Contemporary novelists are befuddled by technology. How can the writer of the contemporary potboiler get their heroine lost in a bad neighborhood when she has a PCS phone, and a GPS module in her Visor? Personal technology renders standard plot tricks useless. I guess they'll have to worry about character and setting. [More Like This… Continue reading Contemporary novelists are befuddled by technology

QaDRAM. Fantastic! QaDRAM, a beta visual PHP IDE now uses ADODB database library to support multiple databases. [PHP Everywhere]

Ming Rules. Often in my articles I rave about the sheer number of functions available to the PHP programmer. This assertion has been once again enforced with the release of the Ming Flash Generation Library. This package, which also offers a PHP extension, provides PHP users with a rather convenient and simple way to create… Continue reading Ming Rules

phpLens Launched. My company's first PHP product, phpLens has just been launched. We practice what we sell; the e-commerce engine powering our store is built on phpLens 🙂 PhpLens is a rapid application development component which allows PHP developers to dynamically and quickly create web applications that retrieve information from databases. With phpLens, data can… Continue reading phpLens Launched

Small Towns, Big Successes. Some of the most obscure corners of the country — tiny towns in Utah, for example — are nurturing some of the fastest-growing companies. [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE]

USA Today: Study: Net use doesn't increase depression, after all. Using the Internet at home doesn't make people more depressed and lonely after all. A new, longer follow-up from a study that linked Web use to poor mental health — heavily publicized three years ago — shows that most bad effects have disappeared. [Tomalak's Realm]

Converting DTDs to XML Schemas. Having introduced you to the W3C's tool for converting DTDs to XML Schemas, it's time now to look at a specific example. Michael Classen runs the RSS 0.91 DTD through the converter and supplies us with a critical analysis of the results. 0719 [WebReference News]

Henry Norr: “A Web browser is really just an application, not — or at least not necessarily — an operating-system function. That should have been obvious all along, but Microsoft did its best to hide it under a torrent of nonsense about technical necessities and user convenience.” [Scripting News]

Web Photos that Pop. You can't expect to add life to your Web page by using lifeless photos. Convert your pics from muddled messes to eye-catching attention-grabbers using only a few simple techniques. Wendy Peck shows the way. 0711 [WebReference News]

I have a theory about why [WebVan is] gone. It's that Americans, no matter what they say, are cheapskates and penny-pinchers. They always go for the lowest prices. [inessential.com]