centre{source}

Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can 'save' their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage.  I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website.  I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.

The much anticipated PHP Doctrine ORM is nearing a stable release. After a long Google Summer of Code, Konsta Vesterinen, also known as zYne- in IRC, has tentatively scheduled the first release candidate for August 31st. This is very exciting for the PHP community as it fills a gap that has existed in PHP since its existence. Stay tuned for more information on this great news.

From the symfony-project.com website, they announced the release of symfony 1.0.2.

The bug fixes include:
* r3785: fixed getCookies() call in sfDebug when using sfConsoleResponse (#1666)
* r3775: fixed _compute_public_path() when using a query string
* r3754: updated Propel to 1.2.1 (http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/query?status=closed&milestone=1.2.1&resolut...)
* r3746: fixed output escaping and _get_object_list() (#1593)
* r3699: fixed highlight_text() doesn't work with / (#1621)
* r3692: fixed i18n support for errors in sfRequest

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CentreSource has jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon! After complaining for months that I spend too much time with email, I gave up trying to avoid the problem and simply decided to further my addiction :) We purchased three new Blackberry 8703e's and have now started the painful process of getting them to work in our Open Source environment. That's right, Blackberries in a world without Outlook and Exchange. The verdict? It works, but not great.

The new mac commercials are great - especially given their crafty delivery of undertone messages about PC users. On the other hand, these parody commercials are hilarious as well. Tit for Tat baby... tit for tat.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2006/07/07/bwe-mac-ads/

Recently, a potential client asked us if we could recommend a viable open source document management system (DMS) for their needs. Despite our deep experience with Open Source business solutions, I didn't have one to recommend. I think that is primarily because so few businesses have need for a true DMS - even if they could benefit from it. As I thought about it, we could benefit from one because we save so many files and even have an elaborate naming scheme for versioning.

So, I went on a quest to see what I could find. The systems I chose have the following features: Easy to use, Flexible to store any file, Versioning, Ability to handle large Volumes of Data, Customizable Meta Data, Document Text Search (including PDF), and Provide a Web Interface for Universal Access. Here are the ONLY two candidates I found:

The problem I alluded to in my brief review of Opera 9.0 TP2 is simple: In the site-specific preferences, if you set the default to "Never accept cookies" -- it does just that, ignoring your site-specific exclusions. This appears to be because although the option to honor your site-specific prefs is still there, they just .. forgot to let you select it in the UI.

Well, the second technology of Opera 9.0 has been released. I figured I would reserve commentary this time until I had actually used it for a while, since I figured the second pre-release would be a bit more stable than the first, which crashed often. Thankfully, I was right, and I've been using Opera 9 for almost a month now.

Frankly, I couldn't be happier. The only issue I've run into is a small one (which I'll cover with a tip on how to workaround in a subsequent post). Everything else I have to talk about so far is an improvement:

This week I installed and setup VMWare Server Beta, which as we noted was released for free last week. I haven't used it enough to provide a comprehensive review, but here are some things that stand out right off the bat: