If you need to set up a mailing list, I will suggest two choices:

• http://www.phplist.com/ An open source email campaign manager, with an hosted option The Free account has an unlimited number of contacts,  but a 300 message per month limit.
• http://www.mailchimp.com Commercial hosted solution. Very nice site, with a strong appeal. Free Up to 500 contacts, so the first seems better.

XAMPP is a very easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin.

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.

After my past experience with bad hosting provider, I am happy to say I have find a very good hosting service. If you need VPS hosting, Rimuhosting is a very good choice.

After about two years with Rimuhosting, I can summarize their feature here:

• They have a very good  entry-price for a virtual hosting
• System aministrator has a very prompt response: on every issue I get support in 24 hours, also on Sunday
• Rimuhosting uses a Xen virtualization mechanism which is very effective. I have tried other virtualized solution, which are worst.
• Java hosting works well, without problems.
• The default Bandwith is very huge (30GB). There is also  an automatic backup and a remote web-based shell out-of-the-box.
• You can choose between high-end Linux distribution  (like Red Hat enterprise) and free one.

At Gioorgi.com we have no time. So we was very happy to find out a blogging platform which can be configured, tuned and rolled out in short time. If you are watching for such thing, you are welcome. Let’start!

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.

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

The trends of this october are about some upcoming products. A clear analisys of QuarkXPress failure is sketched in roughlydrafted site. I do not think the same consideration can be applied to Vista.

As Joel said, M$ can throw away much money before only starting to see its market reduced.