Fabrizio Balliano

• I’d hire 5 programmers to finish PHP unicode support in 2 months
• I’d hire 5 programmers to clean up the database drivers and fix some PDO problems within 4 months, so also PHP could have a great DB interface like jdbc or ado
• I’d hire 2 programmers to add a full abstraction layer to Zend_DB
• I’d drop the old Zend Studio and focus on Eclipse PDT
• I’d start a PHP development blog, people need to know where developers are going

This is just my opinion working every day with PHP for many purposes since 7 years.

PS: Surely also SOAP support needs attention but it seems they’re working on it.

1. speed: try using Google spreadsheet, it’s simply impossible. On Windows it works smoothly.
2. integration: try having to change your proxy settings times a day… FireFox can’t read proxy info from GNOME settings
3. UI: Save/Open dialogs are not the native GTK ones
4. crashes: hey where’s my firefox? it’s gone, without telling me anything… and this happens 3-4 times a day

I think Gnome FireFox needs more attention, anyway I’m waiting for Epiphany/WebKit and for a more Epiphany extensions.

Many blogs talked about that in the latest 2 days, while a was taking a break, but I can’t stop myself for writing a headline about this news from ars technica.

I hope that this unification idea will go on and complete successfully, it should happen for many other projects, I also hope that this will be taken as an example of the right direction for companies that want to work with open projects (ok Apple is not a saint…)

It’s been a long time since the previous release, we worked on many things but only a few of them are visible to the end user. An highlight of the new release:

• most of the back-end was rewritten to achieve better flexibility for power users (and every task was separated in a single script)
• support for alternate CD
• all logging was rewritten to be more human
• many other small things under the hood

Hey, in the package you’ll see the new icon and logo :) absolutely amazing I think :)

So now go download and test, we really need to fine tune things to build the most rocking ubuntu remastering framework! Again I hope that in the near future we could join reconstructor team to work together.

The complete changelog:

* remaster-live-cd script was renamed uck-remaster
* A script for every part of the remastering process was created:
uck-remaster-unpack-iso, uck-remaster-unpack-rootfs, uck-remaster-unpack-initrd,
uck-remaster-chroot-rootfs, uck-remaster-pack-rootfs, uck-remaster-pack-initrd,
uck-remaster-pack-iso, uck-remaster-clean
* Support for alternate cd remastering was added:
* uck-remaster-unpack-initrd and uck-remaster-pack-initrd automatically
detect if you’re remastering a desktop or alternate cd and read/put files
in the right places
* uck-remaster-prepare-alternate script was added to allow you create the
directory you need to put extra packages in the alternate iso
* uck-remaster-finalize-alternate script was added to regenerate the packages
indexes and re-sign the release with your GPG key
* REMASTER_HOME is the new default variable every single script can receive as
parameter, the variable contains the directory where all part of the remaster
will be stored (default is ~/tmp)
* Log/error messages got more consinstancy
* Unuseful error messages were removed to gain readability of the log file
* uck-remaster-pack-iso now supports PPC, x86_64, ia64

When I saw that yesterday… I had to take a picture :D

While we all are waiting for some real news about PHP6… I found a funny bug in PHP5.2.

As you all know PHP5 does not support unicode natively, thus you’ve to use the mbstring module and let the module overload all the functions dealing, doing this will allow you (example) to substring a text without cutting chars in the middle [...]

But mbstring is not complete, str_pad function is not implemented thus in this moment you can’t pad a unicode string with PHP.

IMHO, this is a big issue with PHP in 2007, Python/Ruby and many others support unicode since many years, PHP is too late about that!!

function setParameter( $c ) { $this->parameter = $n; }

:) :) :)

Ubuntu trademark is clear, and the iloveubuntu.com website (intentionally not linked) is violating it, hope Canonical will make that great joke stop.

UPDATE: this post would be a provocation, ’cause you know I’m a bit sceptic about free software and trademarks. I also know about ie7.com and many others, same story here and there. :)

Every member of the Italian parliament can now ask to replace his Windows workstation with a Linux one. Many people say that this is a revolution but I can’t completely agree. Thinking to the medium age of the members and their familiarity with the PC, how many of them will ask for Linux?

A prevision? 1/100 in 1 year, 1/20 in 3 years. And I also think this is an optimistic prevision.

Point is, if someone (with competence) decide to choose one thing, who has not competence should adapt or nothing will ever change.

Via Repubblica, Pollycoke, OSSblog, OSrevolution, Treviño.

UPDATE: the migration will be optional for 630 members, all other servers/workstation will be automatically migrated. Via Pietro Folena.

While the orbo machine demonstration has been postponed again (and I’m going to postpone also my comments about the machine), I’d like to point out some other interesting projects:

• Massive Yet Tiny Engine
• hydro-sonic pump

and the best Italian website/forum about the MEG (Motionless Electromagnetic Generator) and free energy.

…google for more info…

hey, remember I’m not a physicist :)