Bestseller ? and !!

Manuel “phpclasses” Lemos wrote that the “Pro PHP 4” book that I co-authored is an Amazon bestseller. Really? I dont believe it, I have my own reasons, besides, the fact is that the Amazon site does not list it as such. Has anyone seen such a rating?

Yeah! I should be jumping with joy *me* a bestseller but am too tired to even keep my eyes open…. ….

Hmm… hope the sales translate into nice fat royalty check big enough to buy myself a notebook.

Killing Bugs

Spent a rather satisfying 30 min at Scorpio resolving the issues with most of the project – now no project has more than 3 open bugs/feature request!! Bliss!!!

On a different note – Yes, Scorpio is open source but is waiting for someone to write decent documentation – roughly put it is a bugzilla clone BUT it is suited to our way of working and has a method to sync the remote server DB with local server DB, handles multiple projects, multiple developers and multiple reporters per project etc etc

Dead Sleep

“Dead Sleep” by Greg Iles – after a long time I came across a thriller which I have been unable to put down. The story revolves around a female photojournalist who sees a painting of her sister who was kidnapped 13 months ago. the twist is that the paintings are a series and it is rumoured that the women are not sleeping BUT dead !!

Besides the book has sentences like “Do as I say, not as I do!”, “Every person is shaped by the choices they make for their survival”

Mozilla 1.0 Rocks

Ah! finally got it for both Linux and Windoze 20Mb whew!

Have not really put them thru their paces BUT at first glance most of the annoying buglets seem to have gone … …

Unfortunately dynamic fonts are still not supported (well atleast on the Linux version)

Those of you who have been waiting for my PHPed for Linux review – just forget PHPed – I shut the side panels and there is noway apparent to get them back now …

Not even a standard uninstall … besides there was no obvious way to start the debug listener – writing to NuSphere evoked no response

So I would be damn crazy to shell out $299/-

mod_rewrite RULEZ!!

Had his particularly vexing problem of how to point domains to their websites without creating a vhost for each one of them, also it should not need a httpd restart.

I needed this because *all* the website files are not in physical directories BUT a database

Now only if I can make BIND work such that all domains which point to ns.myserver.com from various registars need not have config file entries … …

Hardware and CPU are cheap … …

Concentric Circles

Night of 18th Sept 1993, A day prior to my birthday, I had flown to Mumbai to meet Swati, since all the money was spent on the air fare we were staying at Rashid Mansion, Dockyard Road in the house of Rayomond S. Framose – fondly called Rayo by most. Swati had taken the keys from him – he had said that he would be out for a while…

I was meeting Swati after a gap of almost 6 months and those were the pre-net days – no email, no chat, no mobile, could not afford to talk more than once a week!! It was a passionate evening and we were soon exhausted. At around 1:30 am we were woken up by very gentle and soothing rendering of “Strangers in the night” on piano, this was followed by “Annie’s song”, it was Rayo playing two of Swati’s all time favourite. After which Rayo just got up and went out again without saying a word. The music was lovely at the same time had strains of anguish which we could not place…

We lay awake for a long long time in each others arms not saying a word, in the comforting cocoon of our love.

It was next day afternoon when Rayo retruned that we learnt that the day prior he had spent at the death bed of a very dear friend – she had cancer… …

It was he who had said the you have family and friends in concentric circles around you, the inner most circle is most dear to you and will also hurt you the most, the key lies in placing the correct radius for everyone.

Swati recalled this today morning – wanted to share it with a certain someone but was not sure of the radius… …

Are you?

Commercial Linux based web developer products

Have been experimenting with a wide variety of web developer tools for Linux mostly commercial, PHPed 3, Zend Studio 2.5, Quanta Gold 3 and somewhere down the line the Crossover Office 1.0.1

Though each of them merit a complete review the most satisfying from me was IE5.5 on Linux. Except for a few gifs not rendering properly and the dynamic fonts not downloading IE works better under CXOffice. The best part is that the Rich Text Edit control using which I had created a WYSIWYG HTML editor (See https://www.sanisoft.com/editor for a scaled down version) also works!!

Will be writing a review of PHPed for Linux later in the day…

New paint, new flooring, new furnishings – weeee I have a new house. Slept in my own bedroom after a gap of almost 10 days. Not very strangely it was a satisfying sleep no aches or pains, as Swati jokingly puts it – it is because we see ourselves the first thing in the morning. The bed is parrallel to a 6’x6′ mirror 😉

This time we were smart enough to shop around and the quotes covered the whole gamut from ridiculous to outrageous, but thanks to prudent planning by Swati we got everything done in about half the budget I had estimated.

Hmm… … now I am wondering can we put that saved half into buying some new hardware? I dare not ask, specially after the goof up on 31st. One of my senior programmer managed to overlook nearly a months work in the specs given by the client, the project was quoted accordingly in terms of *money* and time, being the CTO the moral responsibility is mine.

Tough luck – win some lose some more