Ford may sell historic Jaguar plant – Yahoo! News
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F – news) is mulling the sale of its historic Browns Lane plant near Coventry, central England, that was the home of its iconic Jaguar brand since 1928, Jaguar said on Wednesday.
“The possible sale of Browns Lane is one of several options that is currently being studied,” spokesman Don Hume said, confirming a report in the Wall Street Journal newspaper.
Here’s an interesting idea, grab free ebooks from project Gutenburg gather a team of volunteers to read the, and create free audio books.
It looks like it’s just starting up, but an interesting idea.
Stefan N. pointed me to what looks like a cool new Opensource magazine O3. From the website:
O3 magazine is a free magazine distributed electronically in PDF format. O3 is published on a monthly basis. The focus of O3 is on the use of Free and Open Source (FOSS) software in Enterprise Data Networking environments. Some articles in O3 will introduce open source solutions, while some are designed to demonstrate how to integrate open source solutions with leading Enterprise Data Networking hardware from a wide variety of vendors.
My other favorite Free linux magazine is Tux Magazine, which is now on it’s 8th edition. The only thing I don’t like about Tux Magazine, is the fact that they’ll send 8mb attachments via email.
Now all I need is a good color printer.
Note to self: Find way to monetize my hobbies… anyone heard of buisness plans based around IRC?
Investing – bizjournals.com
For years, the former accountant and real estate developer traded options and various securities with his and a few friends’ money. The returns were strong enough to drive Santaularia and his son, Charlie, to start Parrot Trading Partners LLC, a commodity pool fund dealing in market-neutral options strategies, in April 2004.“I decided if I was successful with my own money and a few others’, then I might as well form a pool and see if the world wanted to trade alongside me,” Jes Santaularia said.
I’m just saving this for when it might come in handy!
<ionic> ohhh then I was sooooo wrong
I’ve been saying I would do it for the last year or so, but as of a couple hour I’ve finally moved my crap over onto my server.
Running PHP5.1RC6 with WordPress 2.0 SVN, you could say I’m living on the bleeding edge.
The downside of this is that dispite my efforts, email is still not really working well… we’ll see if that clears up in the next few hours. I generally respond to emails right away, so if you don’t hear from me, please send me an IM/SMS, or /msg me on IRC.
Now that I’ve taken the big step to move my server, the rest of my web empire will fall into place. Watch this space for updates!
By: Stefan Neufeind
Less than a week after PHP Conference in Frankfurt it was time for a trip to Frankfurt again. As last year we had an exhibition booth in the .org pavillion of the LinuxWorld Expo, next to the people from Free Software Foundation and right across from KDE. Unfortunately no PEAR-related talk made it into the LinuxWorld conference-program this year (too many submissions), but we got a 30-minute-slot on the info-stage in the exhibition part of LinuxWorld. It was good to see about 40 interested people listening closely. This reflects growing interest and demand for flexible application-design using PEAR.
In contrast to last year it was good to see that more and more visitors already knew about PEAR and what they have to offer. But for sure we could also convince some new ones that this might be the right choice to consider when building their next PHP applications. The people from eGroupware even thought about using the PEAR-installer for distributing their application and using dependencies from PEAR as well as other channels. Let’s see – that sounds promising.
Besides all good words some “suggestions for improvement” should not be overheard as well. It was mentioned by several visitors that the documenation might need major improvements. For some packages it either does not exist, just covers a general start into the topic or is simply outdated. Some people also desperately searched the web for examples after installing a package, not noticing that usually at least a few basic examples are shipped as part of the package. For those who worked with PEAR already it seems we offer a valuable resource. For all others the barrier to entry might be a problem.
And what’s up next year? PEAR at LinuxWorld again? Well, last year in my eyes LinuxWorld was good. This year far less exhibitors / projects were present, which in my eyes resulted in a noticable less interesting expo. But next year the situation is completely new because LinuxWorld is moving to Cologne. Why? Well, LinuxTag is moving from Karlsruhe to Wiesbaden in 2006, which is close to Frankfurt. LinuxWorld decided to flee from LinuxTag – well, that’s up to the personal feeling of the reader
At the recent International PHP Conference held in Frankfurt, Germany I was able to pick up a copy of Sebastian Bergmann’s “PHPUnit Pocket Guide” a slim pocket guide published by O’Reilly which forms the most complete documentation for PHPUnit. I hesitated before picking up this book, the last “Pocket Guide” I bought covered Python and I found it less than and useful. However, I am very happy with the PHPUnit Pocket Guide, it is well written and easy-to-read documentation for a package which more people should be using.
The book itself is 75 pages long and can easily fit into ones back pocket. After a very brief introduction we quickly move into real life examples and a description of the goals which effected the development of PHPUnit.
What I found enjoyable, was the mixture between real-world examples, Agile development methodologies and program documentation. I have never used PHPUnit style of unit testing before and while I am familiar with the concepts of Agile and Extreme programming, I would have appreciated a bit more Theory. Of course, this is a pocket guide, not “Unit Testing Unleashed” and links are provided to various sources of information on the topic, so there is plenty of information for me to look at.
The pocket guide also covers using PHPUnit with Phing as well as a brief section on PHPUnit and PHP4.
Best of all, this book is totally free and you can download it from the PHPUnit website. Many thanks to Sebastian not only the book, but for bringing a full-featured Unit Testing suite to PHP (yes, I know about SimpleTest, but I’m preferential to PEAR packages).
Conference is over, and the slides for my talk on “Winbinding your Code” are up. I was was very happy with the schedule, and how my talk followed Jeremy Johnstone’s talk on the very cool PHP-GTK2.
Lots of the same people were in both talks, and I was plesantly surprised by the amount of people who attended the talk and the feedback that I recieved after the talk.
The slides are up in PDF, and Shockwave Flash format and the original Open Document Presentation format. The slides are released under the Creative Commons license, so please feel free to use them in your Usergroup meeting. If you make any substancial changes, I would appreciate your posting the updated slides and announcing them on the winbinder forums. you can also let me know by sending and email to firstname@thisdomain.com.
Code samples are here.
E-Plus Mobilfunk – Handys und Tarife
So it looks like my mobile carrier just struck up a deal with skype for a 40EU/month Flat rate UMTS deal. That is VERY attractive.
I wonder if I could use the same package for both my phone and my laptop, or would I need to purchase 2 seperate packages.
Looking at the small text it seems like they block everything but skype, so you won’t be able to use another VoIP service… Since this bit says you can “Download, surf and make Skype calls as much as you can, no extra charges” I am sure there is a way for smart people to tunnel through the restrictions.
First day of this years IPC has ended… unlike previous years, where I tried to cover as many sessions as possible with blog posts, this year I’ll be using my trusty Zaurus SL5500 to capture some of the sounds of the conferences.
In this first episode, we start around the lunch table with Lukas Smith, Jeremy Johnstone, Stefan Neufeind, Arne Blankerts discussing Error handling in PHP (Exceptions vs. PEAR::Error). The conversation quickly moves on to current trends in the Tech Industry, especially in regards to Yahoo!, MSN and Google rivalry, collaboration between platforms, and privacy concerns.
We catch up with Kore Nordmann who talks about his work on PEAR::Image_3d
Like always, you can subscribe to my podcast using YME at podcast.yahoo.com or directly inputting my feed into your podcatcher… I don’t do iTunes 
A vote or comment at Podcastalley won’t hurt you either.
Music is “Break the Code” by Madsumo, courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network.
Download the file here.
Google just added a referral program to google adsense. I’ve been running google ads on this blog for the past 2 years, and while I haven’t made a fortune, it covers the costs of my dedicated server (which I will move to soon).
My ads are pretty mild, and I generally don’t get any more than a couple clicks a day. Your milage may vary, but I have tried a couple ad services and am the most happy with the simplicty of adsense.
If you have your own blog, go ahead and click on the link on the home page and and sign up under me… not only will you be able to get some residual income, but when you reach your first $100, I also get a check for $100… so get with it.
Needless to say, this has replaced my Internet Explorer banner .
Vote for Podcast: Another Day in Paradise
I’m waaaay to tired/busy for blogging these days (DST took out a couple hours of my sleep :S), but if you’ve liked my podcast recently please vote for me using the above link.
If you don’t know what podcasts are, read this and then subscribe to my podcast at Yahoo, PodcastAlley or PodcastPickle.
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