Web Developer job ad

Avocadia: Unclean! Unclean! - "So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the "correction". Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of "Unclean! Unclean!" is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile. There’s a good chance you listen to either Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus or elaborate Paul Oakenfold remixes, with a bit of bootlegged Chemical Brothers thrown in for good measure."

hard times

Electronic Frontier Foundation:"How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing (And Other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal)"

Status Of The Jython Nation

Russell Beattie Notebook - Friday, July 25, 2003: "Jython needs help, however. Guido even petitioned help at the last Python event. It seems that there's a lot of users and not a lot of developers and now Jython is a few years behind where Python is on the development curve. Another problem with Jython besides it's libraries is that the code runs up to 10 times slower than its CPython and Java counter parts, yet I'm sure that there are ton of real heads out there that could improve that with optimization of the libraries... "

Tip of the day from DevArticles:"The magical .phps extension - If your PHP configuration is set to allow it, renaming any .php file to .phps will allow it's source to be read on anyone's browser who opens it. The code will be color-coded, exactly the same as the [PHP] tag in vbulletin. This is helpful when you need to debug a large script. Remember to remove any sensitive information before doing so however (db passwords, db table names, etc..)."

Mozilla State Of The Union

The Mozilla Development Roadmap has been updated: "It's clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone. Instead, we expect Mozilla 1.5 to coincide with Mozilla Firebird 0.7. But we intend to implement the new application architecture in the next several milestones".
Meanwhile, Netscape has been basically shut down by AOL, and the Mozilla copyright burden is now on the Mozilla Foundation shoulders. This means that now Mozilla will be marketed as and end-user browser, and not just as a development test-bed for future Netscape versions (as it was).
Is this good? Yes: now everything is clear, and if I go to the mozilla homepage I can easily find that A) Mozilla is a browser, and B) where I should go to download it.
At the same time, is this bad? Yes, because the Netscape brand was very well known between non-tech users, while Mozilla isn't yet there. Thus, MS now is probably even happier about the browser-war result than before.

Inscrutable Spam

Chris Sell: " I will have to build a simple time travel circut to get where I need myself. I am going to need an easy to follow picture diagram for a simple time travel circut, which can be built out of (readily available) parts here in 2003. Please email me any schematics you have. "

Jon Udell: The Mozilla Foundation

Jon Udell: The Mozilla Foundation: "I implored AOL to do the right thing by Mozilla, and it seems that is happening. Today AOL announced financial and logistical support for the newly-hatched Mozilla Foundation. Excellent!"

MozillaZine:"It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings)."

Uh? Who's right? What's happening? How will thiss affect the new (very ambitious and risky) Mozilla roadmap?

A Suggestion for Aggregators

The FuzzyBlog :: Scott Johnson's Blog: "Now what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications."

Well, it would be nice indeed...

Post-human Japan again

Wired 11.08: Fat Pipe Dream: "Softbank has spent close to $2 billion building out a gigabit Ethernet network and leasing copper wire from Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. The result is a service, offered under the Yahoo! BB brand, that provides Internet access to Japanese homes at 12 megabits per second - eight times faster than what Americans are used to - for about $21 a month. "

This guy is definately crazy, but the technical point behind his madness is interesting: the pure GbEthernet-based network carries perfect data and requires small maintenaince, thus the "voice" costs (that is, VoIP) are almost null, and the available bandwidth is stunning. Too bad Europe won't ever have a similar thing (no one has that much money and that much crazyness), but newly-built places like Phoenix or LA could, one day, feature similar things.

phpDocumentor

phpDocumentor: PHP Auto Documentor: "phpDocumentor is a JavaDoc-like automatic documentation generator for PHP written in PHP. It is the most versatile tool for documenting PHP."
Yet Another Tool To Evangelise For....

The Quest For The Perfect News Aggregator Never Ends

Phil Ringnalda, apart from being the original BlogThis! creator, and a smart guy, pointed me to SharpReader, the best aggregator I tried so far. It's a .NET application, unfortunately :( thus the "award" is a bit unfair, but well, it's really a simple and solid application (NewsMonster developers, did you get that solid loud enough?)

Things You Only Know If You're Not Using Explorer

gemal.dk - Mozilla - Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites

Dot Net As Distributed Object System

Dot Net As Distributed Object System: "TimBernersLee had a brilliant epiphany when he realized that broken links are OK. In any complex adaptive system, successful systems are always somewhere around the edge of chaos, and brokenness is a part of the game. Take a look at New York City. If these distributed computing guys who are making life hard tried to build New York City, I'm sure they would have failed or never finished, because it would need to be exact and intellectually pure (the MIT approach). Water always flows, electricity only went out once, and FDNY really has their sh*t together; yet, people still get hit by cars, shoot heroine in Hell's Kitchen, construction never ends, and potholes magically appear often."

::Manageability::

Blog of the day: Carlos E. Perez's ::Manageability::. Sometimes just a bit too "over my head", but worth considering anyway. (yes, I'm working hard...)

"CyberTerrorists" won't ever have a clue...

Counterpane: Crypto-Gram:: "The worry is that a terrorist would cause a problem more serious than a natural disaster, but this kind of thing is surprisingly hard to do. Worms and viruses have caused all sorts of network disruptions, but it happened by accident. In January 2003, the SQL Slammer worm disrupted 13,000 ATMs on the Bank of America's network. But before it happened, you couldn't have found a security expert who understood that those systems were dependent on that vulnerability. We simply don't understand the interactions well enough to predict which kinds of attacks could cause catastrophic results, and terrorist organizations don't have that sort of knowledge either -- even if they tried to hire experts."
(Oh My God! I Love BlogThis! I'm All Wet! Yes! Yes! Again! YESSS!)

Switched back

I've been "switched back" from OSX to WinXP, due to the bloody Dreamweaver trial expiration thing. The good thing is, I can use Mozilla more than before (the previous Wintel machine was too slow to run it properly, and on OSX I used Safari pretty much all the time). Now I'm experimenting goodies like NewsMonster and BlogThis! integration. After all, if it wasn't for the horrible WinXP "skin" and the bloody spyware everywhere...

Adobe drops Mac support in new version of Premiere

Adobe drops Mac support in new version of Premiere. Earlier this year, we were wondering if it could have been useful to buy it, and eventually we dropped the idea for the time being. Lucky sods. Anyway, this is a considerable blow to Apple creative community, for which the OSX move has proved to be a major pain.

Regexpin' around

Very geeky day, digging through lines and lines of text to be inserted in a RDMS... My only help was JEdit and its RETest plugin. At the end of the day, everything is where it should be (well, almost) and I'm happy about that.

XP Upgrade Day here

As it often happens, an empty day of install-reboot-patch-reboot routines. Now we have WinXP on all the machines (except my iBook, of course). I've also installed the php5b1 on a Win machine (waiting for an OsX build, I don't want to mess around with the compilers and stuff these days), ready to be tested. Found this interesting tool, gModeler [beware, Flash link!], a very interesting UML tool developed with (and for, mainly) Macromedia Flash. I have to agree with the "flasher" here in Voodoo: it's now a mature technology, if only it wasn't proprietary (and not so heavily misused)...

PHP5, the future, Heartbeat status, and a packet of crisps

I'm pretty new to this TrackBack thing... Should I link directly to the post or to the "TrackBack" link on the page? mah. Anyway, Php|Architect expresses a reasonable opinion about the Php5b1 issue. Yes, it's better than before. No, it's not the Holy Grail of web scripting. Yes, everyone should try it, and IMHO it could also be worth a few "experimental" websites. Hopefully I'll have to build a project management coordination tool for Voodoo in the next few weeks; I still don't like the .NET idea, I won't touch VBScript again (I swear!), thus it's now between java, javascript and php. If we choose the latter, I'll push for using the version 5 and do proper OOP design, despite the (relatively small) problem of multiple inheritance not being available.

On another note, yesterday I added some things to the framework. I'm currently working on the database abstraction problem, i.e. how to move away the query building from the Item implementation thus sharing it between different target languages. It's a bit hard, mainly because I need some extra logic for joins and many_to_many relationship tables.

Design, Design, Design

Lots of UML diagrams to do... Poseidon CE is very buggy on my iBook. Does someone know a good UML tool for OSX? Being free would be a great advantage ;-)