Hauser & Wenz :: Blog

The session list of the International PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition in Amsterdam is out. As with the last PHP Conference in Frankfurt-Mörfelden, there seems to be some overlapping between some of the talks, but nevertheless this promises to be a great conference with great speakers from all around the globe. I am especially happy to meet some friends who have to travel very far to get to Amsterdam, including Luke & Laura and John (of course I am also happy to see most of the rest, but most of them have already been at PHP World 2004, so that doesn't count )
Early bird ends on March 31. If you happen to be there, just say hi!

Just in case you haven't heard: The November 2004 "Avalon" Community Technology Preview Including WinFX™ SDK is now available as a
public download, so you don't need an MSDN subscription for it.

A friend of mine is just finishing his Diploma thesis and stumbled upon this: Microsoft Visio can automatically generate UML diagrams out of source code. This is great! In the English version, these diagrams contain this kind of method signatures:

myMethod(in: int param1): boolean

But the German version creates this:

myMethod(Zoll: int param1): boolean

"Zoll" is the German translation of "inch". Holy cow. After some web and newsgroup research, I believe that this error has also occured in version 2002 of Visio, was fixed there in a Service Pack and now reappeared in Vision 2003 and Visio 2003 SP1.

Via John: The long awaited PHP Unleashed finally is out. I had the priviledge to contribute a couple of chapters and I am really looking forward to holding the book in my own hands. This photo in Johns weblog shows Damien with the book, obviously John is also still waiting for his copies.

Update: It has arrived.

When I read this post on the (public) WinEdt mailing list yesterday morning, I knew it would be the start of a great day:
I started with my PhD, i want to learn it. Please send me all new infos
But the day's real highlight was this posting by John Levine (of "Internet for Dummies" fame and Mayor of the Village of Trumansburg) in a private mailing list:
I got a blizzard of "I'm on vacation so come break into my house" messages sent by broken vacation programs over the past week. If your mail comes through MS Exchange you're probably guilty unless your mail system manger is more far skilled than most.
There are a couple of well known tricks that vacation programs have used for two decades to avoid spamming mailing lists. The simplest and most effective is to respond only to mail with the recipient's own address on the To: or Cc: line. Too bad nobody who ever used a real vacation program appears to work in Redmond, Washington. Pfui.