PHP Editors

Wow I didn't realize there were so many alternatives when it comes to choosing a PHP editor! ;D

Offshoring/outsourcing software development

This thread in Ask Joel is the most interesting discussion I've ever read abut offshoring/outsourcing software development!

It's getting incredibly long though, so it's really hard to read through. But the first 25 comments are definitely worth reading.

My personal take on the subject is roughly this: I believe software is art more than science. I think the best approach to make it look like engineering is something along the Unified Process - that's what the IT world has learned the hard way for the last 30 years! One golden rule of UP is to have the users and the coders communicating, to have them understand each other's constraints...

This doesn't mean I think nothing can be outsourced, but you certainly cannot carelessly offshore a whole IT department to a place with a radically different culture and expect that communicating with specs will "just work"! :|

If offshoring software development is ever going to succeed we'll need a whole new set of skills and tools (internet being one of them) to master it, and we're not even close! However, I think the experience of open source software projects developped by an international community are an interesting experience to this.

I would probably elaborate on this if I wasn't this busy reading the thread at Joel's right now! :>>

Blog update

Ausnahmsweise, schreibe ich heute mal auf deutsch! ;)

Ich wollte nur sagen, dass diese Webseite jetz mit der ganz neuen Version 0.9 von b2evolution betrieben ist.

Ich sage aber jetz nich mehr, denn diese Version normalerweise erst nächsten Montag veröffentlicht wird! :>>

Data Modelling Tools

Interesting list of data modelling tools (databaseanswers.com)

Charset conversions (i18n)

Yesterday, I came accross this interesting table which lets me know what conversions I need to do when I paste text from Word into a textarea and further want to use this text on the web...

To be accurate, this table is useful for conversion from the default windows charset (windows-1252 aka CP1252) to the default web charset (ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1). Nethertheless, this allowed me to check the conversion in my b2evolution software and I noticed that it was missing one conversion (in a total of 27).

Anyway, the world actually extends way beyond cp1252 and Latin-1, so how would one deal with other languages? :?:

For example, how do I convert Latvian from Windows-1257 to iso-8859-13 (close match) ? Or Russian from Koi8-r to iso-8859-5 (funky match) ? Check out this awesome character set database provided by the Institute of the Estonian Language. (Wouldn't it make sense if unicode.org provided this? :crazy:)

By the way, how do I know what charsets are to be used for a particular language? Here's a page by the W3C, but it's a little sparse... Another one.