links for 2009-07-06

"Powell said Sotomayor is a "gifted" and an "accomplished woman" with "a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law." " Good job Powell.

"Modernizr does not add missing functionality to browsers; instead, it detects native availability of features and offers you a way to maintain a fine level of control over your site regardless of a browser’s capabilities." I like it.

"There's no longer any need in PHP to create your own regular expressions to try to validate an email address; simply use filter_var() instead. This is available from PHP 5.2.0." Didn't know this was included, but it's awesome, not having to write your own regex for email addresses is so awesome.

"A group of clerics in Iran has called Iran's presidential vote invalid, contradicting official results. The pro-reform group's statement pits it against the top legislative body, which last week formally endorsed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." That's interesting.

Let's write more secure PHP.

Is your company's app as simple as a Google or Apple product, why not?

Pretty good list of how to identify the bad PHP software.

"Silence Is The Enemy was started in June 2009 to draw more attention to the sexually abused around the globe and to encourage everyone to talk about it and act. We have power and influence in our words, and we're able to speak for those who can not. We’re asking all of you—bloggers, writers, teachers and concerned citizens—to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world."

"And check out her daughter, Piper, playing with her flip flops. She's the same little firecracker who licked her brother's hair down during the Republican National Convention. I love that girl's irrepressible quirks." I totally agree.

"Three weeks after Iran was shaken by its most serious unrest since the 1979 revolution, the dust seems to have settled. Banned and broken up by force, the largely peaceful, massive protest demonstrations have fizzled out. The Guardian Council – the powerful, appointed watchdog body – has formally endorsed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose unexpectedly large declared margin of victory triggered the protests." Has anything changed in Iran since the election.

"Back to the original question: How different will the world be if they actually release this thing? Well, Michael Arrington will have less money and a handful of geeks will have a $300 slate-netbook that they use a few times before it gets tossed in their gadget pile because everything it does is better accomplished with something else." A differing opinion on the Crunchpad.

"The slow query log can be used to find queries that take a long time to execute and are therefore candidates for optimization. However, examining a long slow query log can become a difficult task. To make this easier, you can process the slow query log using the mysqldumpslow command to summarize the queries that appear in the log or explore the slow_log table entries by means of classic phpMyAdmin web interface. There’s also CSV file in the /var/db/mysql/mysql/ directory available for data export and further manipulation." Find those slow queries.

"UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says new sanctions may be imposed on Burma's regime after it snubbed visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon." I'm pretty sure Burma isn't going to care much.

"Exit polls in Bulgaria indicate the centre-right party led by ex-body guard and Mayor of Sofia Boiko Borisov is heading for a significant victory. But the BBC's Europe correspondent says while it will be a remarkable win, it is not enough for GERB to govern alone. Mr Borisov promised to end corruption and tackle the economic downturn. It has been Bulgaria's first election since joining the European Union two years ago. Last year, Bulgaria lost access to some of its EU funds for failing to deal with graft and organised crime."

"Aid agencies and major world bodies are to meet to to seek ways of encouraging trade by emerging nations during the economic downturn. It will examine how aid – which is used to boost trading in poorer states – can be sustained during a global recession."

"Twenty-odd years later, I can totally see why most sane people opt out of the "creative" career option- I can totally see why they stick to something more conventional, even if it isn't really all that interesting to them. It's NOT because they're stupid, lazy or unimaginative. It's because the alternative is really, really hard."

"Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has left the US on a flight bound for Honduras, in a bid to reclaim his post. But the interim government says it will not allow Mr Zelaya's plane to land. There are growing fears of violence in the Central American nation. Mr Zelaya is being accompanied on the plane by UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann and a number of journalists. Interim President Roberto Micheletti, meanwhile, has said troops from neighbouring Nicaragua are moving towards the Honduran border." This should be fun.

"So, there you have it. If you're using XML and are wondering why the results you're getting are not the same as what the specification says you should be getting, the answer is simple. Microsoft write their code to fit people's expectations of what the specification says rather than what it actually says. I was also a little taken aback about their assertion that most people consider attribute ordering to be significant. When I asked around So, a question to you all: do any of you consider XML attribute ordering significant when comparing documents for equality?" Umm no, good job Microsoft.

"Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009." Awesome news for web developers.

"But that’s not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they’re interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema—and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow’s source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation." Awesome attack essentially on developers hubris in their ability to recode something from scratch in "no time".

"This is how @donttrythis and @grantimahara make #Mythbusters (with @voicework, @chris71williams & @evangrimm) " Mythbusters flow chart.

"I used to go on Franken’s radio show, all ready to be jocular — and what he wanted to talk about was the arithmetic of Social Security, or the structure of Medicare Part D. So what will Franken do to the level of Senate discourse? He’ll raise it." I have to agree.