You Really Can Buy Moon Rocks on the Internet

Too funny:

The trio worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center this summer when a 600-pound safe with lunar samples and martian meteorites vanished from the Houston facility, the space agency said. [_Go_]

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PHP 4.3.0 Release Announcement

From PHP Everywhere:

After a long and arduous 8 months of development and testing, PHP 4.3.0 is out! With regard to scope, time, and effort, this is the largest 4.x release of PHP, and it further elevates PHP's standing as a serious contender in the general purpose scripting language arena. [_Go_] [_Download_]

While I'll let it settle out for a bit before I move to it (yup, I am  a scaredy cat since PHP is mission critical for me), here are some of the things I'm looking forward to:

• GD library is now bundled with the distribution and it is recommended to always use the bundled version
• error messages now contain URLs linking to pages describing the error or function in question

• A very important "under the hood" feature is the streams API. It introduces a unified approach to the handling of files, pipes, sockets, and other I/O resources in the PHP core and extensions.  What this means for users is that any I/O function that works with streams (and that is almost all of them) can access built-in protocols, such as HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS, as well as custom protocols registered from PHP scripts.

Awesome!  Congrats everyone and Thank You.

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For Shame Zend!  For Shame!

I saw over on PHP Everywhere that Zend is having an Interview / Online event with Zeev about PHP 5 (Zeev = Senior Demi God of PHP type of fellow).  Yesterday it came up fine but I refreshed the window this morning and then got this message: 

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a004c'

Path not found

D: INTERWISE WWWVC IWCAMPUS ICCFILES ZEND EVENTPAGE OI1336../../../../Include/DBConnectionString.inc, line 52  (spaces added for proper breaks in this template) [_Go_]

You know something ... I could actually care less about the VBScript stuff (but it is funny) but I do find it really unacceptable that a vendor you pay money to goes down like this.  PHP is a highly international community and, consequently, so is Zend.  While it may be 7 am in Boston, it's not in London or Israel or other markets they serve.  Hasn't anyone heard of monitoring your site for failure and then pinging an admin's pager ? 

Note: I'm not saying I'm perfect here myself but I'm also not running this type of a 24x7 service.  Still the hosting for my clients doesn't go down.

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