Miscellany
I haven't posted in quite a while. Well, I have been very busy working on very cool (but still secret) projects for Palantir. I also just set up my new desk / workstation. I had to change gears and get an adjustable height table to work on, since I am too tall for most keyboard tray / desk combos.
In the meantime, go find something interesting to read over at Looky, Daddy! -- a parenting blog written by an old college pal o' mine. Or, if you're more serious, go see what Yelvington is up to.
On the plus side, the house repairs are all but done. The new fence should go in next week. And then we are done done.
I won't flood Drupal planet with cross posts, so this is just a pointer to my note about PBS Engage, and the details of my joining the Social Media Advisory Board.
I will be offline for quite a bit over the next few weeks. We suffered some severe storm damage yesterday. Everyone is ok, but we have lots of work to do to get our house back in shape.
See Day one Flickr set for more or the Morning after set.
A big thanks, by the way, to all the guys from Stallion and First General for their work last night.
After the cleanup, we have this:
A few pics of the home office setup I have now.
For good measure, a few dog pics as well, since they hang out in here all day.
I just finished a fascinating phone conversation with Valérie Arnould of IFRA, the worldwide research and service organization for the news publishing industry.
She wanted to talk about the changes in store for the web, particularly about the effects of the semantic web on the media industry. Now, I am not the expert here, but I do know that the Drupal community has been working towards that goal.
For me, the big challenge is convincing media companies to play nice with others in sharing both data repositories and toolsets. We can build some very compelling tools for journalism and communities if we can work together.
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).
