Just wanted to remind people in the Berlin area that there will be a special PHP UG Berlin meeting on september 12th as part of a roadshow. We will have a bunch of guests from Zend, eZ Publish and MySQL doing some very interesting presentations:

1. eZ systems: "Enterprise PHP components by eZ systems": Die eZ publish enterprise components sind der erste Schritt zur Erstellung von komplexen Webapplikationen. Dieser Vortrag stellt die Klassen-Bibliothek vor und zeigt exemplarisch deren Verwendung.
2. MySQL: "Einführung in MySQL 5.0": In diesem Vortrag erhalten Sie einen Überblick über die neuen Funktionen von MySQL 5.0. Erfahren Sie mehr über Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, XA, Cursors und das Information Schema.
3. Zend: "Zend und die PHP-Community in Deutschland": Offene …

By nat

Some interesting developments to watch, two around Hurricane Katrina:

• Google Maps adds satellite imagery of post-Katrina New Orleans. The imagery is from August 31st--enable it by clicking on the red "Katrina" button beside "Satellite", "Map", and "Hybrid". Check out the Superdome as an example of before and after. Yowzers.
• New Orleans flood map with depth information (powered by MySQL and AJAX). This is amazing to play with, because the depth information gives you context for your before-and-after views of the landscape in Google Maps. "Oh wow, that sheen is actually 7ft of water!" moments abound. …

Sun has quietly retired the Sun Industry Standards Source License ("sizzle") which was used by Open Office in favor of the more standard LGPL.  To be honest, I'm not sure that license proliferation is quite the big deal the press makes it out to be given that something like 70% of all projects on SourceForge use the GPL.  But there probably isn't the need for all these variations of licenses and Sun's taken a step in the right direction by eliminating a license that never really caught on.  There are probably another dozen out there that could be replaced by GPL or the Mozilla license for what it's worth. 

To Sun's credit they do appear to be embracing open source where it makes sense. Jonathan Schwartz, Simon Phipps and crew …

So, I’ve been tasked to write an application at work, from scratch. This is really cool, as currently I spend 90% of my time fixing bugs, or adding features to a really old PHP 4 code base with register_globals ON.
So, now my question is.. do I use PHP 5 or 4 ? I think the answer to this is pretty simple, as I want to learn how to do things in PHP 5, but this app needs a database, and I am going to use MySQL. It’s already in beta, and by the time I’m done with my development (2-3 months), we may reach GA. So, what do you guys think ?

The app in question, is basically a Document Management System. We’re going to have Documents with Sections and Subsections, all of which will be converted well formed XML when deployed. The whole point of this app, is to prevent the “business” side manage the content of the documents, rather than us software engineers. Currently, the “business” makes changes to the XML document in MS …

Tim posted this on the O'Reilly Radar yesterday. He cites James Governor (Redmonk), who summarizes it all as such:Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day.And so (as the argument goes), Google will win and Microsoft is doomed. I disagree with this premise, whatever I may think of his suggested outcome. I disagree not so much because of anything Microsoft has done (though License 6.0 comes to mind), but because of my Mac.

Apple chooses to sell me an operating system - they sell me a moment in time in that OS' lifecycle. Or, rather, they sell me that snapshot with the right to receive …

The most recent MySQL server I used in a production environment was a 3.23, so in conjunction with reading the 5.0 sources, I saw fit to reread large parts of the documentation to see where updates had happened, fixes were applied, extensions added. Here are some random clippings from the docs that illustrate quirks, changes from MySQL 3.23 (other than those noted in 3.23->4.0, 4.0->4.1, 4.1->5.0 which we'll give a brief tour of at the end) and differences from the standard. If you recently read the docs, kindly walk on, there's nothing to see here. If …

As flawed as I think AJAX is, I just can’t help but want to start work on an AJAX project. It’s been my dream for a long time to make a 2D Zelda-style MMORPG (similar to Graal (but not the Graal 3D garbage.)) I’ve also always wanted to make a web/browser-based MMORPG (something like Runescape.) I don’t know Java though, and I don’t want to mess with shitty browser refreshes like phpRPG had (note that phpRPG is undergoing some big changes, so maybe they’ll come up with a better product this time around.) AJAX seems like the perfect means to achieve my end of a non-Java, browser-based MMORPG. phpRPG might actually be a good starting point since, well, it is an RPG written in PHP. The AJAX interaction would be the tough part. I would imagine motion in phpRPG is based on locations stored in …

I'm in Germany. Crazy.

I'm putting images up on my gallery page now, but it's slow going. It seems that I keep bringing down my co-worker's network whenever I push a lot of bandwidth over it.

I have not asked my co-worker if I can mention him on my blog yet, so I will not mention his name; But, I would like to publicly share my gratitude. He has been very kind and helped me find my way around his country very adeptly.

He suggested a very nice hotel for me, only moments from his office and home, was kind enough to invite me on an outing last weekend with his children to a local lake, keeps me hydrated (Have I mentioned how uhm... different Berlin water is than Washingtonian water?), lets me invade his network, and keeps me very well informed about MySQL, SAP and MaxDB.

I miss you all. Please comment so I have some sort of tenuous grip with home. I'm getting a little homesick.

…

In the hubbub of doing too many things at once, I have been negligent in promoting the upcoming Open Source Database Conference 2005.

The Open Source Database Conference 2005 deserves some coverage as it is the only forum in recent years that focuses on all of the major Free Software and Open Source DBMS, and includes business sessions that focus on how Free/Open databases fit into the business world, along with solid technical sessions (usually from core developers of the DBMS in question) on:
* Apache Derby
* …

When:
Tuesday September 13th 7:00pm

Where:
Miro International Pty Ltd
Level 18, 31 Queen Street
Melbourne 3000, Australia

Thanks to Miro for offering their offices for the meeting.

What’s happening?
Stewart Smith will talk about:
- What’s new in MySQL land
- Introduction to MySQL AB the company
- what it does
- what it offers
- Graphical tools for MySQL
- MySQL Administrator
- MySQL Query Browser

RSVP
Please RSVP via our meetup.com site:
http://mysql.meetup.com/93/

After
We can head to a pub or out for curry.