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Last year, I won a license for Zend Studio at the PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I was quite happy, I never really used an IDE before and thought it was all bloat. Zend Studio definately did proof the opposite.

Today I found out that version 4 of Zend Studio was released recently. It has quite an extensive list of new features. Interesting. So I checked if I could also download this new version with the license I had, expecting I’d have to buy some kind of upgrade package. But no, I could just generate a license key for Zend Studio 4.

They’ve decided to split Zend Studio up into two different versions. The $99 Standard version and the $299 Professional version. And the license I had gave me access to the Professional version!

So yeah, I must say I’m really charmed, once again, by Zend and their Zend Studio IDE.

I’ve yet to start using the new features, but I’m sure they’re just as good as the IDE that I used with version 3.5.

Every once in a while, I am shocked by the lack of responsibility of some hosting providers. A lot of hosting providers offer their clients free phpBB installations, either through a control panel or as an added service of their support. However, a lot of these hosting providers do not tell their clients that installation is not all. That phpBB should be regularly updated when new versions are released. Of course, this does not limit itself to phpBB, but really to any web application.

We’re currently at phpBB 2.0.13. And today, someone comes to the phpBB support forum because his forum, phpBB 2.0.4, was hacked. I quote:

My hosting service provided that version of phpBB and I never really saw it necessary to upgrade (until today!!)

Hosting providers should really tell their clients who want to use free software installations that they should be on the lookout for updates. It’s also in their own interest, because sometimes, whole servers can be taken down by malicious hackers.

This can not be happening. Unbelievable. Even though there was massive resistance, the European council has accepted the Softwarepatents proposal.

By accepting this proposal, they have signed the death penalty for many small software companies, who may need to start paying high amounts of license money for using certain techniques or even work methods that are patented by big corporations.

I just made up my mind on what to vote when the elections are held here in the Netherlands on whether to accept or reject the European constitution…

Well, I finally did it. I ordered this book. Plone really looks interesting, and I should finally widen my focus. PHP is great, of course, but having more choice than just PHP is even better.

When you rip most of your cd collection, you may walk against some trouble with xmms or other music players trying to generate a long playlist of all your music, especially when the music files are located on a network share. In my case, access to this networkshare is pretty slow as well due to the supposedly bad combination of NFS and wireless. Still, you’ll want to generate playlists and the easiest way then is to simply load an existing m3u file.

zeroK came to the rescue for me. It’s quite easy to create those files on linux. You need a single, simple command:

find /mp3 -type f > playlist.m3u

Of course, you need to replace /mp3 with the path to your mp3’s. But then you’re done. A great and easy way to generate a playlist file of your music.

Online Poker. A topic that is mostly something that results with furious responses from website owners and especially webloggers. But it’s time to strike back. Ozh has the solution. Or well, maybe not really the solution, but definately a nice way to strike back.

And so, I write a post about Online Poker. Let’s get Wikipedia the google rank that it deserves, and thus beat the comment/trackback/referrer spammers on their own territory 🙂

To add a small extra to it, I’ve added rel=”tag” to the links to Wikipedia, so that Technorati might also pick up on this.

Netscape has literally died a thousand deaths already. And for some reason, everytime the browser is given up on, afterwards they come up with a new version again. And again. Soon, there will be a beta of Netscape 8. And boy, check out the screenshot to see how ugly as hell this new version will be. It’s based on Firefox. Well, after seeing this screenshot, I definately am impressed by the designers at Netscape. Nobody has been able to skin Firefox *this* ugly so far 🙂

This is a good tutorial for those who want to start writing in their own weblog.

Every once in a while, something really funny happens regarding to spam. Today, I got a funny SPAM mail. I have my Thunderbird configured to show plaintext mail if possible. So today I get an e-mail from someone I don’t know with the following text:

I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day. — Frank Sinatra

I am quite puzzled, but after inspecting the source of the message, I find that it is simply porn SPAM in the HTML part of the message. They just entered a random quote into the plaintext part of the message, probably in the hopes of that way not being stopped by SPAM filters. Thunderbird’s SPAM filter indeed didn’t catch it as SPAM. And it brought a smile to my face, getting an e-mail like this.