I’m working away here on a typical October, dreary, Monday afternoon with a hot Tim Hortons coffee, feeling a bit run down after my weekend adventure visiting the parents & in-laws in Exeter (the town in which I grew up and have a complex relationship with). It is nice to visit them and all my childhood friends, but it’s always nice to return to “my” town. Anyone who’s moved away from their childhood town knows what I’m talking about.
On a different note… only 3 days until I’m off on a week vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexicos’, Palladium Vallarta for an all inclusive vacation in the sun with my wife and a friend from Exeter. We decided to head to Mexico to bath in the sun and warmth after contemplating heading to England to visit one of my wife’s friends. There were several reasons we chose a Mexico this fall over England… but mostly it boiled down to sun, beach, and swim up bars vs. grey, country side, taverns. I’ve been told October is not the best time to visit England. I’d really like Karla to visit her friend over there, so maybe I’ll send her over in the spring.
Tech notes of interest to me:
– MySQL: MySQL 5.0 was released today. This is great… I see stored procedures, triggers and much more are alive and kicking for production mode now. I’m still running MySQL 3.23.58 on my production web-server, so I guess it’s finally time to upgrade. It’s nice that MySQL releases RedHat Enterprise RPM’s now and I’ve been told the transition is easy.
– PHP: Zend announced the PHP Collaboration Project later last week, which I’m really excited about. A standardized development framework for PHP that hopefully will impress me more than Pear does. I’ve never been a huge Pear fan to tell you the awful truth. It’s sad, I know… I just never got into it and any time I tried the classes were riddled with bugs or lousy code. I’m not saying that Pear is always that way, I’m just saying it seems the classes I wanted to use were always that way.
– AJAX: I’ve been looking for a really nice AJAX framework to work from and so far have came across quite a few. The trouble with “new” technologies (the quotes are because I know JavaScript & XML aren’t a new thing, but hey, it’s a catchy term and human’s need terms) is that well, they’re new. Everything is a version 0.1. They all do more or less the same thing, but it’s just deciding which ones best for me. If anyone has any opinions, I’d love to hear them. ListMessenger 3.0 will likely utilize an AJAX-esque interface because I believe this is the way to go for the future of web-application development.
Favourite / coolest application of the day:
I’d say that RoundCube [http://www.roundcube.net] tops my “favourite” list of last week. I’m very impressed with the functionality of this new up and coming web-mail client. It’s new, but hey, it’s coming along nicely.
“RoundCube Webmail is a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It provides full functionality you expect from an e-mail client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation and message filters. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires the MySQL database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2.”
Well, that’s about all I want to blog about right now.
I’ll be blogging again before I leave for Mexico, and hopefully while I’m there.