I fell asleep while reading the Java Server Programming J2EE Edition again. But this time when I awoke I sat down and wrote some PHP code that is total gibberish, does not produce any errors and seems to be written in beer language. I have no idea what problem I was trying to solve while asleep but it might be that I was just thirsty? Happy Publishing!
PHP  Pencil  Web Developer  beer  code

Digg is a organic news community started by Kevin Rose. There has been much speculation as to how much Digg is worth and whether or not it is up for sale. Rumors have it that Google is thinking of making an outright purchase of the online community. But is it a good investment? Will the community benefit from the sale? What does Google hope to gain?
Article  Social Networking  online communities

There is always resistance to being owned by a corporation. When big brother becomes involved people suspect that they are being used. Businesses are in the business of making a profit so why should starting a online community be any different?
Opinion  Social Networking  building communities  online communities  venture capital

Microsoft has always been confused by open source as is apparent by their refusal to adopt the GPL as part of their Codeplex.com project. But despite the silliness of "MPL", which I only see as a good excuse to brand an open source license, the number of ASP.NET applications claiming to be open source is growing.
Open source  Opinion  asp.net  gpl  mpl

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them. Microposts can be made public on a Web site and/or distributed to a private group of subscribers. Subscribers can read microblog posts online or request that updates be delivered in real time totheir desktop as an instant message or sent to a mobile device as an SMStext message. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging,instant messaging,email,MP3 or the web.
Announcements  Web technology

Firefox 3 was released a few days ago and so far as a surfer I have enjoyed the experience. But as a web developer it is starting to cause me headaches. It seems that FF3 cannot stretch a div that has overflow auto to the full length of the content. I check this with really long lists and got this output. When I change the overflow attribute to hidden the div stretched as it should. IE7 though not my main browser has no problem with this code. I stopped using IE a long time ago but it seems that I am always forced back to using it to check on bugs in Firefox! Firefox always claims to have the faster browser and the one that is most standards compliat. The problem is it comes at the cost of many irritating bugs that I would trade standards compliance for any day. Years ago I found a bug in Firefox where numbers on ordered lists would not iterate. It took two years? and hundreds of unwanted emails from the bug tracker it was finally fixed. I still get those emails now and again. I seem to always stumble upon these Firefox bugs and have to wonder people say that FF fixes bugs faster. Just not true. While there may be an effort to fix seurity bugs those other bugs, the ones that you can see and annoy you always seem to hang around. This is the same as it is with IE so no matter how you slice it the IE and FF are really evil twins. Its just that both are evil.
Firefox  Review  User Tests

Someone posted a comment about this and it's true. Four more of Mambo's core developers have jumped ship and started a new fork of the content management system. Below you will find their reasons for doing so as posted on the website. I am curious though as to why they did not join the Joomla! group. The MiaCMS Story MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. Why a fork? We felt that the policies, processes, and priorities of the official Mambo Foundation were having a negative impact on the code and the community. Innovation, creativity, and team spirit have all but been eliminated. Thus the fork. Much of the same crew that built you Mambo 4.5.3+ through 4.6.3 are here now continuing development on the same award winning software base that everyone has come to know and love. Let us make clear we never gave up on the product or the community, but rather just the Foundation which controlled it. The MiaCMS project was initiated by four individuals with profound knowledge of the Mambo CMS system. The founding team includes Al Warren (alwarren), Chad Auld (cauld), Ozgur Cem Sen (ocs), and Richard Ong (arpee). Together we have held the following roles within Mambo over the years; project leader, board member, steering committee member, core team leader, quality team leader, documentation team leader, and server administration. Those who know the project well will recognize those listed as what was the majority of the current core Mambo development team. Who is left to carry on Mambo development? The answer is not many. We plan to continue down the revolutionary path we laid out for Mambo before ultimately cut our ties to the Mambo Foundation. Just that we will be doing it as MiaCMS from this point forward. So again... this is a fork, we do give credit to Mambo for past work done, and we do aim to make MiaCMS even better (in fact we think it already is) !
Announcements  Content management  Mambo

I always find it a little weird that the same people that accuse me of not being a help to a project seem to glean my ideas and try to implement their own versions. Recently I placed some of my past OOP ideas and code into FireOrb. These were changes that I thought were necessary back in Drupal 4.6 but now have updated for 4.7. Suddenly in this thread I see that someone agrees that being able to use Classes in Drupal is a necessity. I also made it clear that one of the reasons it is necessary is because of PHP5 OOP features like __autoload. Well it looks like I have readership because a new patch for Drupal 7 seems to incorporate these ideas. I guess it is only natural and flattering since everything I had planned for Typical Text ( the previous name of my Drupal fork) is now in Drupal 5 and 6.
Developer Zone  Drupal

Some might be thinking that one person or a small group of persons could never hope to run a fork of Drupal because of its size or whatever. vbDrupal proves that the only thing you really need is to "just do it". vbDrupal is a fork of the CMS Drupal. It integrates Drupal into the forum software vBulletin. Drupal and vBulletin are tightly connected with eachother, user accounts and sessions are shared between the two systems. vbDrupal tries to offer the best of both worlds. vbDrupal is completely free, however it does require that you have a valid vBulletin license. The project is hosted on SourceForge.net, from there you can download the product and/or it's sources. vbDrupal.org is the community site where we try to offer support, it is also a showcase of the product. This fork of Drupal seems to be gaining momentum as the need for a robust forum like vBulliten is needed as the hub for creating a community. Though FireOrb will not be headed in a similar direction it is nice to know that others feel the necessity to implement new ideas.
Developer Zone  Drupal  News

So am back on the job market. This time looking for a PHP programming job not just a job doing a particular CMS. It seems though that things have changed. Employers want OOP style programmers. Maybe they are just tired of all the crap that programmers place in their code or maybe they want to be sure that they can understand the code from one employee to the next. But whatever the reason companies are set on making OOP a hard pre-requisite to employment. Making Drupal OOP Now I have a even stronger reason for forking Drupal into FireOrb. Since Drupal is totally procedural when you use it you get out of practice in using OOP. Your mindset is different and you have no references for solutions to common programming problems. Since Drupal does not have any enforced coding conventions you can do pretty much what you want. They call it flexibility I call it hazardous. OOP vs. Spagetti While it is entirely possible to create spagetti code with OOP it is difficult and becomes harder to do as you gain more experience. But once you start in with spagetti and meatball coding you only seem to find ways to cover it with different sauces. This is how I honest ly see Drupal 6. There is this mashup of objects and functions used like "goto" throughout the application. A classic recipe for unreadable and unmaintainable code which takes forever to debug. Performance Some say object-oriented programming take up too much over head in a web application. These are the ones that are also okay with a web application using 50 or 60 mb of memory. Totally hypocrisy and nothing but excuses for not taking responsiblity for writing crap. If you are using 20mb to start your application then there is no excuse for not using OO and some type of design pattern. FireOrb is both Back in Drupal 4.5 I did a few things one of which I regret now. The first thing was I was dead set on getting Drupal to work in PHP5. That worked out because later the core team finally took the cork out and decided to go with PHP5. The second thing was I made changes to the core so that you could use OOP classes just like you would fuctions. I really regret not continuing on this path and making sure that OOP made it into Drupal. But now I am going back to making these changes in FireOrb. I still want to do Drupal developement but I also want to OOP in PHP so that I can show potential employers my capabilities. So as of now FireOrb
Developer Zone  FireOrb