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?

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

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)

In the recent voting, as was written about in more detail in this article, the most debated features of 'the old' PHP survived yet another minor release. The item 'Remove safe_mode, register_globals and magic_quotes' recieved a total of 14 'against' votes, which is more then enough to keep it from being eliminated from PHP just yet. Though, as rumours tell us, usage of any of these functions will probably result in a DEPRECATED NOTICE (E_DEPRECATED) as of PHP 5.3. Though it might surprise a lot of developers, there is logical reasoning behind it. All of these functions are a part in the current core, and removing them would break Backwards Compatibility big time. There is no alternative to any of these, so they have to stay in, for BC reasons. It is generrally assumed that they will definately not make it into PHP 6. Which, in turn, would make PHP6 even less equal to PHP 5 with Unicode added. Though the talk of Andrei Zmievski is telling us otherwise, which might mean that they will still make it into PHP6, and, with a rapid release of PHP 7, might be dropped no earlier then the 7 release. But rapid releases are really uncommon in OpenSource environments, so this possibility is a lot less likely.

Anyway, for those bad guys who still rely on any of these functions: blessed it be, they will not be removed from PHP 5.3.

~RW

After the voting this week on the PHP Internals mailing list, the releasemaster Illia Alshanetsky summed everything up, and announced the intention to release a 5.3 release. The following list of features is taken from this survey, and each of the features recieved 10 or more votes (out of the possible 28), and is therefor put on the todo list for a possible PHP 5.3. Please keep in mind that it is extremely early, and this list will definately change. Items will be added and removed from the list, and a whole lot of development needs to be done before it is finally there. Don't rewrite your applications just yet. So, on to the list...

Every corporate site that want to join in on the latest hypes, is moving to techniques like AJAX (all the non-corporate sites that want to join in on the hype, did so a year or more ago). If you have no idea what AJAX is about, then please disconnect your computer again, and enjoy your social life (you gotta have one, if you don't know what AJAX is about). Most sites want to retain backwards compatibility. Either because they actually care, or just because the consultant needed a few more bucks. Backwards compatibility with older browsers is a good thing, but usually implemented in a really bad way. Most sites fall back on a browsercheck, and match that against an internal list. This goes wrong either way. Either your textbased/ancient browser is not found on the list, and you get an unusable site, or your other-brand/brandnew browser is not found on the list, and you get a website that represents the earliest days of webdesign. Just don't rely on browserchecks. They don't work, or you need a full blown team that searches the net 24/7 for new and other browsers, their capabilities, and keep that list up to date. And even then I wouldn't rely on them. Don't rely on browser information either. Some browsers, mostly older ones, ly about what they are capable of handling. It's a commonly known fact, but you can't keep a list of all exceptions either. There is however a perfect way to tell if a browser is capable of handling AJAX (or: insert your favorite technique here). Read on...

During your daily browsing, you’ve probably stumbled upon those paid content delivery networks (CDN) a few times. Those networks give you a limited, low, speed if you are not a paying member, and give you full speed if you did pay to use the premium service. Though it can be annoying for users that want just one file, it can actually help you out quite nice to serve a lot of concurrent visitors, who want to download your latest release, while it’s still hot. If there would only be a simple way too limit speed… Well, there is! And it is pure PHP too. Read on…

Being used to the magic of PHP, it can be quite hard to get used to a more strict language. Variable comparison can only be done if both types are the same. String "5" is definately not the same as Integer 5. But what happens if you compare two strings? That should be easy right? Well, not allways.