At long last, today marks my first day as a Mac owner. I picked up my new MacBook last night and let it charge overnight; I’m booting it up for the first time even as I type this message.
So far, so good! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to learn how to use this thing.
I happened to catch this news tidbit on Digg today:
British Library calls for digital copyright action
The British Library has called for a “serious updating” of current copyright law to “unambiguously” include digital content and take technological advances into account.
In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference in Manchester, the United Kingdom’s national library warned that the country’s traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully recognize digital content.
“Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass,” Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, told ZDNet UK.
Digital rights management (DRM) technologies and licensing agreements currently can impose restrictions on copying content that go beyond the requirements of copyright law. This needs legal clarification, according to the British Library.
I think the general public needs to hear more of this, because these days it seems like our rights, particularly with respect to issues like copyrights, are being defined more and more by corporations than by governments. At times I think we are at risk of losing the rights we once enjoyed as citizens and are acquiring in return only the so-called “rights” that companies choose to grant us as consumers. It is well beyond time that copyright laws were updated to reflect modern realities, lest corporations be at the forefront of defining our rights in perpetuity.
Has it really been almost six months since my last weblog entry? I’d better do something about that.
I’ve decided that one of the first steps in my rehabilitation as a blogger will be to get a MacBook so I can write even when I’m away from home. I’ve been wanting to get a Mac ever since the advent of OS X, but for various reasons just never got around to getting one. Now is the time to change that. I’ve already picked out the model and the specs, so the only thing left at this point is to shop around for the best price. By this time Wednesday I should be playing around with my very own Mac.
PHP Hacks by Jack D. Herrington
December 2005, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
468 pages, $29.95, paperback
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.jp
From generating Flash movies on the fly to adding interactive maps to your Web site, the number of interesting things that can be done with PHP is limited primarily by one’s imagination. To provide some stimulation on that end, Herrington has picked 100 nifty things you can do with PHP and brought them together in PHP Hacks from O’Reilly.
Like the other titles in the Hacks series, this book contains a smattering of just about everything, but treats the reader to just enough information about each topic to serve as a springboard for further exploration on your own. Although the code samples are quite generous (in many cases, they could be adapted to your own projects with minor alterations), they are clearly intended as a staring point, not as finished, production-ready scripts. In many cases, Herrington also provides well prepared UML diagrams to go along with the code samples, which provide an intuitive visual complement to the code itself.
Although there is certainly a lot of good information and inspirational value in the book’s first four chapters (Installation and Basics, Web Design, DHTML,and Graphics), in my view the really good material is in the last six chapters (Databases and XML, Application Design, Patterns, Testing, Alternative UIs, and Fun Stuff). The material in the chapter on design patterns, in particular, was excellent and would very likely challenge the skills of all but the most experienced PHP developers.
In some cases, though, the content of this book may be a little bit too close to the bleeding edge of what is possible with PHP. I could not help but notice that many of the hacks required PHP5 or the latest versions of Microsoft Office applications, whereas in many production environments (including this server, in fact), PHP4 is still widely used, and many office environments have more or less standardized on the features that were available in Office 2000.
Another thing that may surprise some readers is that, contrary to the regular “copy this code to your server and then load that page in your browser” technique used in many PHP books, many of the hacks in this book are actually designed to run from the command line, which some might find unusual for PHP, which is often thought of as simply an “HTML scripting language.” When shown the command line hacks—and the one for creating desktop applications in PHP—I think most readers will quickly realize that there is more to PHP than just Web pages.
Recommended for anyone who is interested in PHP, but needs a bit of a creative nudge to get started on some truly interesting projects.
Word from back home is that cousin Kelly took fourth place in the women’s biathlon at this year’s Paralympic Games.
Underkofler Takes Fourth, Bascio Fifth in Women’s Biathlon at 2006 Paralympic Games
Way to go, Kelly! That’s a tremendous accomplishment.
This is the weblog of an American expat in Japan, a father of two, a loving husband, an armchair political wonk, an inveterate geek, and an all-around garden-variety fool.
