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Weekly Roundup - May 5th 2008

Posted May 5th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of April 28th to May 4th 2008, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.

Articles posted on my blog

Monday: Weekly Roundup - April 28th 2008
Tuesday: How to tell if it's a leap year with PHP
Wednesday: Enable the Web Interface for uTorrent
Thursday: Monthly Roundup - April 2008
Friday: Reverse Mapping Checking - Possible Break-in Attempt Error with SSH
Saturday: Stop logwatch reporting on a particular service on CentOS
Sunday: logwatch "postdrop Illegal seek" and "sendmail queue file write error"

Interesting articles found offsite

BSD

OpenBSD 4.3 was released.

Hardware

The downspec Toshiba Satellite A200 that I bought a few weeks ago was reviewed by NZ PC World.

jQuery

devkick.com posted links to a whole bunch of useful scripts/plugins/modules for jQuery.

KDE

KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 was released, and both PolishLinux and Ars Technica reviewed it, along with screenshots.

Linux

Slackware 12.1 was released. You can buy Slackware from the Linux CD Mall.

Microsoft/Yahoo

Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo has been big news over the last three months but Microsoft has finally given up. Read details at PC World, The Register and Ars Technica.

MySQL

The MySQL Performance Blog looked at the use of indexes on columns in a post titled "do you always need index on where column?", benchmarking a tinyint field with only two possible values on a table with 20 million rows.

Photography

Smashing Magazine posted 50 amazing photographs. Some of them have obviously been Photoshopped but there are some really great photos in there. I've seen a few of them before but most of them were new to me.

PHP

phpMyAdmin 2.11.6 was released. This is a bug fix only release.

Marco Tabini posted about 5 PHP 5 features you can't afford to ignore on his "Accidental Businessman" blog. These include SimpleXML, JSON and SOAP, PDO, SPL and SQLite.

builderau.com introduces SOAP with PHP using the nusoap library.

PHP 5.2.6 was released.

Windows

Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released, as reported by Ars Technica, and then held back due to a compatibility issue, as reported by The Register.

PC World posted 18 Features Windows Should Have (but doesn't). I'd really like to see the virtual workspaces built into Windows instead of having to use 3rd party add-ons which just don't work smoothly enough.

Other Stuff

PC World looked at how Xerox spun off their Palo Alto Research Center as a separate company and how it is now making a profit. PARC has come up with many modern computing innovations, such as the graphical user interface and ethernet. And Computer World looked at how Xerox/PARC has created erasable paper which can be reused up to 100 times.