuntu (9.04) in combination with Gnome and Eclipse. When I switched to another application which was (partially) overlapping Eclipse (in my case: Zend Studio 6.x and 7.x), I could not switch back to Eclipse by clicking the item in the taskbar. Nothing would happen, and if I clicked multiple times, the application would actually get hidden. I could switch back to Eclipse by either alt-tabbing to the right icon (which takes a lot of time with many apps and windows open), or by double-clicking a file (effectively opening) in an Explorer window (PHP Explorer in my case). The issue seemed to be with un-docking windows, because when all windows are docked, the issue would not happen. Not really a solution, as that would limit my screenspace in Eclipse itself, and leave a monitor for decorative uses only. So off to Google for a solution.

For my mail, I use several catch-all accounts, so I can give every service it's own email address, which proves very useful in creating automatic rules. There is one issue though, you have only one sender account, and some services require that you respond from the original send-to address. To manage such 'virtual identities', Thunderbird allows you to write your own from address. Mail.app however, does not have such a setting. After several Google attempts, today I found *the* solution: the 'email address' field in Account properties, allows a comma separated list, allowing you to specify multiple addresses. Quite a genius way of solving the issue, if you happen to know this. Full credits go to Jonathan Tron who wrote the solution on his blog, together with some images. Thanks Jonathan!

I don't like pyramid schemes, but if both Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ivo Jansch are participating, who am I to stop the trail? So here's my list of seven(ish) things you may or may not know about me (likely the latter), after receiving a tag from Ivo Jansch, who in turn got tagged by Matthew Weier O'Phinney, who got tagged by Keith Casey, who got tagged by Tony Bibbs, the root of all evil the one who started this all.

People have tried for almost a year to get me on twitter. Until now, I have always declined the invitations, and ignored the pleads. But now, things have changed. For a side project, I need to be very up to date with what goes on in the PHP world, and not be the last to know. Since it's quite obvious that you have to be on Twitter to know about things happening as they happen, I did the unevitable, and signed up for an account. It'll last for at least a month, and maybe, yes, maybe I might keep it after that, if it turned out to be really helpful, and I can't live without anymore. We'll see :). Either way, for the mean time: if you want to follow me, or see the rare update I give, follow me on Twitter!