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One of the most impressive things about modern scripting languages, and probably the biggest productivity booster, far bigger than the languages themselves, is the wide range of high quality libraries available through easy to use repositories. Seems odd that Java doesn’t maintain a similar library repository.

Over the last week I’ve been designing a mini-PHP application. No big deal, just a back end admin system with a simple display on the front end with some blog like feedback mechanisms. I’ve had a look at the great work the Ruby on Rails people have done with Ruby and wondered whether PHP has anything similar. Learning Ruby is too big an investment for the simple application I want to write.

Denis received a letter from Agilent advertising a technical seminar. The letter starts thus: 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the Evolved UTRA project, which significantly enhances the current HSDPA/HSUPA based UTRA technology through variable bandwidth up to 20Mhz, a new air interface both on downlink (OFDMA) and uplink (SC-FDMA) and a new network design (SAE). Hmmm, anybody got a translation for that? I’ve tried Babelfish but it can’t make any sense of it.

Many moons ago back in the mists of time, well late 2002, Denis & myself thought it would be a good idea to start a company. Today is the 5th anniversary of the incorporation of OPENXTRA Limited. Our likkle baby finally had a legal life of its own. To celebrate we’re treating everybody to a trip to see the Sweeney Todd musical at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Should keep everybody in-line when it comes to pay rise time.

One of the biggest problems a website encounters is trust. How do you know who you are dealing with? Well, you just look for the SSL certificate and that proves that the website is bona fide doesn’t it? Wrong! All a traditional SSL certificate does is verify that the domain is the same as the one specified in the certificate. A scammer can very easily install a traditional SSL certificate for their website with the minimum of checks.

This is a reply to Tarus Balog’s Show Me Da Money (a Cautionary Tale) post. Tarus has labelled the business model of giving away an open source core but selling proprietary extensions as shareware open source. It’s a great term, but I don’t think it’s wholly appropriate. If the Hyperic & Zenoss communities have a problem with the licensing terms of the commercial extensions then they are in a great position to circumvent it.

You know when you’ve reached programmer middle age, a new operating system/IDE drops through your letter box and you don’t run off to install it. 😉 I received Visual Studio 2008 via MSDN last week and it is still sitting on my desk unopened. Is there any hope for me? Even Eclipse managed to release a new version without me noticing. Am I doomed to a gradual decline from programmer middle age through to programmer senility?

Every bout of downtime teaches you a lesson. At least one. 😄 The lesson What’s the lesson this time: anything less than full hot swap disks just isn’t good enough. If there is anything that is going to go wrong on a server it is the disks. Our last major bout of downtime back in 2005 was caused by disk failure and that is why we moved up to SATA based RAID system.

The most noteworthy thing about the Sun purchase of MySQL isn’t the purchase itself, but that it took Sun as long as it has. Sun has been around since the dawn of time in IT terms, is heavily into the enterprise market, you would have thought that a major presence in the relational database market would be acquisition #1. Still, they’ve got there in the end. MySQL, as the predominant open source database, ties nicely into Sun’s re-branding as an open source oriented enterprise company.

Apologies for the downtime over the last day or so. What started as a small hard disk failure turned into a much larger problem when the remaining disk started having intermittent errors and the server itself collapsed too. Fortunately, we are paranoid enough to take our own backups in addition to the ISP backups. Good job we did! The images on the blog, from 30 November onwards, are missing because we didn’t have the bandwidth to back them up.