Great news, Xubuntu 8.10 was released last week.
Although I’m a big fan of Fedora I wasn’t very happy with the lack of speed while running a few applications, then I’ve decided to try a different Linux distribution.
The first one that I thought it would be a good alternative was Ubuntu, but after reading a couple of threads, I’ve finally decided to get Xubuntu.
Xubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system and it uses the Xfce desktop environment.
As some of you know PHP doesn’t handle UTF-8 by default and that could lead to a terrible headache, at least till version 6 cames out.
Today I’ve spent some time looking for good articles on this subject. I’ve found two great articles that cover a lot of topics including strategies to use while working with MySQL:
Handling UTF-8 with PHP
Scripters UTF-8 Survival Guide
You can download the second one in PDF format and read it later.
At the moment I need to write a couple of work flows and charts so I can be able to demonstrate the usage of a tool I’m currently developing.
The only tool that I knew that could do this kind of work (on Linux) was Dia. Although it has a lot of features it seems (I’m not sure, since I’ve only used it once) that there aren’t much sheets available to download, and I don’t like the ones provided by default.
Later I’ve decided to look for another program, and I’ve found Kivio an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application integrated in The KOffice Project.
Kivio provides by default a couple of nice sheets, so let’s hope it works as expected.
Yesterday I got back to one of my favorite sports, Mountain Bikes (MTB) in a Cross Country (XC) strand.
It was a small adventure ~20km in a spectacular place: Parque Natural da Arrábida.
Hope to get there again as soon as possible. If you’ve never went there, you really should think about it.
The last two days have been great, and that’s mainly because of the great news I’ve received last Friday: I’ve finished the last course of my degree in Computer Science Engineering.
Next step: fill the application forms for the Master degree.
One of the biggest concerns for Web Developers while developing something with SQL, is to avoid SQL-Injection problems, because those are the most common security flaws.
But there are also another flaws that you should be aware about, for example, column truncation vulnerabilities.
This security flaw it’s related with the lack of input length validations and it seems that it is affecting a lot of known applications.
Stefan Esser wrote a great tutorial about this subject it’s a must read.
As some of you know I’m a big fan of Bodybuilding and a regular user of Bodybuilding-PT.com, great forum by the way, it has a lot of informations not only about exercises but also about diets.
A couple of weeks ago I’ve read something about a documentary that talks about the effect/usage of steroids on sports, and I got curious of what this documentary was all about.
As some of you know I’m not a big fan of having lots of MP3 in my laptop, and those of you who don’t know me may ask: don’t you hear any music while you’re at your laptop?
Of course I do, listen to music is one of my favorite hobbies and I do it almost 24/7, most of the times I listen to online radios.
Yesterday while I was talking with Luís Silva, he suggested me Last.fm, and what a great website it is!
You can listen all your favorite artists, with a single click. One thing that made me very happy was to find some of the best Portuguese rappers, such as Valete, Sam The Kid and Xeg.
While you listen to a specific music you are presented with some informations about the artist and the album.
Last.fm is already saved in my bookmarks.
I’m not a big fan of posting videos in my blog, but today I’m opening an exception for this one, only because it touched my heart!
If you are a developer you’ll understand my words and see what I mean.
You can also see the video on blip.tv in here.
A couple of weeks ago I’ve found this project, it’s name is GoPHP5 and it’s main goal is to speed up the transition of old PHP applications to the newer versions.
I totally agree with this project ideas and support them 100%, in my opinion it doesn’t make sense to keep developing applications using old PHP versions.
At the moment there are already a couple of big projects associated such as Drupal, CMS Made Simple, phpMyAdmin and others.
If you’re going to develop a new project or develop new features to an existing one, take a look at the website, spend some time reading and GoPHP5.
At the moment I’m only working with PHP5 and I’ve got to say, the new features are great.