I bit the bullet last week and ordered a Zend Certification Voucher. This afternoon I went to book an exam; during Pearson Vue’s registration process Zend require you to enter a Zend network username (I forgot I had one). While scouring the site for my username I stumbled across this thread on their forums.
With the new PHP 5 certification going live in just 5½ weeks (26th July) I figure I’ll hold off booking my exam until this materialises. Now to Ebay my Zend Certification Study Guide!
Well it seems I was a little slow off the mark with spotting this but I stumbled across Xgl today. What is Xgl? (quote lifted from Wikipedia)
Xgl is an X server architecture, started by David Reveman, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. It takes advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, supporting hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz.
It certainly looks impressive, especially the rotating 3D desktop demo that Novell have showcased. Shame it doesn’t support multiple monitors though.
If I’m honest I did think to myself, after the novelty factor has worn off, how much will this improve productivity? Sure spinning the desktop on a 3D cube looks cool but I never used the multiple desktops that were available in Linux anyway, it was usually a case of “out of sight, out of mind”.
After a few days of using Windows XP’s Luna theme I found it bulky (and always reminds me of fisherprice) and switched back to Windows Classic, I’ve found most of people at work have too.
Check out Novell’s Xgl showcases.
When Zend released their certification in 2004 I promptly picked up their study guide in October 2004 (along with MySQL’s study guide). However, even now I’m still not certified, I’ve studied the material but never booked the exam. When I stumbled across this thread it reminded why I never booked the exam. Read the rest of this entry »
I spotted on slashdot.org yesterday that Microsoft has made beta 2 of Vista publicly available (and RC1 on DVD for a limited number), unsurprisingly MS’ servers are working overtime.
I wasn’t going to bother with this after reading some reviews and the reported issues with UAP. My brother has gone and downloaded it anyway so I’ll guess I’ll see what its like sooner rather than later.
I was really charged up about Vista last autumn, regularly following Scoble’s video interviews with various Vista developers but with further set backs to the release date, UAP issues and more features being cut it seems a bit anti-climatic now.
The Aero interface looks like a love / hate thing to me.
I’ve spent too many hours this week porting the company database from MySQL 3.23 to 5. This was probably a bit more painful than it needed to be because we’ve not upgraded MySQL versions… ever.
