North Korea and nuclear tests

I don't post this kind of stuff, but I couldn't help it. I was reading on Google News this headline:

U.N. asks North Korea to cancel nuclear test

Source: Seattle Times The reaction: Oh no! Not now!

Japan's newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday that the tests could come as early as this weekend. U.S. spy satellites have detected sustained activity at a suspected underground test site in the north. Abe will travel to Beijing on Sunday and Seoul, South Korea, on Monday to press for support in corralling North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

So, BigBrother is watching...

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a device would be detonated about 6,500 feet inside a mine near the border with China in the north of the country. North Korea has timed its military exercises to coincide with significant dates: it launched missiles July 4, despite international warnings. Monday is North Korea Workers' Party Day. [...] The Security Council statement said that a test would not bring Pyongyang closer to its goals. Rather it would "bring universal condemnation by the international community," the statement said. "The Security Council urges the DPRK not to undertake such a test and to refrain from any action that might aggravate tension," the statement added, using the acronym for the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Chief U.S. delegate John Bolton said that the council takes the threat seriously, and the United States is prepared to push for international economic sanctions. "If they do test it, it will be a very different world the day after," he said before the meeting. "There would be another nuclear power. This would be proof positive of North Korea having a weapon." [...] Russian diplomats said they were "very concerned" about the possibility of a test.

Ok, US will take actions, and use UN also for their goal... So, after Afganistan, I was expecting a move on Iran, and leave DPRK alone, for some time... but it seems they are acting on 2 fronts: Middle East

LONDON — The United States and five other major powers agreed Friday to take the next step toward imposing sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with a U.N. resolution to prevent it from subverting its nuclear energy program to develop a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. and European officials. Source: chron.com

and DPRK (above quotes) ... One wrong step from any of these countries and war is closer than ever. What is the really scary thing is that nuclear weapons are at stake. In Afganistan the situation was different, war for oil, US gets a better position on world oil market, and a place at OPEC table. And God help us when someone will push the trigger.

MySQL Front discontinued

I was surprised to see on Mysql-Front website this announcement:

MySQL-Front has been discontinued since MySQL AB forced us to remove this program from the market. Thanks a lot for all your help! Your MySQL-Front Team We hope the humanity will learn to work together instead of fighting another senseless...

Getting curious about this started to search on google... Lenz Grimmer clarified this for me:

Clarification: MySQL AB did not force the removal of MySQLFront Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I'’d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated. We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely– this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a different name. The problem appeared resolved as the project was renamed to SQLFront and the old web site pointed to the new location - we regret that the developers decided to shut down the entire project shortly afterwards. We encourage and support every application that broadens the MySQL Ecosystem. Why would we want to completely shut off applications that support us?

Lenz Grimmer works MySQL AB as a member of the community relations team. The MYSQL AB Trademark policy provides the information related to authorized use of MySQL AB marks. The "problem" is caused by the usage of MySQL as a part of a commercial product name, that is not developed by MySQL. I still don't understand why they shut down the project and communicated that kind of message... Lack of funds and they found a way to close it and blame someone else? /Later edit MySQL Front development continues at Sourceforge under a new name HeidiSQL

Marketing on blogs

A Romanian online gift shop launched 2 days ago a campaign named “Blog this!” The main idea is to write an article on your blog which follows the rules: - the article must contain a link to Christmas Gifts category - the article must not look like and advertisement, but cannot be strongly negative nor defaming - after you publish the article send them an email with the link - the publisher must have at least 10 articles in his blog It’s a win-win situation. The problem is that one side wins more, other side less, exponentially less… This type of advertising can be included in the broadly defined guerrilla marketing, with some viral parts, also similar with a stealth campaign, buzz marketing & co (use of social networking – blogs, the prize – I doubt the actually paid for the ads they are offering, maybe it’s a joint-venture campaign )… The goal is obvious: achieve a better visibility for a category, create a buzz, get inboud links (from >100 blogs, with the condition to be indexed by google), increase number of visitors on the website, basicly promote the store using "word-of-mouth" and buzz. The effect: - in 2 days they got 27 winners ( and all the good or bad content and inbound links) - some good “Gossip” and buzz from Radu Ionescu, Zoso, Tudor Mateescu, Blogoree Blog and others It is nice to analyze the effect of the campaign in January 2007, maybe they will publish some figures… or not. At leat check google to see how many inbound links they got and from where, and position in google for some keywords (Christmas gifts :D ), number of visitors, referrals. What can I say more? it’s a campaign, and from the figures point of view I believe it is a profitable one. Moral and profit are not in the same league.

Adobe buys InterAKT

Adobe recently acquired the technology assets of InterAKT, maker of extensions for Macromedia® Dreamweaver® from Adobe. The acquisition further strengthens Adobe’s position as a leading provider of web design and development tools. For additional information, please read the F.A.Q. page on our website.

And the 1st question in FAQ:

Why did Adobe acquire InterAKT? A: Adobe acquired InterAKT to enhance existing product lines, including Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Flex. The new development center will also provide Adobe with greater access to and expertise in the Eastern European market.

Anyway, Macromedia should have done that before, but, I don't think they studied the market that well. Most InterAKT client were not from Romania... And InterAKT extensions for Dreamweaver are popular in central/western Europe and USA. As the announcement states, the direction will be continuing the production line for Dreamweaver extensions, migrate existing products to Adobe technology (myfeedz will use Flex)

We expect that most current InterAKT employees will remain with Adobe following the integration.

:) We will see about that... InterAKT had 32 employees So basicly as I see it: - Adobe work style will be implemented - personnel migration is inevitable, the company will grow, but some employees will leave (foreced or by thieir own decision) - primary focus: dreamweaver extensions and improve Adobe Flex, or just build components for Adobe Flex. - MX Kollection is renamed to Kollection, and they cannot "kill" the product, because of its customers, so I think it will be refactored to use Flex, sell it in the future. They should be able to "catch" some projects with the government, because until now, MCTI website was the only website developed by a company that knows what is doing, and not made by some kid at 7th hand... Updates will be available after I find more information.

GWT Beta Version 1.1

Well, Google Web Toolkit beta version 1.1 has been released. On July 21st they said that the next release will have:

• Localization Easily localize strings and formatted messages
• XML classes An XML library based on the W3C DOM
• JSON classes JSON is moving into gwt-user.jar, and it's much faster than the sample in 1.0.21
• FileUpload widget The much-requested file upload widget
• FormPanel widget Easily submit traditional HTML forms from GWT apps
• RPC optimizations Speed improvements and a more compact wire format
• JUnit enhancements Unit tests are much, much faster than in 1.0.21, and you can now test asynchronous things like RPCs and timers

Also, annouced that Maven is used for the building process. More features in current release:

• Automatic resource injection Modules can contain references to external JavaScript and CSS files, causing them to be automatically loaded when the module itself is loaded.
• gwt-servlet.jar Deploy this jar to add RPC to your servlet-based webapps without having to manually crack open gwt-user.jar to remove the servlet API classes.
• Javadoc-style API documentation By popular demand :-)
• An automatic mechanism to stop the browser from caching the .nocache.html file for your module.

I'm still waiting for a large scale app, built with GWT.

Phalanger - PHP Compiler for .NET

The original description is:

The Phalanger is a complex solution giving web-application developers the ability to benefit from both the ease-of-use and effectiveness of the PHP language and the power and richness of the .NET platform. This solution enables developers to painlessly deploy and run existing PHP code on an ASP.NET web server and develop cross-platform extensions to such code taking profit from the best from both sides. Compatible with PHP 5.0, the object model in Phalanger enables to combine PHP objects with the .NET ones. It is possible to use a class written in PHP from a .NET application or even to import a .NET class (written for example in C# or Visual Basic .NET) into PHP scripts provided that this class respects the PHP object model implemented in the Phalanger. The Phalanger is the only existing PHP compiler which produces .NET Framework MSIL bytecode.

Some benchmarks were posted on the website with Phalanger 1.0 Beta 3, PHP 4.3.11, and PHP 5.0.4 with and without Zend Optimizer, and some php based popular apps: Nuke and phpBB compared. The tests were done on a Windows machine. Anyway, looking at the benchmarks Roadsend seems interesting too. The idea is that PHP for .NET is a viable solution, and compiled php is an improvment.

Creole Trac - Ticket spam

Well, spammers get better, after blog spamming, trac is vulnerable. Creole is using trac for development, and while browsing through tickets, found this: Public comments and new tickets seem to be suppresed now for anonymus users. Example: Ticket: MSSQL driver errors Edgewall is working on a spam filter, which will be released with 0.10 Milestone Until then, disable anonymus content or you can try experimental spam filter. A quick fix could be:

DELETE FROM ticket_change WHERE author = "spammer_name";
--update  ticket version and milestone, which is altered
UPDATE ticket SET version = '', milestone = '' WHERE version = 'HEAD' AND milestone = 'MILESTONE_NAME';

Database administrator Job Role

Even though I said to myself that I will not post on this blog anything that will be praise to myself... After passing the Oracle PL/SQL test, I have achieved the Database Administrator Job Role: So, from now on you can trust me on administrering your database... The last test for this job role: Oracle PL/SQL Programming :)

Zend framework preview

Zend framework preview is out... after some quick fixes, the discussions started... Chris Shiflett wrote a tutorial for php|arch (in a big hurry it seems)... I consider the Model in an MVC framework a key component, while in this tutorial Chris uses a Database object, no ZActiveRecord ( I thought zend will find the Panacée for Active Record), no ORM library (Zend_Db_Table - Row Data Gateway, Zend_Db_Table_Row or any Zend_Db component). He explains that: "Because the database components of the Zend Framework are still relatively unstable, I use a class for storing and retrieving news entries and comments" ... Is understandable because this is just a preview release, but I was expecting more... The coding standards are not followed... (tabbed indented files, 2 spaces indented file)... It seems there is alot of work to be done.. Yesterday Zend Framework Preview 0.1.2 was released; important updates: unit tests and controller documentation :) For testing is used: PHPUnit2, not simpleTest, not Test::More... I hope that soon we will see a stable framework, that can be compared with Zope...