Cities of the Future

today REALsoftware announced REALbasic Forums. i think they want to improve the quality of support. the forum is moderated by realsoftware employees. we will see, how the community will adopt this feature of support.

you can receive a $20 worth DivX license for free at divx.com. you only need to enter a valid email adress.

hejo. one of my new private servers crashed with a grace hdd failure .. the unit was 2 month old. i am sorry to say, that the provider wasnt able to recover the hdd. i currently fight with backups :-)

did you know typetester ? it is an online font testing tool. you can compare 3 paragraphes of text with different font settings. this application also generates css. very nice.

yesterday mysql ab relased version 5.0.13 rc1 of their new rdbms server. as lamp/php developer you will find there a lot of new features which are already implemented in other rdbms systems but now they come to your lamp system :-)

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mh, i need some wap emulators these days and only found one, who is working properly at my x64 machine .. winwap. the other i used some days ago isnt working under x64 anymore .. shit ..

on request of some users i post here the source code of my script, which won the fractal code contest in scripting languages at apress.com.

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nearly every day i work at different plattforms. one day on mac and another day on x64. since i primary work via remote shell or doing things using a plain command shell i opened a lot of windows.

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in august i submited a php script to a fractal coding contest to Apress.

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these days a new version m0n0wall was released. m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format.

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you can download propellerhead rebirth, a 303/808/909 emulator, for free at rebirthmuseum. have phun.

i played a lot with unix sockets in the past and also with some tcp service stuff with an own deamon. after many tests i discovered inetd, where you can use STDIN/STDOUT to exchange data with the client.

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these days a client modifies a one of the applications i customized for him. he told me, that he implemented some new features and if i could integrate this stuff into the next release cycle to the productive version of this application.

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if you want to evaluate a system you need a working environment to test and play with.

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one major problems i got in the last years was that nearly nobody knows ibphoenix/firebird ? do you know this RDBMS ? its a fork free from borlands interbase. firebird can handle a large amount of data and support full ansi sql 92 since years. you got triggers, stored procedures, writeable views, unions and stuff since years ..

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RealSoftware announced this summer a new release model, to improve their product in a short cycle than years. they spoke about months.

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as announced in august this year mysql released MySQL Workbench. Many PHP developers are using the well know ER modelling application DBDesigner4 from fabforce.net.

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some people are using knoppix or another linux system on a flash drive, to recover their systems. if you got a 256 mb flash drive, you can also install windows xp on it. this seems very handy in cooperative environments, where the it department is using windows xp for their own .. or have to use windows xp only .. or where linux is an evil thing for the management .. :-)

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these days i found this review of well known php based so called CMS systems.

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i am too busy right now ..

anandtech.com has a nice review on a well know appliance service .. "google mini" .. they purchased a unit for 3k us bucks and show us some internals .. verry interesting ..

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since 1991 i am using computers. i started with a 8 MHz 286 intel CPU. since then i am a victim of keyboards and their countrz localization. in my case its the german keyboard layout. i always wondered, who in the world generated the syntax of languages like asm or c++ and what keyboard layout he used ..

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today phpwscite R12 was released. this release fixed some major bugs which occurs, when you are using directories or files containing spaces.

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"I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," said Brooks, referring to the freezer where bodies sat decomposing. "In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … and this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live."

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i think this is a verry interesting point of view:

I keep reading “(...) won the project (...) after a pitch...” Won? A pitch is the presentation of design ideas to a client by competing agencies or studios. The Americans pitch a baseball, while the English noun denotes a black, sticky substance that is difficult to get off your hands. That stuff is called Pech in German, and we use the same word for bad luck. I love etymology! Bad luck indeed for those who don’t win a pitch. Clients invite designers to a pitch when they think they need help with a communication problem, and the fee usually doesn’t even cover the cost of the colour prints. That would be like visiting several restaurants in a row and trying the food in each one, then refusing to pay the bill because none of the dishes were really to your liking.

Taking part in a pitch where concepts are sold for a fraction of what they are worth – in other words: given away – makes you a loser three times over. First you lose any respect for our business, because if it can be given away, it can’t be worth much. Then you lose money by not being paid for your most valuable asset: ideas and their visualization. And finally, you lose any chance to show the client that it takes a dialogue to solve design problems. A pitch is like a blind date with many partners at the same time. A client who invites designers to a pitch without first talking to them properly, at length and in depth, might as well draw lots among the members of a professional association. And if a client does engage a few designers in a dialogue about the issue, he won’t need a pitch any more. He’ll know who to trust.

Why then do more and more clients think that pitching is the way to go, and why do so many designers take part? It seems that Stupidity, Laziness, Vanity and Cowardice – the four Riders of the Design Apocalypse – drove Reason – one of the patron saints of design – to a blackout; a pitch black one, so to speak.

source: erik spiekermann

i am glad, that i am an engineer .. :-)

sometimes you want to view and/or export an existing microsoft access mdb database without the need to install microsoft office, inlucding access.

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happy birthday phpn.org. everythings starts in august 2003. in september the project gets public. its the 2nd anniversary.

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it is a shame for such a "glory nation", whats going on down in louisiana.

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sometimes you need to examine, what HTTP messages are transmited. you first idea is to use a network sniffer like tcpdump or ethereal. netcat might also work.

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do you need an installer for windows ? i recommend Inno Setup. you will find the major features you need to create a windows installer from scratch. in my opinion the best feature is, that the installer is leightweight and is compatible with all major windows version from 95 to xp.

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every monday i start the week with a new wallpaper.

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the last weeks show, where open source can end and what a company behind a oss php project can do for the community.

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