I am on the board for this years CH Open Source Awards. All the other guys on the board seem to be more into Java and other languages which so far have gotten way more submissions. So all you swiss open source developers (not only PHP developers), submit your work, get recognition, prizes and most importantly show off what kind of great open source applications are being created here in Switzerland. We are especially keen on seeing projects coming out of schools and universities. Should also help boost visibility for your project and its not all that much work to submit your project. We will look at all submissions in a fair bit of detail, so most of the work is on our side :)

I am still quite in shock over the recent news about the assassinations of family members of suspected terrorists executed by US military drones under the supervision of the CIA. What confuses me the most is the lack of a real public outcry. For some time now we seem to have accepted that the CIA uses these drones outside of warzones to kill people that are suspected terrorists in areas where at least officially the local governments oppose such actions. We have also accepted "human collateral damage" during these attacks. To me the recent attack however have a new level as now it is apparently also legit to kill the family members of suspected terrorists outside of warzones in countries that officially oppose such attacks. What level of wrong do we need to reached before we realize that we have nothing left to be proud of our western democracies and legal system?

For a while now I have been meaning to create a planet for digital DJs. Thanks to Yahoo pipes it was a breeze to create this planet once I finally sat down to do it. Essentially Yahoo pipes lets you take any web content, preferably feeds, and pipe them through various tools for looping, string manipulation etc and aggregate them all together into one final output stream. This stream can then be consumed in various ways like RSS, json, php serialized strings and even a nicely formatted website. You can also embed the output into your site with some simple javascript. If you are interested in reading about my motivation for this planet check out my music related blog. Nice!

A long time roommate is participating in the UN-informed project. The idea of the project is to create a database of all the various UN resolutions so that it becomes possible to quickly find everything about a given topic. Amazingly enough there is nothing like that at the moment. So its seemingly impossible to find out what resolution is still currently relevant, what resolution even has any legal value, who has ratified the resolution etc. The final database will become an invaluable tool for NGOs, researchers and even governments around the world. However most of the people on the project have a background in economics, politics and law.

This might come off as ironic, but the proposal for type hinting illustrated to me quite well what kind of restraint people have put on themselves in order to work together for the greater good of releasing 5.3.0. Let me explain: To me even the thought of talking about adding a language syntax feature right after 5.3.0 is out is so inconceivable that I cannot even begin to express how shocked I am that a long time RM like Ilia would bring this up and then moan about discussions being needles bickering and preventing him to commit the patch within less than a week. Even more surprising is that apparently so man people thinks its a good idea to do so. This is not because I think that strict type checking is not a good fit for PHP, but simply because putting this in CVS now means, that we have no time to let the feature mature in CVS for a while as we need to make a bug fix release fairly soon. Adding a language syntax, even if its an optional syntax, should never be pushed into a stable release so quickly imho.