Fritz Thomas

Now it is finally here. The long awaited PHP 5.3.0 Release with Namespaces, Late Static Binding, Closures, many new extensions, new additions to the SPL and many more.
Read the full Release Announcment for PHP 5.3.0
You can download PHP 5.3.0 on php.net Download site.

Read the full News at the FLOW3 Project Website:

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

I have just updated my Blog a bit. Actually i updated just some CSS but i hope it has more contrast now.

You may know the CSS declarations text-align and vertical-align. Perhaps you tried alredy to vertically align inline span elements within a div block element but did not succeed yet. I will try explain how to achieve this with a simple button example.
Before:
After:
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Many of you may already know this sites. But one more link can not be that bad.

If you are searching for a list of CSS Attributes and their compatibility in the major browsers with examples, demos, hacks or workarounds to get it working Cross Browser wide take a look at http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html and http://de.selfhtml.org/navigation/syntax.htm#css (only in german language at the moment).

Yesterday Zend Framework 1.7.5 was released with the normal enhancements and bug fixes. There is also an update to Zend_View which breaks Backwards Compatibility due an Security Issue. Read more on this on Matthews Blog.

It is available for download as usual on http://zendframework.com/download/latest.

Do you ever wanted to know which features of HTML5, SVG or CSS3 are implemented in which browsers, or when they are going to implemenet it?
Thats what you can see in the compatibility tables on “When can i use” .
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Mozilla released a new Labs project which shows what can be done with HTML5. It uses only Web Technologys – No Flash. I write this because it might look like Flash in the video.

Bespin is not another richt text editor. It is a fully integrated development environment usable right in your browser. Like the title of Bespin Homepage says: “Code in the Cloud”.

Read the full announced on the Mozilla Labs Blog.

Or watch this introducing screencast from Dion and Ben:

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

“Is this real life?”, “I can’t see anything…”, “I feel funny….” –> So funny!

There is also a Web Site about the new book: http://designingwebinterfaces.com with a little comparison of the essential controls needed in an web application and which JS Librarys have implemented it so far and how.

The first annual ExtJS Conference was announced and takes place in Orlando, Florida from 14th to 16th April 2009. There is also a release party of the new ExtJS 3.0 release.
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Have you ever needed the absolute path of the shell script within this script? I do not mean the current working dir (pwd). That is different, because you do not know from which path the bash script is called.

In my case i needed the absolute path, because i wanted to call another script, which is by convention, in the same directory as the called script. In such a case you would use realpath in PHP – readlink is the bash equivalent to it.

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# Absolute path to this script. /home/user/bin/foo.sh
SCRIPT=$(readlink -f $0)
# Absolute path this script is in. /home/user/bin
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

I made some changes to my picture gallery. There is also new folder ‘Hardware‘. Within this folder there are all pictures of my previous blog posts about new hardware. This is:

• Lenovo Thinkpad T61P Notebook with Advanced Mini Dock
• Jabra BT620s Bluetooth A2DP Stereo Headset
• Logitech Illuminated Keyboard

If you have made any High Quality Photos of your Hardware in at least 1024×768 resolution and you think this might interest other people, please contact me via the contact form.

Yay. First!!

After buying some cool new stuff from Thinkgeek my workroom looks like this now. Only the orignal super mario sound is missing. Maybe this will be done in the future.

Songbird is for the first stable release yet powerful.But do you miss an option or feature in Songbird.  Take a look at the addons for songbird. I missed to minimize the player in the notification area of Gnome in Ubuntu 8.10 and i found an addon – Firetray for Songbird. Installed, Restarted, ready to minimize.

A few weeks ago Adobe announced to release new versions of the Flash player and Air simultaneously for the 3 major operating systems Linux, Mac and Windows.

Today Adobe released AIR for Linux in Version 1.5 to catch up with the others. So in future Linux Users of AIR do not have to wait for new version. I think this is just another step of Adobe in the Linux world. I hope they will release also other Software simultaneously for Linux in future. For example Photoshop or other foto related programs of Adobe.

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The Upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 did not raise any errors and was straight forward. I just followed as usual this guide: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

This was the last upgrade i had to make, because of the new automatic upgrade system introduced in Wordpress 2.7. In Future an upgrade will only be a click away. Yay.

I found a really nice tool on our corporate blog. Wordle .

To describe best what worlde does with Webpages – take a look at this picture:

After upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid you may get some error on sshfs mounted directories, when you tried to copy something on this places. This fix seems to be fixed in sshfs 2.1. If you need a fast fix on this install sshfs 2.1 manually from here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/sshfs

Select the right Architecture and download the .deb file from one of the locations on the next site. You can open the deb file directly with GDebi Package Manager.

Ignore warnings that an older version was found in your package manager.

As i posted some days ago, the ExtJS Roadmap was updated and includes some very interesting and promising new features. Some of them will be:

• Comet
• Charting API
• etc…

Now Jack Slocum posted a preview of a visual drag and drop developer tool for ExtJS. In the Screencast he shows how to create a grid with an XML Source with Drag and Drop.

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Andi Gutmans writes in a recent blog post about the progress of Zend_Amf in the Zend Framework since the partnership between Adobe and Zend:

At ZendCon this year we announced a partnership between Zend and Adobe. The goal of the partnership is to help make it easier for PHP developers to use Flex. Since then there has been a flurry of activity including blog posts and the introduction of Zend_Amf into the main trunk of Zend Framework.

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No, it is not April the first! According to a report by TechWorld, a student asked Steve Ballmer on a Developer Conference in Australia:

“Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?”

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On the Roadmap Site for ExtJS, there are some new interesting features to come for early 2009. Some of these are:

• Flash Charting API
• Ext.Direct – Remoting and data streaming/comet support – on of my favorites.
• Integrated client-server data binding/marshaling of updates
• ARIA/Section 508 accessibility improvements
• Update the Ext event registration model
• Ext.Ajax enhancements
• All new lightweight, high-speed core base library

Some words on the “new lightweight, high-speed core base library”:

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Darrell Meyer wrote an interesting Article on ExtJS Blog how to test JavaScript generated User Interfaces with Selenium. Selenium is tool to automate testing the functionality of web applications. Tests are written in Selenese, a very simple HTML Syntax.

In his article he describrs how to test a Form Interface genereated with ExtJS. But the article is a very good introduction in Selenium and how to write such tests, regardless of the used JavaScript Library.

Read the full article on the ExtJS Blog.

Interesting new multi functional device: Pome Granate Phone

Some Features:

• E-Mail
• Digital Camera
• Internet
• GPS
• Projector
• Coffee Brewer
• etc.

Take a look at this nice viral video at: http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

Today i found an interesting OpenSource Web Traffic Analysis Tool (GPL Licensed), which i think i will give a try on my Blog and i think it could be a real alternative to Google Analytics and also for Clicky for me. The aim of Piwik is clear:

piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

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For all of those who have not participated at the ZendCon (like me), there are some interesting links to the slides on DevZone. If you want to get a better “feeling” of the ZendCon there are some Photos on Flickr. Thank you guys for sharing all of those!

Yesterday Adobe released a new Version of their Flash Player – Version 10. For the first time they released it simultaneous for Linux, Mac and Windows. Adobe has not the best reputation in the Opensource World in the past but they want to change this. I think this is good thing.

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