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As announced in my previous post, I went the next day (April 22nd) to PHPSeminar.NL, organized by Ibuidlings (yes Ivo and Skoop, I *can* spell it correctly, I just don't want to :P) and Sogeti. Not everything went as smooth as I wanted, especially with the Public Transport, which caused me to drop in just before the second-last talk ended.

UPDATE (2008-04-22): Photo added.

Tonight I had dinner in Amsterdam, with some of the people I admire most. At the informal 1980-ish restaurant "Moeders", I shared the table with people who need no further introduction: Cal Evans (calevans), Ivo Jansch (oeli), Stefan Koopmanschap (skoop) and Michelangelo van Dam (DragonBe). It was fun, really fun, to say the least. And before we could even start with the spare-ribs, Cal decided to play Santa Claus, and grabbed his goodies-backpack. In there was the set of PHP-collectors cards for me. And, since he only brought one copy with him, later on, back at the hotel, also a personally signed copy of his book "Guide to Programming with Zend Framework". I love such gifts, especially when they're signed. I would've bought the book anyway, but having it signed by Cal himself just makes it invaluable.

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)

Since day 1, I've been using content moderation for any comments posted to this site. This basicly means I have to manually approve a comment, before it will show on the site. I get a nice email as soon as someone leaves a comment, asking me to either approve or deny the comment. It does introduce a delay, but since almost nobody reads this site, and even less people leave a comment, it works for me, and it's a failsafe method to keep the spam away.

While I was hacking godiva again, I was listening to the livestream of Hard.fm. I have no idea which DJ was on, or which record (s)he was playing, but at a certain point, the music came into a 'break' stage. For the less-music-technical people: The 'break' stage in a dance song comes after the 'body' or 'main' stage, and before the 'buildup' stage where the music builds up in strength to reach the 'climax' stage. In other words, the 'break' stage is where the music reduces in intensity, usually drops the bassline or slims it down drasticly, and in a lot of tracks, where the real lyrics are and/or the beautifull musical intermezzos are released. Anyway. Since the music decreased in intensity, there were actually moments of little to no music at all. And in those moments, I heard a really remarkable sound.

It happens to me on a quite frequent basis. I work in a Windows based editor for some time, and press ctrl+s every now and then to save my changes to disk. It turned kinda into a habbit. No big deal, unless... you start working in VI. Everytime, well, until now, when you press ctrl+s, it would hang up your session. Nothing you could do about it. It's the most frustrating thing ever. You are finished with your modifications, want to save them, and instead of :wq, you accidentally, out of a habbit, hit ctrl+s. *Poof*! Gone are all your changes, you have to restart the session, and make your changes again. Well, Not anymore!

With great pleasure and filled with gratefulness, we would like to announce the extension of our family with two new members. We give a warm and friendly welcome to Godiva, who is a healthy Pentium 4 DualCore Asus Server. With a nice coat of CentOS 5, she will serve all development related and other tasks, with her powerfull Gigabit interface. Although we are very happy with this extension, we have yet another extension too! With the same warmth and friendlyness, we would like to welcome Deianeira, who is a powerfull Core 2 Duo T7250 Compaq Notebook. With a fancy coat of Windows Vista Home Premium, she will serve all communication and Windows based Quality Assurance tasks, as well as tagging along on all roadtrips, to serve as a fancy replacement for the pen&paper, with her 17" widescreen glass-look monitor. Both girls are running two cores at 2Gigahertz, and both have 2 Gigabytes of memory installed.

This whole experience has been somewhat surreal but we are struck with the realism of the experience each time one of the newborn girls makes an announcement on our Gigabit switch.

Sincerely,

Katya & Selena
P.S. Detailed stats of our whole family will soon be uploaded to our website, so please check back soon!

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

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