Software

Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distribution. There are many variants, including Kubuntu (Ubuntu with a KDE desktop), Edubuntu (education oriented Ubuntu), ...etc.Now there is a new edition: Christian Ubuntu. No, it is not a joke. It is real. It includes the Bible, as well as web parental control software. Here is the announcement on the Ubuntu Forums.Of course, something like that would always invoke jokes, such as this blog called Ubuntu Christian Edition Facts. It clearly says that it is a joke.

Ruby as a "quick and easy interpreted scripting language for object oriented development" did not really pick up until the Ruby On Rails (RoR) platform started taking off.It was only a matter of time for full-fledged Content Management Systems  (CMS) based on Ruby on Rails to emerge.Here is a list of a few I found out, still the early stages.

• RadiantCMS, licensed under the MIT License. It seems at a very early stage though, but has a small library of "third party behaviors" (modules/plugins), and templating is via special markup (check the demo).
• RailsFrog is another RoR CMS in the early stages as well. They need programmers, and Drupal's Ber Kessels is on board there.

It is official: Drupal has 14 Summer of Code projects for 2006.

This is amazing, since Drupal came out #8 in the list, ahead of other open source projects, such as Joomla, Gentoo, Gaim, Mozilla, Eclipse, GNU and Debian.

This also means that Google will be investing $70,000 in Drupal.

Last year, I co-mentored three students, and got a Summer of Code 2005 T-Shirt. Two of last year's students that I co-mentored (The Amazing Angela and Fabulous Fabiano) are mentors in their own right this year!

It seems that MySQL has countered Oracle's purchase of Innobase's InnoDB and Sleepy Cat's BDB, by buying its own transactional engine from Solid Tech, and even making it GPL. The obligatory Slashdot discussion here.

Oracle Corporation has been on a shopping spree.

In 18 months they are spending $18 billion, including many open source companies.

First, it was InnoBase, the company that makes the InnoDB for the MySQL database. Then rumor has it that SleepyCat will follow, which makes the Berkley Database Base. Following that is Zend, maker of the PHP accelerator, and the PHP development environment, Zend Studio. Finally, it is JBoss, a Java application server.

The first two worry me the most. Although the source code of both products is available, the proprietary license for each allows MySQL AB, the company that makes MySQL, to offer non-free versions with suitable licensing for clients who need it.

Here is a list of web application frameworks that are written in PHP.  Some of those were inspired by Ruby On Rails, or seek to imitate it. Others are frameworks with varying goals. All are PHP based.

• CakePHP has been covered before on this web site.
• And so is PHPOnTrax.

Here is another web application framework written in PHP.

WASP is a "powerful web application framework built on PHP5". It is object oriented, and strives to be suitable for enterprise class applications with less code.

What is interesting is that  WASP uses Drupal to power its site. 

Resources

•  ONLamp article on WASP.

After completely forgetting about it, the Google Summer of Code T-Shirt has finally arrived. I participated as a code review  mentor for Drupal on three student project.

Some time ago, I ran across this lengthy humor article on how to write unmaintainable code.

Look at this gem:

Capitalisation
 
 Randomly capitalize the first letter of a syllable in the middle of a word. For example ComputeRasterHistoGram().
 

How many times did you see this CamelCase notation in code on Words? Too many times!

I ran into The Daily WTF web site by chance. Programmers send the web site maintainer coding mistakes they have seen by colleagues. Some submissions indeed have a high WTF factor, for example, this overly verbose way of negating a number.