PHing Is Not GNU make; it's a project build system based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Features include file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.

via Phing.

Finally I managed to buy a Asus EEE PC 700  this week. I would thanks a lot Next Store and its kindly clerks, which I will prefer in future to Mediaword :)
If you are at Milan and you plan to buy it, Next Store is a good choice.

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iPhone is the brand-new Apple product which has changed the way Apple thinks. Because of iPhone, Apple strip the word "Computers" from its brand name. And because of iPods and iPhone products, Lepoard developmenet slip a bit, blurring the focus on pure technology.
To be true, I do not beat on  the iPhone success, but the product success is at least  bright this year. And the iPod touch has also added value to the iPods product catalog. But I am an IT-man, damn you boy! So I want to buy it to play with it, to program with it!

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In the last year, "Apple Computer" has changed a bit its focus.

First of all, Apple has erased the  word "computer" in the company name.

Then,  has shifted its focus on new products like the iPhone.

iPhone is a GSM telephone, and so it is quite different product for a computer company.

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There is a future for SmallTalk? I was a very strong fan of the SmallTalk language, but in the last five years I have seen more and more contraction of its usage in the IT field.

The OLPC project, which uses also Squeak Smalltalk and its done by the core team fo Squeak, is not going very well.

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I have read http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/chandler-failure and I think it is very danger way of exposing concepts.

In the article pointed out, the quite dead Chandler project is compared to the multi-billion Eclipse project. And then a too easy analysis is done against dynamic languages, where Java is the absolute winner.

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This is the sad true: parsing is boring. And writing parser is even worst.

If you can choose a scripting language for parsing you can think to do it in perl.

For this way, take a big breath and go in the black sea  of perl's funny regexp. They are funny only if you have that special love for the regular expressions.

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Let the Zend Framework introduce itself as a Borg would do: 

"Hi dear RubyOnRails. Hi all. I am the Zend Framework, a small work (about  5 tons of code) done by IBM and Zend to destroy you. You think php is not able to build big project?... do you?
So you have dared to develop RubyOnRails or Perl or Python, thinking you can own the web in your way... Dear nerds you are so funny and young!!" in a lamp of light the borg duplicate itselfs in 100 indians programmers, saying together

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Sometimes I need to build a small script to delete a huge set of tables of a schema.

In Oracle is easy to do it, using the meta tables "all_tables", "all_views", and "all_sequences":

select  'drop table ' || table_name || ' cascade constraints;' 
   from all_tables where owner='protoss' and  table_name not like 'BIN%';

select  'drop view ' || view_name || ' ;' 
   from all_views where owner='zerg' ;
  
  select  'drop sequence ' || sequence_name || ' ;' 
   from all_sequences where sequence_owner='spacemarine' ; 

The "BIN%" table are special temp tables of oracle.

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