PHP 5 has been released, and on the same day a new version of 4: 4.3.8.
Version 5 has several improvements over 4, the most important of them being the completely rewritten XML support and the use of the new Zend-II engine that has real object support (instead of a modified document model to suit OO-programming). Browse to their website, and find out everything there is to know about this new version.
Yesterday I had a good day in my mental/personal(/midlife?) crisis, so I started Delphi just to do some programming. Nothing real, just playing around. A while ago, I downloaded SuiPack, from SuniSoft, so I installed that.
Let me tell you about the installation first. You start the installer, and in less that a minute a message is showed that the installation is complete. Okay, I thought, I haven’t even noticed something.
Starting Delphi again gave me 4 more tabs in the pallette: SuiPack, SuiPack DB, SuiDialogs and SuiUtils. The first one is so filled with components, that it doesn’t even fit on one page. It seems to contain just about any object you already know! SuiPack DB holds the components that are database-aware. SuiDialogs hold some predefined dialogs and then there are some utils.
Working with the components is easy. Converting old projects is easy too. Just drop a converter-component on your form, and suiPack will try to convert all components to the Sui-counterpart. If you don’t use too many third party components, converting should give you no problem. Switching themes on the fly is easy. Just drop a SuiThemeManager on the form, double-click it to select which components will be effected and at runtime change the SuiThemeManager.SuiUIStyle to something else. A predefined theme, or something you load from a file. It’s already in there.
Two thumbs up for this product. Its price is good too. Individual licenses are $59, or $99 with full source. Corporate licenses are more expensive, but still very cheap if you have a couple of developers on your payroll.
This is cool. Some people love vi so much, that they turn MS Word into vi! Check this out.
Like I used to said a couple of years ago: real programmers use vi.
If you need a good paintprogram, with unique features, but don’t have an arm and a leg to spare, try DogWaffle. It is a strange name for a very good program and it has a free version. If you like it, or need the newer features, you can always upgrade to the latest version. For only US$67 you have an awesome, especially aimed at artists (so it’s not really targetted at photographers and photo-editing like PhotoShop, although it will do just fine in comparison). It has a nice feature onion-skin (for old-fashioned animation), a particle engine for sparks/fireworks/rainfall, and lots of other goodies found only found in programs costing ten times as much. Check it out, you won’t regret it.
If you need to control your server, but can’t actually be at its keyboard, RealVNC is lean, mean and … FREE! See the picture I’ve taken, but don’t mind the mess. You can see the real server to the right, and it’s screen in a window on my workstation to the left.
I tried to install PostgreSQL, the 7.5 binary development night-build (since I can’t build it from source). The basic procedure is:
- Unzip in directory, let's assume C:PostgreSQL
- Add C:PostgreSQLBin and C:PostgreSQLlib to PATH
- Add environmentvariable PGDATA and have it point to C:PostgreSQLData
- Now start the following command: initdb -L "C:/postgresql/share"
First problem encountered: PostgreSQL won’t run as admin. So I created a limited-user (I’m using Windows XP Pro) and logged in as that user. The init-command now crashes with an unhandled exception. Can’t see what it is, or what to do about it. Just a message that somebody is sorry for the inconvenience (you know what I’m talking about!).
Let’s wait a while until 7.5 with the real Windows installer is there. In some online documents I read that this Windows support was supposed to be included in version 7.4 already. But hey, who cares about tons of users?
If you have an USB-key or pendrive, then this tool from HP allows you to format it so you can boot from it. Think of the possibilities: as a rescuedisk, as an alternative way of booting Linux, as Symantec Ghost bootdisk, whatever. Great.
Since I participate in the RC-72 contest of Distributed.net, I regularly visit the stats pages. A while ago, the guys switched from Sybase to PostgreSQL as their database of choice. On the statspages the PostgreSQL-logo is displayed, so I clicked it recently.
PostgreSQL looks like a good choice if you are, like me, accustomed to Oracle. I hope version 7.5 will bring a decent Windows version, since Cygwin is not something I like very much. But tablespaces, replication, foreign-keys and subselects are things I do like. I’ll let you guys know when I installed it, and what my findings are.
I just finished installing an old (U2W) SCSI disk in the server. It was a remainder of the old Linux server, too good to leave unused. It’s only 9.1GB, but fast ones!
I also installed Smarty on the server. Being a (PHP-) template engine, it can be used to build just about anything. I’ll expirement with it, and let you know if it is of any use. The company’s website still needs to be build, so perhaps this is the time to do so. Templates are fun and simple, so it should not be a problem.
After the server crash last year, I hadn’t had the time to setup an online photo album softwarepackage. But I did last week, and it’s got some pictures already.
Comments and ratings are always welcome. If you like me to host your pictures, please do not hesitate to contact me. The software (CopperMine) is template driven, so it can be change in look-and-feel to whatever you like. Commercial use of the galleries is not implemented yet, but if you like to, do contact me, then we can work something out.
View the mainpage of the gallery here: http://www.rare-it.com/cm.