So Many Conferences, So Little Time

Lots of great conferences going on right now – wish I could be at all of them.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Matt Mullenweg won’t Upgrade: WordPress and the PHP4 Dilemma

Last week the folks at PHP.net announced that support for PHP 4 would end at the end of 2007:

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

In parallel, a group of developers working on open source PHP projects have created GoPHP5, a site and community of projects all of which have agreed to drive PHP5 adoption. In order to be listed on the site, the project must:

Make an announcement on your site that by February 5, 2008 you will accept PHP 5.2 features into your codebase and will no longer provide support for lesser PHP versions. (versions or branches of your software already released by that date may continue support for older versions; this resolution applies only to new development.)

The idea is that unless a certain critical mass of key projects begins to require PHP 5, most shared web hosts won’t upgrade the version of PHP they make available to their users. Because the web hosts still run PHP 4, the developers of PHP projects still have to support PHP 4 – but so long as the developers continue to support PHP 4 there is no incentive for the hosting providers to upgrade:

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

Read more…

Democracy Player

You might have seen mention of the Democracy Player go by in my del.icio.us links feed, back when the Mozilla Foundation donated money to the Participatory Culture Foundation.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Democracy Player itself, you really should. Think of Democracy Player as an alternative to Joost : an open source, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) video player and download client which can handle video podcasts / vodcasts as well as bit torrent downloads. It’s also open in terms of content, and the channels which can be made available. It is soon to be renamed to “Miro” – in anticipation of the 1.0 release.

As the project page explains, the Democracy Player is not only a better player for its users, but also better for the ecosystem of the internet:

Television is the most powerful medium in our culture, and it’s moving online. There’s a huge opportunity to hear new voices. But if video on the internet is dominated by just one or two huge video websites, we’re all in serious trouble. Openness, competition, and decentralization make the internet work. We need to ensure that online video has that same freedom.

Democracy Player keeps online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers, all in one place. Don’t get locked in to one video host.

Safari for Windows

I have to admit I thought I was stumbling across an old April Fool’s joke when I found this BBC article.

However, now that I’ve installed and used it for a bit, I can validate this is not a joke. Apple’s Safari browser, version 3 beta, is available for Windows XP and Vista.

Web-Killer 2.0

Carl Howe’s “Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Apollo: Web-Killer 2.0” argues that “these proprietary browser extensions break the utility of the World Wide Web in important ways”:

• Put users into plug-in hell.
• Create Web ghettos.
• Don’t provide accessibility.
• Make search a pain.

It’s a great beginning to a real debate about the place of technologies like Silverlight that many others have been fawning over.

Read more…