Lots of newspapers (and maybe the state of Kentucky) are banning anonymous comments.

Perhaps this site is why.

Update: When PEAR signs on, you know the movement to PHP 5 is real.

Well, that was pretty fast. Php.net announces:

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

I’m not taking any credit here. The writing was on the wall, and GoPHP5 was a symptom; this announcement is the cure.

For those of you playing our home game, here’s the photo I use as an avatar.

It is, appropriately, named BigHeadKen on my local machine.

I took this photo almost 10 years ago. Strange.

How many people does it take to start a movement? I guess we’ll find out.

GoPHP5.org launched today, after a lot of hard work by Robert Douglass, Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle. I know that Larry has been evangelical about contacting web hosts and PHP projects for the last month.

The purpose is to coordinate the movement of Open Source Software (OSS) projects to the exclusive use of PHP 5. Why exclusive? Because there are some incompatibilities between PHP 4 and PHP 5, developers often write workarounds to cover both cases. And, in other cases, we have to avoid using functions that are PHP5-only. Frankly, that just doesn’t make much sense to me.

For me, the whole thing started in Sunnyvale, during Dries Buytaert’s “State of Drupal” talk at the last Drupal/OpenSourceCMS meeting. After his informal talk, there was open Q&A. And, since we were at Yahoo!, Rasmus Lerdorf was handling the microphone for the audience.

The two had a friendly exchange about why more OSS projects didn’t use PHP 5 (Drupal 5.1 and the upcoming 6.0 both run on PHP 4 and PHP 5). The basic answer, from Dries (as I recall it) was so many of our users rely on shared hosts and most shared hosts still only offer PHP 4. Now, pride in his work aside, Rasmus has a vested interest in getting people onto PHP 5 as a platform: if the developer community doesn’t use it, support for new features will fall off, and the proect will suffer. Dries discussed this right after the Sunnyvale conference. Rasmus also faces the challenge that the PHP working group can’t force people to drop PHP 4. The code is loose, and people can do as they like.

But there are great benefits to moving development to PHP 5 (especially if you like to pass data around using XML).

My position on the issue is simple, but its a complicated kind of simple.

• I work for a large company where we use PHP 5.2 exclusively in production.
• On my development machine, I code and test on PHP 5.1.6 (thanks to Marc Liyanage).
• My web host (for this site) runs PHP 4.4.x
• I develop and maintain a Drupal module
• The company I work for runs Drupal and Joomla sites, and Jonah Braun is on our staff.

So one day Jonah was having a barbecue and we started talking about the PHP 4 / PHP 5 debate, and the role of Drupal and Joomla. We agreed, in theory, that the problem for both projects is this: If one declares a move to drop PHP 4 and the other doesn’t, the project risks losing users not based on quality, but simply based on the availability of PHP 5.

Now we work on different projects, but Jonah and I agree (I think) that your decision to select software should be based on the merits of the product, not forced restrictions. So we thought: Hey, if we both declare that we’re moving to PHP 5 on some arbitrary future date….

After that conversation, I sent a note to Larry (who I knew was working on cool PDO features for Drupal that, yup, require PHP 5), and he thought it sounded like a good idea. That exchange spawned this soon-to-be-infamous post to the Drupal development list.

Since then, thanks to Larry and Robert and everyone else who has commented on, worked on, or debated about the proposal, the GoPHP5.org movement has gathered steam and leaked out to the greater world.

And that’s a good thing.

I took these this morning in the back yard. Hoping to print them and hang them in the bedroom, but my printer ran out of yellow!

Note: These blooms are about 6 ft (2m) off the ground. The day after I took these, the stalks collapsed under their own weight (it happens every year).

So I’m working on the MySite version of Google Gadgets and Yahoo Widgets right now. It’s code that let’s the admin define a content element that users can add to their MySite page. By default, all Blocks and Views will be eligble for inclusion by the administrator.

I’m killing development time trying to think of a good name for these widgets. I don’t want to copy the Widget/Gadget name, but can’t find a good option.

Drupelet actually works and is semantically accurate (in English anyway). But I’d never even heard the word before.

Some others in the running:

1. Object — bleh. Way too boring.
2. Drupe — the parent of Drupelet. Still too obscure in English.
3. Extension — also boring
4. Slice — not too bad….
5. Element — still dull
6. Drop — I like this more, the harder it becomes to find an alternative
7. Droplet — as above
8. Snippet — that’s ok, I guess

For now, I’m using Droplet.

So I got back on Monday. This is the height of Spring in Augusta, which means two things: azaleas and pollen — are everywhere. Below are some pics to give you an idea.

Azalea blossoms

Full blooms

Japanese maple buds

Pollen everywhere

I’m not a huge photographer. Never liked it as a child. Complex terms, and I wear glasses and could never focus an old 33mm.

But digital makes it much easier. For years I had a Nikon Coolpix 3100. And I finally got decent enough to realize that it kinda sucks. I especially wanted a zoom upgrade, so I can get good closeups.

So yesterday I bought a Canon PowerShot S3. It weighs three times more, but it has a 12x optical zoom and actually has realistic color capture.

Check out the detail on my dog, stalking her brother in the backyard.

Click image to enlarge.

I think I’m going to like this camera.

Monique Van Dusseldorp posting on the Poynter Institute website writes about the Great Firewall of China project.

The site purports to view any URL through a server hosted inside the People’s Republic and to return information regarding whether your site is blocked or not. Interesting. According to the site, Secong Goose is banned, but my family site is not. If so, it is likely due to keywords (like newspapers and media) or the discussion of Drupal and open publishing technologies.

Though I’m not sure why the Goose would lead to Chinese sedition, I suppose that I’m proud to be banned.

See the original item at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

Well, this little guy sums it up pretty well.

Who is he? The mascot of Brussels, of course.