There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. This presentation will cover server technologies like FastCGI, IIS and the PHP SQL Server Driver, client technologies like the ASP.NET AJAX Library and Silverlight, as well as developer tools. This is not a sales pitch – it’s a technical walkthrough with demos, and will give you pointers to lots of resources for digging deeper.

I’m sure Glen’s talk will be interesting, and I’m looking forward to a chance to catch up on the current state of web servers in Microsoft-land. While I tend to use unix-based systems for most of my own work, there are plenty of organizations who are standardized on Microsoft products, and you have to be able to be able to work with what they have. Case in point, my wife is hoping to set up a WordPress website for her department at work, and they’ll probably set it up on a Windows-based server.

If anybody reading this is planning to attend, please introduce yourself. I’ll be wearing a WordPress shirt.

ShareThis

After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. So I decided to go with Ubuntu. This was probably just as well, as we use a lot of Debian Linux stuff at work, and Ubuntu is Debian-based.

I won’t bore you with details of the install (which went smoothly), or with detailed lists of what I’ve done to customize my system. But I do want to point out some good links and highlights for the curious. Especially what I did about those pesky “can’t-live-without” Windows applications.

I knew that the main Windows application that I would miss was Photoshop. Yes, I know about the Gimp, and I’m sure it’s quite capable of doing 99% of the things that I do in Photoshop. But I’ve been using PS for about 10 years now, and I know my around that application. I’ve tried using the Gimp a few times, but I just can’t make myself use it enough to get used to that interface. I also know about Gimpshop, but I already own the real thing, and I’d prefer to use it.

Enter Wine. Wine is an implementation of the Windows API under Unix. And it really works. I just mounted my Photoshop CD, and ran wine Setup.exe, and Photoshop was installed into the default wine environment under my account. I did run into some glitches trying to run it at first, however. But after a bit of searching, I discovered that the solution was to remove some unneeded definitions for a Wacom graphics tablet from my xorg.conf file.

The other main Windows app that I thought I’d miss was iTunes. However, rather than running that under Wine, I decided to check out the native Linux offerings. I tried XMMS, but it was too much like WinAmp, and I didn’t like the interface. I also tried Rhythmbox, and it was okay, but just didn’t seem like I could tweak it enough. Then I found Amarok 1.4.2, which is what I’m running now.

Amarok has an interface and feature-set very similar to iTunes. It’s also very easy to hook into it and write your own scripts to interface with the player. I was able to whip up a perl script to send “now playing” song information to my web server very quickly. I just wish that there was a universally accepted way to transport song ratings from one system to another. I lost all my iTunes ratings, play counts, and such. It’s probably possible to extract that from the iTunes data files, but I don’t have enough spare time to mess with that. In any case, I’m pretty happy with Amarok.

And finally, I also found some simple instructions for running Internet Explorer under Ubuntu. This is great for web development, as I’ll be able to test pages with IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. This procedure installs each version of IE into its own Wine environment, so you can run them all simultaneously without side-effects. I’m keeping my eye out for IE 7.0, but it might be a while, because it apparently depends on some bits of Windows XP that aren’t yet handled by Wine.

In any case, I’m still getting along just fine with Ubuntu. The main problem I’ve had so far is that some of my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions don’t want to work correctly (ForecastFox, for example). But I’m sure that the wrinkles will get smoothed out over time. If you are thinking of installing Ubuntu, or if you already have, and need some pointers on what you can do to tweak your sytem, try the following useful links:

• Mark Pilgrim’s Essentials, 2006
• Top 10 Ubuntu Apps and Tweaks
• 14 Days of Ubuntu
• Automating GNOME with Devil’s Pie

Sometime in the future, I might post more specific details on other utilities I’ve installed or configuration options I’ve tweaked to get my system set up the way I want. If you’d be interested in that, let me know!

ShareThis

They are using a license called CDDL, which is a spinoff of the MPL. CDDL is OSI approved. So, brownie points in their favor for that.

The company released all of the code associated with Solaris 10 at OpenSolaris.org: the core operating system, networking, system libraries and commands.

All the features available in Solaris 10 are in the download, officials said, for both Sparc and x64/x86 architectures.

via internetnews.com

ShareThis

Linux has other problems too. It’s likely that developer interest will wane when Apple is fully engaged on the X86 platform. While Apple ran on the PowerPC chip the amount of developer effort in the Open Source camps was nil. But now that Apple is using the same processor as everyone else, targeting the Macs will now be an easy decision to make. This will be at the expense of Linux.

And then there are the numerous developers who simply do not subscribe to the notions of the Open Source Foundation and its rigid licensing requirements. They will quickly see profit opportunities for OS-X/86 development without having to worry about what has to be shared and what can be sold for profit.

Huh? Dvorak doesn’t seem to grok the Linux and Open Source community. First of all, one of the first things that’s going to happen is that developers will port Linux to the new Intel-based Macs. Just like they’ve ported Linux to the XBox, Playstation, Game Boy, and just about every cell phone and PDA out there. It might not be the most practical thing to do, but it’s a challenge, and therefore it will be done.

Secondly, I can’t really see many Open Source developers suddenly getting dollar signs in their eyes just because Macs have a new CPU. Why should they? How many open source projects are written in assembly language? Not many, I can assure you. Mostly, they’re written in Java, C/C++, Perl, and Python. Some are written to be cross-platform to begin with. Others are targetted at a particular operating system. But few of them give a hoot about what kind of CPU they run under. And then there are the web-based projects built around PHP, Ruby, and/or Javascript, among others. These tend to be even more platform agnostic. They don’t care if they’re running under Windows, OSX, Linux, or FreeBSD. In fact they don’t care if they’re running on a desktop, a mainframe, or a Commodore 64.

The way I see it, Linux and its cousins have a lot to gain. With only one CPU to target, work will become easier for those working on Mac emulators. I don’t imagine that it will be long before we see something like WINE. Maybe MINE is in our future?

ShareThis

Steve Jobs just dropped the bomb: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

Basically, it seems, Apple has been disappointed with IBM’s inability to deliver a G5 processor that could break the 3GHz barrier or with heat characteristics that would be usable for laptops. They’ve been developing an Intel-based Macintosh, along with the cross-platform tools needed to manage the transition, secretly over the past five years.

There are some more details from the keynote available over on Engadget and The Mac Observer. Of note: Jobs displayed the slides for his keynote using a Macintosh powered by a 3.6GHz Pentium 4. He showed demos of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Mathematica running on the new platform. Existing PowerPC binaries will be able to run on the new system thanks to a new real-time emulation layer called Rosetta. The Wolfram Research folks were able to get Mathematica, which has millions of lines of source code, modified and re-compiled for the new platform in just a couple of days.

via: kottke. Also, as Dave Winer points out (and tons of people are sure to overlook), this does not mean that you’ll be able to run future versions of OS-X on your Dell computer. Apple has always been able to ensure a certain level of stability in their systems because the hardware was locked down. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. But the possibility of a version of Windows that runs on the new Apple hardware is a different story.

ShareThis

ShareThis