So what do namespaces and playlists have to do with each other? Nothing of course. I am just mixing a short note that PHP 5.3 alpha3 is still delayed because of the lack of a decision on how namespaces are supposed to work, with one more genius idea I want to get published, before some idiot goes to patent town with it (though I heard that if someone is quick enough one can even get a legal patent of something that has been published shortly before a patent submission was made). So todays topic are playlists, or rather what I shall label "semi-manual continuous playlists".

While I am spewing out idea to help save the world from search engine abusers, I should also add that I am surprised that social networks have not yet been leveraged more to reduce spam. For example while I may not want my entire social network (especially 2nd and 3rd degree contacts) in my address book, I still might want them to be not marked as spam (or at least be considered less likely to be spam). Furthermore it would be kind of convenient to see where and to what degree I am connected to people right in my email client. Again this would help me weed out false positives or increase the chances of me reading the email more quickly.

While Yahoo and Google show off their search-index sizes, I am waiting for some real innovation in the way that search results are presented. For example my number one gripe with search engines is that I mostly get redundant content and that links are returned that simply give me a link which contains my search term.

Here is a little tid bit about a useful MySQL extension to the SQL standard, since I have given this same hint to several people in a short timeframe. A good friend from good old Berlin who runs a site for selling car parts was the first to ask, so I am giving him credit for bringing this nifty operator back to mind. Essentially the problem is that frequently we want to easily handle matching against some value or NULL with the same code. Obviously the standard expects you to switch from the standard equal operator to "IS" for matching a NULL. After all NULL is not equal to anything. Right, but its tedious to handle this in the code so MySQL invented the "<=>" operator aka the "NULL-safe equal to operator". Also very useful in combination with prepared statements.

As I said in my last post we are not yet sure if we need to make some changes to namespaces before we can move from alpha to beta in the current 5.3.0 release cycle. What I did not ask for explicitly is feedback from people that have already started developing code with namespaces. These people are likely the best source of feedback on the current state of namespaces and if the proposed changes to namespaces would be useful or not. As you can see in the thread on internals around this RFC Stas does not feel its necessary, while Marcus still feels its a good idea.