Saturday, 30th November 2002
This year’s Demotivators
This year’s collection of Demotivators are out (via Doc Searls). I think my favourite is Motivation.
[... 25 words]XML security on SitePoint
Getting Started with XML Security is a SitePoint article of epic proportions. I had never really looked at any of the XML security applications but this article appears to cover the lot.
[... 33 words]Why computer books suck
Why Computer Books Suck. The principle argument seems to be that most authors get burned by their first experience and avoid writing further books, leading to the bulk of computer books being written by newbies. One of my long term ambitions is to write a book on a geeky topic—I haven’t been put off yet, but the prospect does seem slightly less appealing.
[... 66 words]The evolution of PHP
Via ReadingEd, an interesting article on the Object Oriented Evolution of PHP by Zeev Suraski (the Ze in Zend). As well as a history of PHP’s OO support, the article provides some tasty snippets of information as to improvement to look forward to in PHP 5. Personally I can’t wait for the objects to default to passing by reference, but the exception handling is going to be very nice as well:
[... 209 words]PostgreSQL 7.3
PostgreSQL Global Development Group Announces Version 7.3. I still haven’t had a play with PostgreSQL yet but everything I’ve heard has been positive. I’m sure PostgreSQL’s popularity would skyrocket if they made a Windows binary available—the ability to test scripts written in PHP and MySQL on a Windows desktop PC is the main reason I have stuck with MySQL rather than exploring PostgreSQL.
[... 66 words]Blogdex spammed
Uh oh, looks like Blogdex has been spammed. At the time of writing a whole bunch of the links positioned at "12" were "PremiumDomains—www.somedomainhere.com—DOMAINS FOR SALE". This is a worrying precedent—many of the services we bloggers thrive upon such as weblogs.com, blogdex and others are easy targets for spammers thanks to the open nature of the service they provide.
[... 66 words]