Have they made upgrading PHP easier without telling anyone? Last time I attempted it, it took an hour of fiddling with ini settings and my apache config to get precisely nowhere. I did a rollback immediately.

Yesterday, however, I dropped in 4.3.1, modified 2 ini settings and was done in less than 5 minutes. Majorly impressed by how it has smoothed out.

In other news, the first beta of PHP 5 is out. Looks like a lot of improvements to the class structures (private and protected methods and values, abstract classes) and not a lot else. Still, worth watching.

First up: How do we feel about 99 bottles of beer in 571 languages? Programming languages. Yes, someone has created a list of very similar programs in pretty much every language that’s ever done anything useful (and about 550 others). Too much spare time, but interesting to compare syntax nonetheless.

We now have Necho support in the feed validator (formerly the RSS validator). It is based on the 1st of July snapshot and, although there have been changes since then, it works nicely.

Most exciting for me is the announcement of Textile 2. Textile is an integral part of my developing CMS these days (I even have written permission from Dean Allen to include it in any final public release I might make).

There were a few things I had to change about the first version: it got a bit scatty for me when dealing with del and ins tag, and refused to do the right thing with code tags without a fair amount of mucking around. I also really wanted a detextile function for editing and began work on it before giving up. At a glance in the code of Textile 2, there seems to be an experimental version in there. Nice! I look forward to being able to mess around more with it.

In lieu of actual content, I thought I’d do one of those entirely links based posts that people are so fond of. Note: there are actually a few pieces of real content waiting to be added, but I thought since I got a decent set of links today, I’d post them instead.

Pixie Theory: RSS vs. Necho: By thinking of the opposing sides as either pixies or not pixies, we can figure out what side of an argument we should be on. Necho wins, of course.

BurningBird: I remember usenet: AOL is coming for weblogs. As any right thinking individual knows, this is the first sign of the apocalypse.

Be A Grafitti Artist: A (partial) return to form for Nothing Sacred with this article about how to be a grafitti artist.

Drop Shadows With CSS: A nice little technique for adding shadows to boxes in CSS.

Blogshares: I finally became a blogshares millionairre today. To celebrate, I devalued the stock for this site by selling a shitload of it; earning myself yet more money. Capitalism is, indeed, fun.

Good news! Necho support has been hacked into the current version of nntprss. I’ve just added the hack to my version and it works perfectly.

The nntprss necho hack comes from Semantic Web. Good job, that man!

The Mars Volta brought us the experimental Tremulant EP as a statement of intentions for their debut album. They spoke big words through layers of noise orchestrated to perfection: and the album lives up the to promise.

While “Deloused In the Comatorium” borrows much from the bands partial instantiation as the defining moment in rock known as At The Drive-In, they’ve taken their previous band’s work and gone off in a tangent as fast as possible.

The result is eclectic, but compelling. You’ll never notice that the majority of the songs break the 6 minute mark (most still going at full pace), it’s that immersing.