Last year, Australia became the first country to announce it would ban the use of incandescent bulbs by 2010. California is planning a phase-out by 2018. And on Tuesday, New Zealand said it would join the fray, ending the use of traditional lightbulbs starting in October 2009. Now Europe is talking about doing the same.

As I wrote quite a while back, there seems to be a convergence on open-source technologies that will enable all the old-school thick-client desktop applications and their nice interfaces, and much more for new applications. Now Apple has demonstrated a use and commitment to a JavaScript framework known as SproutCore which further pushes the state of the art in that direction.

Do you have a Mac still running Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? And did you recently decide to install a PEAR component for use with some PHP? And lastly, did it fail with some cryptic HTTP error "410 Gone" that you had very little luck finding with Google? I did.

The solution is a bunch of steps backward and then forward again. Unfortunately, it's not very clear to the perhaps large number of Mac users who did not keep their PEAR libraries up to date all along on Tiger. But the answer is here, at the moment (it will scroll off when more news is added): http://pear.php.net/

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

Here we are, 2 years after the first Intel Macs went on sale, and 3 years after Steve Jobs announced that Apple would transition to Intel CPU chips. Wouldn't one think that all major makers of Mac software would have long since ported their software to work on Intel Macs?

I too have now run into the infamous Time Machine bug. Little did I know. I upgraded my 3 Macs to Leopard back around December 1. On my primary Mac Mini desktiop, I pointed Time Machine at my external 250Gb drive, which also had some large video files on it, but which was mostly otherwise empty.

I was profiling one of my favorite large PHP applications today using APD. I kept getting what seemed to be strange results -- it was telling me that bunch of defines statements (30+ of them) were responsible for an inordinately large percentage of the page generation time. On minimal pages it was as much as 37%. Even on the well-known largest of pages, they were still clocking in at a not insignificant 5%.

That just didn't seem possible.

Here's a table which lists all Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 core compatible modules, indicates whether they have been ported to Drupal 6 or not, and for which of those branches a simpletest directory exists.  (1350 lines)

So I just did several Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installs, upgrading from Tiger (10.4) and even one machine from Panther (10.3). Although for the most part they went well (though very slowly),I have a few complaints. Some things are stupidly difficult, because Apple's obtuseness, combined with the plain complexity of the system (required, I suppose, to get the functionality), but mostly just because of the lack of documentation. So here are some:

Or how to get what you want without cutting code...

I have a Drupal 5-based website for use by my extended family and friends to keep up with my own family while we are overseas. Most of them are far from being sophisticated web users, and seem to be having a challenging time remembering how to log into my site. So what I needed was a way to get them onto the site once and then persist their sessions for a period of time.