pbr/ I am still a Windows XP user thinking about trying out a Linux distribution./pbr/pbr/ I installed VLC Media Player recently on XP, and then applied my ultimate test for any media player: I popped in a DVD and checked if VLC could play it. Even on a copy of XP, it could not as the required codecs were missing./pbr/pbr/ If I switch to Linux I would like to be able to play DVDs legally, even if I have to pay to use the codecs./pbr/br/pbr/ I am still a Windows XP user thinking about tryinRead More…

Scene: A college classroom
Professor: Is anyone here applying for Google Summer of Code this year? If so, see me after class to discuss getting independent study credit toward your degree.
Jack, a student: Isn’t that a really hard program to get into? Like, hard like getting to level 70 in Modern Warfare 2?
Sophie, a student: I [...]

Walaupun baru ?berdiri tahun 2008 yang lalu, Polytechnic Linux Community (POLICY) ?bertekad untuk memajukan open source di Aceh. Hal ini terbukti dengan memulai diadakannya Seminar Linux dan Open Source ? di Politeknik Negeri Lhokseumawe pada hari Rabu, 10 Maret 2010 yang lalu yang berlangsung mulai ?pukul 09.00WIB -15.30 WIB, dan? Alhamdulillah kegiatan seminar ini berlangsung [...]

pFilsh.net is a video clip converter. It works with all OS’s. I believe it’s an add on to Firefox.nbsp; A friend in Germany sent it to me.nbsp; (www.filsh.net).nbsp; I haven’t tried it. But for those who are into doing video clips with You tube, etc.nbsp; it’s worth a try. It has a lot of good reviews. Seems easy to download, and use.nbsp;/p

Yesterday was a quite thrilling day for the PHP development team and led to some imprecise news articles so let’s take a look at what happened: Over the last months many of the core contributors agreed that the current approach to bring Unicode into PHP’s engine wasn’t the right approach and a good thing would be to rethink it from the start. By a provocative move of one contributor the stalled situation got some more movement and Rasmus declared the current implementation to be discontinued to restart.

The past

When the foundation of what should have become PHP 6 was created a decision was made to use UTF-16 as internal encoding for “everything” inside the engine. The choice for UTF-16 was made due to the fact that PHP 6 would use the ICU library which is focused on offering UTF-16 string functions. By using UTF-16 as default encoding we’d have to convert the script code and all data passed from or to the script (request data, database results, output, …) from another encoding, usually UTF-8, to UTF-16 or back. The need for conversion doesn’t only require CPU time and more memory (a UTF-16 string takes double memory of a UTF-8 string in many cases) but makes the implementation rather complex as we always have to figure out which encoding was the right one for a given situation. From the userspace point of view the implementation brought some backwards compatibility breaks which would require manual review of the code. These all are pains for a very small gain for many users where many would be happy about a tighter integration of some mbstring-like functionality. This all led to a situation for many contributors not willing to use “trunk” as their main development tree but either develop using the stable 5.2/5.3 trees or refuse to do development at all.

The present

Yesterday the stagnation created by the situation has been resolved and it was decided that our trunk in svn will be based on 5.3 and we’ll merge features from the old trunk and new features there so that 5.3 will be a true stable branch. The EOL for 5.2 has not yet been defined but I suggest you to really migrate over to 5.3, which usually can be done with very little work, as soon as possible.

The future

Right now we’re starting different discussions to see what kind of Unicode support we really want. Many contributors react positive on a proposed “string class” which wraps string operations in Unicode and binary forms without going deep in the engine. In my opinion such an approach might also be a way to solve some of the often criticized inconsistencies in PHP’s string APIs without the need to break old code. (new code uses the new class, old code the old functions) But that idea is far from a proper proposal or even the implementation, current status is about refocusing the development and get the requirement and design discussions going. By that it’s a bit early to decide whether the next version of PHP will be called PHP 5.4, PHP 6 or maybe even PHP 7.

PHP is alive and kicking!

Two years ago while I was working at dotMobi, I was one of the programmers working on the DeviceAtlas project, which launched at Mobile World Congress 2008. At the time, it was the largest launch I?d been involved in and it was quite a ride towards the end ? when you?re launching to 60,000 people [...]

Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather [...]

PHP 5.2.13 has been released. The announcement is here and software is on the downloads page. At the same time, PHP 5.3.2 RC3 is available for testing, see http://news.php.net/php.qa/65489. There are only a few days before the final PHP…