I’d like to say Happy Holidays to you and yours this season. No matter your religion, race, nationality, whatever… I wish you the best in the new year.
PHP.net’s holiday logo was finally updated this year. The previous one was a bit dated.
Both Microsoft and Mozilla have released patches for their flagship browsers in the past 24 hours or so.
Microsoft’s patch was a response to a security hole that could allow an attacker to steal passwords from your computer using a drive-by download initiated on an infected site you might visit, or be sent to. Every version of IE, from IE5 to IE8 beta 2 is affected, so you should update immediately if you don’t use Automatic updates(or if you have it set for a long time in between updates).
Firefox versions 2 and 3 both had patches released too, though the security flaws fixed in FF were unrelated to the IE security flaw. So make sure you grab the latest version of either of those as well. Mozilla says this will be the last update to the 2.x codebase of Firefox.
Even if you don’t use either FF or IE as your primary browser, if you have either installed, update them immediately.
Today, on my birthday of all days, I got hit while driving (back)to work. I was coasting along, doing the speed limit, and a lady pulled out from a crossroad just soon enough to hit my back-right side and spin me about 150 degrees. Neither of us was hurt, and the immediately obvious damage to my vehicle was negligible. Her vehicle, on the other hand, is going to need a new bumper, front end, and a paint job. The nice police officer issued her a citation for “Failure to yield right of way”. It has been pointed out by two people already that “at least it was a memorable birthday”, and that it was.
Also, thanks to my awesome friends who made it out for my birthday dinner(you know who you are =]).
The busy developers over at Mozilla are at it again. They recently released a pre-alpha version of the next iteration of Firefox 3, dubbed “Minefield”. It’s pretty fast(I’m using it to make this post), although Firefox is pretty fast itself if you run it with no extensions. The extensions available for Minefield at the moment are pretty limited. There were some complaints about it being unstable(come on, it is pre-alpha after all), but I haven’t had any problems with it thus far. You can download it here, but be forewarned that it will alter your current Firefox installation to become the default version that gets launched.
The next minor version of PHP5(5.3; currently in the alpha stage) will include support for NOWDOC, Lambda functions & Closures, and the much anticipated ternary shortcut(?:). NOWDOCs are basically HEREDOCs, but without interpolation. It’s like using single-quotes versus double-quotes in your strings. Lambda functions allow you to define a single-use function so that it doesn’t have to be defined in the global scope of the script throughout execution. You can exectute things like loops or callbacks without having to define the function ahead of time, and you can return the value of your loops or callbacks to a variable directly. The Ternary shortcut is to allow you to perform a quick if() & return the result, which is what the Ternary operator(s) does already, but you don’t have to specify an “else” value. Most(all?) of these features were discussed for inclusion in PHP6, but it looks like they’ve been backported, which is good. 
Also included will be “limited GOTO” which, as I understand it, will entail using the break language construct to jump to a certain position in the script. The information that I’ve seen is minimal, but this feature could be useful to a lot of people as well.
So I came across a picture taken recently by a reporter in a helicopter over Galveston. Apparently this house was just recently built, and was built to withstand a category 5 hurricane. The rest of the houses in the area… not so much:
This second one is an overhead view from a satellite:
Images courtesy of the internets and NOAA.
We’ve been pretty lucky so far this hurricane season. We’ve only had one direct hit, and one or two near misses. Hanna veered further out to sea and made landfall around New York, while Gustav curved into the Gulf and hit Lousiana, and Ike had a similar track but hit Texas head on. I’ll attach a picture I came across on the internets of some minor storm damage(certainly not the worst) from Ike.
Hurricane Hanna’s current projected track takes it right up the eastern seaboard, which means it will sideswipe us here in Florida. The current speed is rather slow, like Fay, so we can expect some decent rain. The ground is still soggy from Fay, a week and a half ago. Creeks will flood, bridges will close, people will lose power. Many will worry far more than is necessary. Welcome to Florida! =]
Also, something that people tend to forget is that meteorology is anything but an exact science. We(as a race) can say with some level of certainty that a storm will head NW until it hits the US(then NE usually), but the smallest change in course amounts to a huge difference of where/when/if it hits us. So just keep that in mind, you worry-warts.
Attached is an image of the current track courtesy of StormPulse.com:
Soon(roughly 8AM Wednesday in the image) it will strengthen to a Category 2 hurricane. When it gets back into open water it will probably speed up a little, too.
Six months ago Microsoft issued this statement:
As you may have heard by now, Internet Explorer 8 will ship with three layout modes – Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. The saying goes: “put your best face forward” and, true to this, Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default when encountering standards content.
Now, with the release of IE8 beta 2, it seems that statement is less than true; for intranet sites at least. Even when a site is completely standards compliant, if it’s on an intranet, IE8 will render it in compatibility mode by default. According to the article(see link below) roughly 60% of computers sold go to corporations with the remaining 40% going to home users. So, when you load the corporate homepage from your desk at work(internal) you will see it differently than a user loading it from the internet(external). EVEN IF the page is completly standards compliant with DOCTYPEs and everything.
Apparently, it’s not exactly easy to fix either. It’s just a checkbox, but it’s in an odd place and has a confusing description for the average user. To make matters worse, your page will have an icon next to the address bar that shows a broken page, just to.. you know.. cause more confusion:
I’m kinda regretting the switch to WP. I’ve used it before, but I don’t remember it being this bloated. It has a lot of nice features, but it’s also incredibly slow. And one of the plugins caused the XHTML validation to fail with something like 89 errors.. I realize that it’s not part of the core, but features that I consider essential aren’t included, so I had to install some extra plugins.
In other news: I am overly critical of other people’s work. Even when it’s free I expect it to be of a very high standard. =P