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.

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!

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

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