After 1 month and 1 day I received a small grey paperboard box. It was supposed to be a christmas present, but due to my own stupidity in mixing up two addresses, it was now almost February. I knew from who it was, but had no idea what to expect. After covering the green import/export label (I hate spoilers!), the box was carefully opened. In the box, I found a small bottle of 'Mountain Dew', which tastes quite good, btw. I can't describe it any better, as I don't know a drink they sell in Holland which you can compare to this. Also, there was a small bag of chips. And there was something blue and furry in the box. My very own Elephpant! That's maybe the best present I've ever had! I still can't believe I could be this happy with a stuffed animal! Thanks Cal! For an explanation, and an image:

A while back, I stumbled on some amazing piece of Art. Art in Paint exactly. Someone actually painted the Mona Lisa in MS Paint.... After 2,5 hours of work (you kinda fast-forward through it, so it only takes you 4 minutes), the end results looks stunning. Check the YouTube video out here. Hell, I can't even paint a straight line without holding down the shift key!

~RW

With the upcoming of Ruby on Rails, and the increase of PHP5 availability on shared webhosts, a lot of blogs are going into the language war again. Wether it is being Ruby vs PHP, PHP vs Java, Java vs Ruby, or whatever combination you can think of, there are a lot of comparisons. So, before you click a way, I'm not going to bug you with that. Each language has it's (dis-)advantages, and in the end it all boils down to the 80/20 rule: personal preference versus suitability for a certain job. You can't wash the dishes with a sledgehammer, and you can't build a house with a towel. But what amazes me in a lot of those blogposts is one recurring argument. 'I rebuilt app X in only Y days, while it took me Z days to built if in language P'. Well, duh! (Read on)

Back in the days, when I still used w3schools.com to learn HTML, I found a little joke on their website. It's an imaginary person asking where he can download the internet. As an answer, they link to this image:

Everyone who has a bit of internet knowledge, knows that it's a joke. Wait, did you say everyone? (Read on)

Lately, I've been working a lot more with other people's codes. Oddly, there seems to be some trend for certain developer to reverse the arguments in an comparison. It even shows up in the PHP manual. Take for example this code piece extracted from the PHP manual :

Wait a minute? What does that !== thingy do? That's explained in the manual too, on the page about comparison operators. To quote:

Waiting for a compile to finish? Just pretending to be at work? Here is the most unusefull way of wasting your time. And, as a bonus, it annoys your co-workers at the same time! Curious? Then start poppin'!

~RW

After the alluring article about Zend Studio Neon on RegDeveloper, Sebastian Bergmann managed to get his hands on a copy of a build, and posted some screenshots on Flickr. The text in the article, and the beautifull screenshots are promising a really nice IDE coming up. I haven't seen an official launch date yet, but I heard it was supposed to be lanched in Q4 of this year.

And your favorite show gets interrupted, again. And while the commercials play by, you start thinking that you’d rather pay more for a subscription, and enjoy your shows without those breaks, then have to watch the same boring commercials, over and over again, on the most inconvenient times. Stop your thinking! There is a great plus side of commercials! Read on…

A couple of weeks ago, the founder(s) of the #php.thinktank channel on FreeNode decided that there was not enough use for the channel to maintain it’s existence. Soon after that, everybody got booted from the channel, and the channel ‘merged’ with #phpc, the PHP Community channel. With a few commands to chanserv, the utopia of PHP knowledge was gone… But gone forever?

It's been 3 years allready since PHP5 was introduced. I still remember me buying a book for PHP5 a few days after it was released, to learn about the new OOP features in PHP5. Though way too late to be an early adapter, I did adapt it soon after PHP5 was released. And besides some freelance jobs, I managed to stick with PHP5 for the whole 3 years. And, as you probably knew allready, I even became PHP5 certified a short time ago.