Hauser & Wenz :: Blog

When looking through the dangerously high stack of "might be interesting stuff" on my desk, I found some vouchers or promotion codes for various certifications. So I decided to give it a try. First, I pased the MCP exam 70-305 (ASP.NET). The exam was quite difficult, since all questions are rather long stories (with rather short answers). However also some IMO unneeded stuff was asked (including debugging of client-side VBScript code -- who in the world is using that on professional web sites?!). I also found some of the questions poorly translated into German, including the translation of element names (!!). With one questions, two of the alternative were identical -- and both correct, IMO.
Then, I went on to pass both the Certified Dreamweaver MX 2004 Developer and the Certified Flash MX 2004 Developer exam. The first of them contained some strange questions about menu commands (and was held in English, however as an author I have to use the German versions most of the time), but also required much knowledge about HTML and CSS. I liked the Flash exam more, as it contained many questions to issues that are common in real-life projects. It also contained many coding questions which of course suited me fine *g
In a nutshell: The Microsoft exam was the hardest to pass and really required a fundamental knowledge of the technology; they also tried to put all questions in a real-world context (however the questions itself were sometimes really strange). The Macromedia exams seemed to be easier, however I found them generally more suitable to the topic.
This also ends this year's work for me. Have a great end of the year, and check back here in 2005!

I just stumbled upon this: A Software called Phalanger promises to compile PHP code into MSIL code, the byte code used by Microsoft's .NET. This is an interesting concept, despite I am sure that some members of each community will just shake their heads on this idea.

The PHP group has released PHP versions 4.3.10 and 5.0.3. Apart from the usual bunch of bugfixes, the new releases fix several critical vulnerabilities reported by Stefan Esser and by Martin Eiszner. So please do upgrade your installations!

Does Linux have less bugs than Windows? Honestly, it could be true but I don't know. However this is not a way to prove it.
Quote:
The report [...] states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel [...] contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis.
Uh-oh. Convincing. Not.

Something new from Google Labs: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

at least, for this year. Yesterday I flew to Berlin and made a surprise appearance at Dirk's, Michael's and Uwe's TechTalk-Tour. Then, I rushed to the dotNET DevelopersGroup BerlinBrandenburg and talked over two hours about all sorts of mobile devices (and developing for them). Now, my voice is severely damaged, but after a class I am teching this weekend this was the last talk for this year. That means that on Monday I can start some serious writing again, before the new year brings new (and old) conferences. Stay tuned!

see Chris Shiflett's announcement.

I think I stumbled upon a bug in the new PHP 4.3.10RC1 when playing around with PHPUnit. To reproduce, just run any code that uses PHPUnit and worked with PHP 4.3.9. More details and a workaround for PHPUnit can be found here, but it's of course no PHPUnit bug, but a PHP bug.

Update: Most probably this was not caused by PHP alone, but by this bug.

When I just booted my old Win98 system today, I was very surprised when the update mechanism prompted me to visit WindowsUpdate. When I was there, I found a cumulative IE6SP1 patch -- associated with KB #889293. However I did not manage to find this article at first. After some reloading(!), the KB search finally found the new KB number and linked at a Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (889293) : MS04-040. This currently leads to a 404 error message, but probably Microsoft is just updating their servers. I am really curious which of the outstanding known vulnerabilities in IE6 are fixed by that or if it's just backported SP2 fixes.

Update: The bulletin is online now; obviously, only this one has been fixed.