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.

Yesterday we had an entire day at Liip dedicated to various talks, workshops and hanging out together. It really reminded me again what an amazing company Liip is. Its really what I wished m company back in Berlin should have been. Fun, smart, successful, productive, agile, good. At any rate I wanted to mention the stuff we are working on in terms of OSS. Obviously Chregu and myself are active on PHP. Jordi is also an active member of the PHP.net community. But we have other less known stuff that should also get noted, like Jackalope, Mahara, Picok, GottaGo and Okapi.

W00t! 5.3.0 stable is out. Never expected it to take this long, but its a lesson to keep faithful to the "release early, release often mantra" in the future. At some point a branch can just get too big, that it becomes close to impossible to release it. While I do appreciate the various thank you (or in the case of backslash haters "drop dead") emails, I want to highlight that all I really did is take over the tasks that require at most a bit of patience and certainly no technical skill (well I did have to update a few websites, but even there I needed Hannes to fix all my typos).