Boston PHP Anyone?

If you're in the Mass / Boston area and want to do something tomorrow night there is a PHP Meetup (the same folks who do the bloggers meetup events) tomorrow, thursday evening, 7 pm at Mama Gaia's in Cambridge.  Drop me a line if you're going to be there (sorry for the late notice but i just found this an hour or so ago).  And, yes, I'll probably actually even tear myself away from the keyboard and attend. [_Go_]

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Greed ... They Name is ANYONE Associated with Microsoft

Since Microsoft started expedia, why does this not surprise me at all?

Expedia announced Wednesday that it will charge a $5 booking fee on airline tickets purchased on its Web sites, joining the ranks of a number of other online travel companies.

The move comes as the profitable company seeks to squeeze out more revenue from its low-margin airline-ticket business and as a number of airline carriers, struggling under financial duress, are waging battles with both brick-and-mortar and online travel agents over the cost of commissions.

"The airlines are continuing to put pressure on their commission fees, so this will serve as an offset," said Paul Keung, a CIBC World Markets analyst.

 Expedia will charge a $5 booking fee for tickets purchased on its U.S. Web sites. The company, however, will waive the fee for tickets purchased as part of a travel package. [_Go_]

So let me get this straight ... First web travel sites do a pretty good job of putting travel agents out of work and now they are going to charge us for the privilege of buying from them now that they have gutted the competitition?

Gee if banks were like this first they'd introduce ATMs to cut their own labor costs and then they'd start to charge us for the privilege of using them.  Oh that's right !  That's already happened.  Oh fsck me.  Bastards.

In this essay today Tom Giaovanetti says:

You can't trust governments to do what they promise. You can't trust them to police themselves. You can't assume that, because something is not supposed to happen, it won't happen. So what you do is refuse to allow government to amass power. You don't let them develop the tools that can be used by future tyrants. [_Go_]

The problem is that it isn't government anymore than industry -- both seem intent on pushing every limit just as far as it can go -- and then just a bit further. 

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One of the Most Useful Articles in a Long Time: How To Remember Your Passwords

All of us, I don't care how sophisticated a user you are, struggle with passwords -- and most of us don't do a very good job of it.  Here's a really good article on how to remember them all.  [_Go_]

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You Should Definitely Spend Some Time on BlogStreet

If you're seriously into blogging then spending some time on BlogStreet is recommended.  They have added a bunch of improvemnts including making the blog search feature much better.  I particularly like the Blog Neighborhood feature as a way to find new blogs to read.  A bunch of the changes to the favorites section of my blogroll recently came from BlogStreet.  Recommended.  [_Go_] 

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Good Internationalization Article

From the authors of the PHP Cookbook comes a good internationalization article

Localizing different kinds of content requires different techniques. This article covers an object-oriented method for localizing plain text messages and images. The PHP Cookbook contains additional recipes for dates, times, and currency. There are also recipes on using GNU gettext and other I18N and L10N topics. [_Go_]

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Spam as Humor Fodder

This is just too damn funny.  Ever wonder what you'd write to a spammer?  Here's the answer.

RC Mini Remote Controlled Race Cars - As seen on TV.

Sold out in stores. Best price in the country! First come first serve. Not $39.95 or $29.95 Limited Time only $19.95ea. Hurry for Christmas 

Race here Now

The all-new Mini RC Car is the latest craze for everyone of all ages! Each Mini RC Car comes complete with remote control, mini car and carrying case. It's a great gift for all ages. Take advantage of this special low price offer today. Radio-frequency remote control - wireless! Super-Micro size receiver in the car is less than 1" Has an independent front suspension Adjustable steering - Rubber tires Battery Charger Radio Controller included 5 Minutes Fast Pace Action With Only 1 Minute of Charging Assembled and ready to race.

---

Hello, I've just gotten your email, and I was wondering if your company does any custom jobs. I run a charity, and the type of service you provide would help me greatly with my work if you're able to think big. Here, let me tell you the amusing tale of how my organization originated.

I was sitting outside of a local supermarket in my Saturn, waiting for the crystal meth to wear off a little so I wasn't so shaky and jumpy inside the store. It's never good to look jumpy in a place of business, especially when the rent-a-cops and store managers are just looking for some action to break up the tedium. Did you know tedium is also an element on the periodic table? It makes up 40% of the shell of a Saturn! [_Go_] [_Site_]

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New Inbox Buddy Information Posted

I've taken more than a few slams on the "marketing" of Inbox Buddy.  And they are all right -- we pretty much haven't been trying to market the product yet -- hence the lack of work and focus in that area.  I just now posted the product information for Inbox Buddy. [_Go_] 

You might be wondering why we took so long to get that page up there.  I mean a product info page isn't that big a deal, is it?  Well I look at it as once the formal marketing process starts you want all your i's dotted and your t's crossed.  And to me that means first and foremost that you've got to have the glitches out of the product.  And then your support system has to be in place, you need to be ready to sell, etc.  There's no point starting the whole marketing process unless all those things are in order -- and we haven't been ready.  All too often startups race to the sales and marketing without making sure they're ready.  And that's just dumb.  Hence the delays in the product page and the overall marketing process.

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Interesting: Turning Down Microsoft

Here's an indication of how much Microsoft wants the Indian computer market: They are now offering to pay students for their work.  (entire article was published on Linux-Delhi and is reprinted in full due to absolutely 0 support for permalinks). [_Go_]

Nov 26, 2002 - Two school students, Avneesh Chhabra (15) and Shivaas Gulati (15) designed a Hindi Devanagri font for an inter-school contest. They won the event, received assurances from Microsoft that the Seattle-based company may be interested in licensing the fonts from them, and then, on 25 November 2002, decided nevertheless to publish the fonts under the freedom-based Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL).

Wow!

The fonts will be published on the Indian Linux User Group Delhi website, http://www.linux-delhi.org, and people across the world are free to download, to use, and to modify, and to modify the fonts as they feel fit, under the LGPL license (www.gnu.org for more info.)
The decision to release it under the LGPL has been made by them so that those making embedded systems that may not be published under GLP-ed firmware, such as cellphones, handheld computing devices, consumer digital/electronic devices, etc. could still use the fonts under the terms of the LGPL license.

Quite far-sighted.

Even generic software that may not be published under the GPL license, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Reader, or the several varieties of eBook viewing software, could use the LGPL-ed fonts.

To boldly say no to Microsoft's offer and to go the LGPL way, especially in a country like India, and that too for such young students, is rather revolutionary.

Am sure Fred in Goa, for instance, may wish to research and do an article on this, both for indian and for international publication. What motivated them to move towards free software, despite our education system being so closely dependent and almost governed by the whims of the proprietory-software companies? Why did they say no to a potentially lucrative deal, and give away their work for free, when even our governments, policy-makers, and even the media, explores the significance of free software to a developing country like india with extreme reservations and caution. Would be nice if this gets to see the light of the day at the OSDN (OpenSource Development Network).

Would appreciate if others could spread the word of this across to others as far and as wide as possible.

The school students groped their way around on their own. Briefly, they searched and downloaded a fully-functional demo software from the web, called "Font Creator Program 3." They then hand-created the glyphs, digitised them, touched them up in a raster app, and finally imported them into FontCreator. The software automatically traced and generated a truetype version of the font.

The font aesthetics are good. However, several things need to be done, and the students hope gurus, peers, and experts will guide them further. Things-to-Do:
i) keyboard-mappings need to follow INSCRIPT.
ii) the unicode assignments need to be verified.
iii) hinting codes need to be generated.
iv) the font needs to be converted into OpenType.

The students are willing to learn further. They are looking for experts to conduct a workshop at their school (perhaps a few months later once the dreaded final exams are over.) And they wish for more and more students from across India to take the initiative and design, encode, and create indian language solutions under free software to create a 'digital revolution' in indian software development that bridges the digital divide in the country.

For those interested, the email ids of the two students is fontdudes AT rediffmail.com. please do not respond directly to me, i have no further information to share. contact avneesh and shivaas directly.

The reason that this is a big deal is that the lack of good fonts under Linux for Indian languages (and there are lots and lots of Indian languages) is a huge drawback to using Open Source.  If Microsoft had been able to pre-empt this it would have been a big coup since it would have done more than a bit to slow down Open Source in India.  All I can say is Good Job and my thanks to V K Bala Murali for pointing this out.

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The Amazon Saga Continues ... But with Success

Well I was finally able to order my iPod.  Apparently the trick is adding all 3 items to your shopping cart (not just the iPod) and then applying the promotional code.  And, although their tech support person says this is in the documentation for the promotional code, I don't interpret it that way.  They say this:

Buy a 20 GB iPod for Macintosh or iPod for Windows and get a PowerPod Auto adapter and an irock! wireless music adapter free using promotional code TRAVELBNDLPD. [_GO_]

That to me says "Buy an IPod" and get these things free if you use this code.  NOT "Buy all 3 and then you'll get two of the three items for free" which is the implication of adding each item to your cart.  So here's a good example of clear technical writing.  For the lack of writing this one web page correctly they got:

1. A frustrated, angry customer.
2. Not one, not two but at least 3 blog entries bashing Amazon.

Still this did get the page lots more hits I suspect than they would have gotten otherwise.  Nice to do my little part for Jeff and the gang at Amazon.  :-)

And I guess that's good for them even if I do think they're idiots.  How hard could it be to write the instructions correctly in the 1st place?  Or make an error message that means something?  Or automatically add the other products if you have the promotional code correctly?  I know in the real world rebate industry there is a very real trend to making rebates as difficult to apply as possible so people don't take advantage of them.  I'm not sure if that's what is going on here but I suspect so.  I think a big difference is that when email is allowed as a communications channel, its ease of use means that people will keep digging until they get the right answer.  If that is true then making rebates difficult for ecommerce is just stupid.

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I Didn't Know there was an "Enterprise Weblogging Market"

From Traction Software:

Traction is the leader in Enterprise Weblog software, delivering easy to use tools for groups and teams to communicate, share, organize and link business information in context. [_Go_]

Still, someone I respect, the operator of KM Connection, says good things about it.  They seem to have some interesting integration options:

Traction has built three optional client plug-in accessories to ease adoption and enhance the user experience: Traction® Dashboard™ for Microsoft Outlook, Traction® Instant Publisher™ (for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Word), and Traction® Client Publisher™ for Lotus Notes. [_Go_]

It's apparently Java based with a Java server component.  I'd copy and paste the details but they are only listed in a PDF and its two columns so I can't just copy the 1 block of text (boo, hiss at PDF). 

Support for XML-RPC, RSS output or BloggerAPI is very unclear although I doubt it (RSS output is a maybe I'd suspect).  Here's what they say:

Traction can be integrated into the enterprise environment with the use of our Solution Developer Kit, RDF feeds, XML feeds, and the SOAP protocol. Traction can optionally integrate with LDAP. [_Go_]

While on the home page they claim to be a blogging tool, on this page they don't instead saying "the weblogging technology trend".  It sounds to me like they initially built it as a proprietary groupware / Knowledge Management environment and are retrofitting it into blogging.  Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but I'd spin the positioning better myself.  Back pedal anyone?

The underlying journaling structure mirrors a newly emerging "Weblog" technology trend, while providing the project based context and security/permission systems necessary for the Enterprise. [_Go_]

They do seem to have an interesting concept of Projects and Flags:

Projects: Traction is organized into secure, permissioned "project" spaces. Users are able to see all flags, comments and articles belonging to projects for which they have read rights. Traction uniquely allows a user to look at an article in one project with visible, contextual references to only those articles in other projects for which they have permission.

Flags: Users can easily place flags at the full article or paragraph level. Flags can be used for a variety of purposes:

• Describe or call attention to a paragraph: "Pricing", "Quote", Competitive", "News."
• Support a workflow: "To Do", "In Process", "Version 2"
• Flags can be used to organize information at the time of entry orany time thereafter.
• Make articles selectively visible between project spaces without duplication. [_Go_]

No mention that I could find of search capabilities which is a mistake in my opinion.  We all know it is damn hard to find stuff in blogs and this is a place where they could really add some value.

Bottom line I'd say is "interesting".  There is definitely a need for fine grained security, I'd be curious to know if it can easily be administered in a way that supports the underlying free flow / flexibility of blog writing.  Anybody out there used this puppy?  Anyone know if it is actually shipping?

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