Wolerized.com

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!

It's a commonly known problem that if you import an ICS event into iCal, which is happening in another timezone, iCal will ignore the set timezone, and add the event in your own timezone. This means that a meeting in Israel time (GMT+2) at 14:00h, will happily show at 14:00h local time, even if you're not in, and maybe never been in, the GMT+2 timezone. You can't move the meeting to the real time, as iCal will happily notify you that you can't move the appointment, because you are not it's creator. By accident, I found a work-a-round that does allow you to change the time. Read on....

Only a mere 24h, and the world will know where the Americans want to go next. Like to know where the world wants the America to go? Cast your vote on iftheworldcouldvote.com and find out how the world, and your country, thinks about the future.

~RW

Ethanica is the codename for a project which re-implements the Zend Framework as a PHP extension in C. For more details, see the project website at http://www.ethanica.com/ .

(Ethanica used to be the name of a Server Control Panel in Java, which has been marked comatose for the time being. If (and when) active development on the project will be resumed, it will continue under another name, which will be announced here, and on the active projects page.

A couple of weeks ago, the PHP Enterprise Management Magazine Newsletter approached me with a request to do an interview with me for their section 'Developers World'. My first PHP related interview, and I'm actually quite fond of how it turned out. If you want to know a bit more about me, you can read the whole interview here. If any questions arise, please leave a comment. If you want an answer, but do not want your comment displayed, feel free to mention that, and the manual moderation will make sure your comment won't be published.

~RW

A search engine excels or fails with the results it returns. It's not the number of results that count, but the result the user was looking for. If a user can't find what the user is looking for, even though the user knows it's there (just not where), the search engine will get the blame. Even if the user used to most irrelevant keywords for the search, it's always the search engines fault. Google became famous with this. It found what you were looking for. You didn't need a degree in computer science, it just found what you were looking for.

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