Google breaking up with me?

Dear Google.

There is a reason why my browser does not send out request for Norwegian content. That reason is the same reason why I change all my language profiles to English. Even though I live in Norway please respect my wishes and stop serving me Norwegian content.

Earlier today I got this usually weird message from Google Reader saying "There is an update available for Google Reader click _here_ to refresh" (or something along those lines). I have no clue what that means, but I get that message regularly. I always click "here" and never notice any changes.
I suspect this is Google Gears (yes, it will always be called "Google Gears") that is updating the content, but what is the "Go offline" button then for? Clicking that button fetches my unread items and "disconnects" so I can read my feeds on the train.

Related note: I am pretty sure Google Gears swallows some of my still-unread-items when going online again. Very annoying as I explicitly check the "Keep unread" box so I can read the posts later on in a more friendly environment.

Back to the point. After clicking "here" earlier today Google Reader decided to change my profile settings to say "Norwegian" and displays everything in Norwegian, removing the offline feature and "Friends shared items".

After changing my profile settings again to English only the settings dialog is in English. The rest of Google Reader is still in Norwegian with missing features I use regularly.
To make things worse, clicking "Logg ut" does not work. Simply throws "Beklager, det oppstod en feil. Prøv igjen om noen sekunder." back at me. No matter how long I wait or how often I try.

Going into my profile settings again, and change the language to Norwegian gives me back the offline feature and "Friends shared items" - and some random things in English. Apparently I can log off now, which is a appreciated.

While writing this entry on blogger.com "Autosave failed" has been blinking for most of the time, and now a big fat red line showing "ERROR" below the "Title" textbox is showing.

Dear Google, do you not like me anymore? I thought we were friends and shared something special. If you are breaking up with me I'd like to hear it straight up. Not randomly throwing errors at me for several months. I do understand your feelings though. After growing up together for so long we have finally reached the the tipping point, and started to grow apart the past months. You not caring anymore about the products I used to love, and me moving on to greener pastures.

We had a good run you and I. But I guess all good things come to an end at some point.

Love,
Hannes

8 reasons why you should *not* write for the php.net manual

8 reasons why you should *not* write for the php.net manual:

• You get more page hits by publishing your work on your blog
• You get a free pass to conferences by converting your work into presentation
• You get paid to submit your work to magazines & commercial websites
• You get a "trading card" and considered a star
• The community will know your name
• You can flame the documentations without needing to do anything about it
  
• You can copy&paste parts from the manual and sell it (see point#3)
  
• You can license your work to forbid any commercial use or further improvements
  

:)

PhD: The [PH]P based [D]ocbook renderer RC1 released

Quick note; We released PhD0.1RC1 today \o/

Building the php.net documentations has never been as easy or as fast.

Note: You'll need 200M free diskspace (90M for the phpdoc XML sources and 110M for the generated html/php files).

• Fetching the phpdoc sources:
  
bjori@lindsay:~$ cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net/repository co phpdoc
cvs checkout: Updating phpdoc
U phpdoc/.cvsignore
U phpdoc/LICENSE
U phpdoc/Makefile.in
[snip]



• Configure and test the XML
  
bjori@lindsay:~$ cd phpdoc/
bjori@lindsay:~/phpdoc$ php configure.php
configure.php: $Id: configure.php,v 1.7 2007/10/02 12:03:16 bjori Exp $
PHP version: 5.3.0-dev
[snip]
* No missing ids found
All good.
All you have to do now is run 'phd /home/bjori/phpdoc'

  


• Installing and rendering the php.net documentation
  
bjori@lindsay:~/phpdoc$ cd ..
bjori@lindsay:~$ pear install http://doc.php.net/phd/PhD-0.1RC1.tgz
downloading PhD-0.1RC1.tgz ...
Starting to download PhD-0.1RC1.tgz (19,683 bytes)
.......done: 19,683 bytes
install ok: channel://__uri/PhD-0.1RC1
bjori@lindsay:~$ mkdir build
bjori@lindsay:~$ cd build/
bjori@lindsay:~/build$ time phd /home/bjori/phpdoc
Creating php/toc/manual.inc...
Creating php/toc/introduction.inc...
Creating php/toc/getting-started.inc...
[snip]
Creating php/toc/userlandnaming.inc...
Creating php/toc/about.inc...
Creating php/toc/opl.license.inc...

real 1m40.448s
user 1m20.309s
sys 0m6.420s
bjori@lindsay:~/build$ ls -l
total 26M
-rw-r--r-- 1 bjori users 26M 10-02 12:28 bightml.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 bjori users 364K 10-02 12:28 html/
drwxr-xr-x 3 bjori users 336K 10-02 12:28 php/
bjori@lindsay:~/build$ ls php | wc -l
6288


Thats right. It takes less than 2 minutes (on my two years old Precision M70 laptop) to render the entire php.net documentations in three formats.

To celebrate the release we have registered a new "special" mirror, docs.php.net,
which is running these experimental builds of PhD, and would like to request
that people take a quick look at it before we start pushing these builds out
to the rest of the mirrors.

There is currently no known bug in these builds so if you find one then
please file a bug report or at least let us know about it.
I don't care how small or major the bug is, a missing whitespace or a
whole page missing, let us know if you find anything.

-Hannes

"Latest releases" box and "conference teaser"

Update (February 19th): Thanks to Steph this should look fine in our favorite browser, IE6, now.

I committed the conference teaser patch few hours ago, and as usual it only took about an hour for it to go live. I really think its a nice compromise, looks nice there above the news entrys and isn't that intrusive.

Anyway. I also committed "latest releases" box on the right, above the "event section".
The idea is to list the latest, stable, releases there - and when we are in RC phase then list them in a box below it. The links will be to qa.php.net where a "big fat warning box" will welcome the user and explain what a "release candidate" really is.
Release Candidates will now get more exposure and, hopefully, get more testing - benefiting all of us.


Speaking of 'latest releases', I've seen lot of code parsing the frontpage, the download page, the php-announce mailing list, heck, even cvs log in order to get the latest release info.
Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...

What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?...
Send me a mail (private or to the webmaster@ mailing list), add a comment, blog about it, scream loudly (hoping we hear you) or whatever. If the idea interest you, its your chance to get heard!

PHP.net frontpage changes

As many of you know I changed the frontpage of php.net recently by moving conference announcements and call for papers to its own dedicated page in a desperate attempt to regain the control of our frontpage.

WTF?! came up among conference planners which didn't like the changes at all. Heck, why should they? They lost an important, free, ads on a very popular page on the web. The flip side: they have now their own page free of any distractions and irritations around their advertisements.

Regain control? Yes. Conference planers have treated php.net frontpage as their private commercial ground for long enough. It was time for the php.net "staff" to take control of the frontpage back and publish php.net relevant news.

This is a community effort, you are no king. Good point. I am no king. But enough is enough. Flooding the frontpage with conference announcements and call for papers had to stop. It was so overwhelming that there was no point for us to post real news about what was going on with php.net. 24 hours after an important PHP release a call for papers was committed above it, making the release "old news". Within a week of phpdoc major update there was a new conference announcement posted. This is ridiculous. I kicked around on IRC the idea of dedicated conference page and immediately got praised for it. Everyone (online and awake) agreed. Few hours later in a frustration caused by all those announcements I cleaned the frontpage up, moving old stuff into the archives and then added the conference page. Few days later I then added a dedicated feed for the announcements.

Now that things are starting to cool off I posted a patch for a conference teaser on the frontpage. I've learned my lesson. There is no way in hell I will commit without a notice.

Just to be clear. I do think PHP conferences are important, but they are not as important as what the php.net team is doing. They are however important enough to be on php.net, just not cluttering and making fun of php.net efforts.

Seeing post like the one from Cal Evans, Extra! Extra! Get Your Conference News Here!, is kinda funny. I had a hard time finding those feeds, in fact I can only see them in that blog entry.. and his php.net has had a change of policy link points to a post by conference planer.. Heh? Even funnier is the the fact I can't see any indication on importance of conferences on Zends Developer Zone at all. *sigh* That's the spirit Cal! Kick my nuts and send out fancy statements without anything to back it up.

Cal: I'll avenge my nuts in London... ;)