Check out http://php.meetup.com for details of the first International PHP MEETUP Day. Sign up and get details for the meeting taking place in your city. The site claimed only 142 registrations when I signed up, let’s see if we can bump that number up a bit.

PHPkitchen is a little low in Canadian content so here goes …
1. Smarties
2. Crispy Crunch, Coffee Crisp
3. The size of our footballs fields and one less down
4. Baseball is Canadian
5. Lacrosse is Canadian
6. Hockey is Canadian
7. Basketball is Canadian
8. Apple pie is Canadian
9. Mr. Dress-up kicks Mr. Rogers ass
10. Tim Hortons kicks Dunkin’ Donuts ass

A few highlights from this list

1. Uh-oh…..
2. ****!!
3. What the hell!?
4. Go get your backup tape. (You do have a backup tape?)
5. That’s SOOOOO bizarre.
6. Wow!! Look at this…..
7. Hey!! The suns don’t do this.
8. Terminated??!
9. What software license?
10. Well, it’s doing something…..
11. Wow….that seemed fast…..
12. I got a better job at Lockheed…

In a move mirrored by Governments in South American and Europe, the UK Govt recently announced policy to move towards adoption of Open Source Software solutions.

Interesting highlight from the policy document, “UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software”

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
• UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
• UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code or customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software it procures wherever this achieves best value for money.

The “Open Source” label has become so common that users rarely consider all the implications of the term. In fact, there is no universal definition of “Open Source.” If you are working at home on a personal workstation with standard product distributions, you may never need to explore the subtle differences between Open Source variants. But if you write your own software, or if you dabble in the distribution of software, you’ll need a clear understanding of the various license options.

An informative overview of P2P programming, language independent
Witnessed the music sharing revolution,Napster and others Gnutella,Bearshare etc. Ever wondered what makes all these happen ?! It’s the “peer-to-peer computing” (P2P in short),the latest buzzword sweeping the computer industry.What’s P2P all about? Is it concerned only with music and file sharing? The answer…”peer-to-peer computing or networking is a set of technologies targeted at better utilizing under-utilized networoked resources -diskspace,procesing power and others”.And its glory comes when it utilizes these resources at the edges of the Internet.With the web growing dynamically at tantalizing pace,P2P promises several features that suits todays needs.

Why is it the most simple things are impossible to find? There is a very simple way to switch between the two main desktop environments in Linux, KDE and Gnome. Just type:

# switchdesk

at the command prompt. Try find that on Google and you\’ll be out of luck. If you have a similar experience to me, you\’ll need to download the 176 MB Ximian desktop which contains the basic gnome libraries required to run the majority of Linux gui apps. What\’s that you say, you\’ve used up2date so your redhat install has all the bleeding edge libraries? Well it still won\’t have the required gnome libraries. So start downloading, hope you have adsl

Then you think you\’re happy with KDE but you want to give gnome a try. So you switch into gnome via an obviously provided app named \’desktop switcher\’. Well once you\’re in gnome no where within the gnome menu system, options, configurations will you find the option of how to switch back to KDE. A ploy almost worthy of Microsoft?

Interview of Derick Rethans, author of SRM. ‘Script Running Machine’ brings applications server features to PHP.
Read this interview to get insight into how PHP can be used in an enterprise development framework. Using SRM, a PHP application server, such things become possible as application-wide variables, remote invocation of compiled PHP objects, maintained authentication states, cached queries and object sharing.

MySQL tips
Please see the MySQL documentation of version 3.23.39 for more information.
Section and page numbers used below refer to the PDF format of the MySQL manual.
shell> indicates commands to be executed from the directory where MySQL is installed.
mysql> indicates commands to be executed while connected to the server.

Bringing up the server
use the safe_mysqld command to bring up the server
  shell> bin/safe_mysqld -u root &

$PATH_INFO is your friend when it comes to creating clean URLS. Take for example this URL:

http://www.company.com/products/routers

If the Apache configuration contains this block:

<Location \"/products\">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Location>

Then all you have to do is create a PHP script in your DOCUMENT_ROOT named \’products\’ and you can use the $PATH_INFO variable which will contain the string, \’/routers\’, to make a DB query.