Wang Xiaoning was convicted of the charge of “incitement to subvert state power” after e-mailing electronic journals about multi-party system. This the fourth case implicating Yahoo. It is a shame. I cannot understand that. Yes China is the world’s second largest internet market but that does not justify the decisions to collaborate with dictactorships, oppressors or massivelly corrupted governement (China can fit in the three categories I think…).

On one side, I like Y! new community strategy with their various OS projects, on the other side, such things make me doubt about the goodness of its board or intentions. If anyone cares.

From Wired.

I did not try it, only read the docs available on their site. It looks like yet another “3D xyz” you can find in any supermarket, maybe it is better, I do not know At least the personal version does not cost anything.

Sketchup

Silvano Girardi Jr created the ptBR Validate package last year (our firt south America Locale . Marcelo Santos Araujo joined the effort last december.

Marcelo has released Validate::ptBR 0.5.3 today, a bug fixes release. Good Work Marcelo

Validate::ptBR Homepage

Validate::ptBR Downloads

Update if you do not use php 5.1.3 and up (or 5.1cvs :), you have to get 1.3.1 to be able to build it.

A small backport of a Tony’s fix in many bundled extensions. It affects classes extending the Zip internal class.

I also added two new functions, getFromName and getFromIndex. They return the contents of a Zip entry as string.

[php] <?php $z = new Zip(); $z->open(dirname(__FILE__) . '/test.zip'); $im_string = $z->getFromName("item.gif"); $im = imagecreatefromstring($im_string); 

to upgrade:

pecl upgrade zip-alpha

Zip Homepage

Many Validate related releases this week. The first to get some love was the UK backends with a API change, we now use the same methods name as the other locales. The french locale recognizes now the DOM/TOM departements.

And finally I released Validate itself. It supports now RFC822 compliant email validation, thanks to Bertrand Gugger for his work

We also look for maintainers for some existing locales (ES or CH for example) or to add new validations modules. Leave me a comment or mail me (pierre at php.net) if you like to add your country to the list.

Validate

Validate_UK

Validate_FR

Pippin gave us an interesting link about CMYK displays. It looks really promising, from a quality, energy and colour points of view. This document describes this new technology. I m not sure if they choosed the right name, “electrowetting”

• LiquaWista
• Electrowetting PDF

A relativelly important bug is fixed in this release. It was due to the PEAR installer itself. If the cache directory is missing, the installer will have to request the channels server for nearly all command, again and again. The Web frontend now checks if the cache directory exists and automatically creates it if not. PEAR 1.4.9 contains the fix as well.

Time for upgrade!

PEAR Web Frontend homepage

This long weekend was a good occasion to cleanup a bit my PEAR todo, long weekends are always good for that (especially when it rains 22h/day…). The first entry to get my attention was go-pear, the PEAR installer (the “installer installer”:).

A “bug” was reported about gopear being broken when safemode is On. To be honest, I did not test it that much with safemode On. But given the absence of bug reports, I supposed it was working well . And I was right.

The problem is the lack of PHP knowledge of some sys admins. Those responsible for this bug mix mod_suphp, open_basedir, safemode without knowing how to confugure them. The results is that any directory created by php cannot be accessed again by itself (but by apache). The FTP users is a different user as well with different permissions, making impossible to delete something.

This bug is a another “good” example. Not setting a temp directory or not adding the system one to the open_basedir directories list is (leave the default value as well).

If you are clients from such ISPs, find a new one, save your money, save my time.

An annoying bug in the ITX callback system introduced a couple of months ago has been fixed. I would force me to write 100 more tests if I forgot again to run them before a release. But the bug seems to not have affected too much people (no related bug report)

The other two are a PHP notice and a warning. For some reason fread decided to raise a warning when the content is zero, it will be fixed in PHP soon, but I still have to fix it in my code.

pear upgrade html_template_it

HTML_template_IT Homepage

Download HTML_template_IT

Zack Urlocker, MySQL’s vice president of marketing, has announced that the company has renewed its relationship with Oracle for the InnoDB storage engine:

After several months of back and forth negotiation, MySQL and Oracle have agreed to a multi-year extension to the existing contract enabling MySQL to continue to sell and support the InnoDB storage engine. The terms of the agreement are very much “business as usual” for both companies.

Oracle acquired InnoDb along with InnoBase last year. Followed this acquisition, I had the feelings that Oracle will do something bad. They did not and that’s a real good thing© He also mentions Ken Jacobs as the key person to help drive this agreement from Oracle’s side.

I do not know him but I think it was not an easy job.

On the same topic, I’m looking forward to see what will come up in the next MySql UC about the choices of transactions engines. One of them could be Jim Starkey’s Netfrastructure (interbase/firebird), acquired by MySql earlier this year.

Read on businessreviewonline.com.