More annoyingly my simple comment spam prevention I put in place here on dotvoid.com early this summer has leaked considerably. I have just cleaned out all the spam and put more rules in place and it should be harder for the bots now. I must take some time to have a closer look at what techniques are best for spam prevention besides captcha when I’m not as busy.

Something that made me much happier was an offer to write an article on a specific subject for a large PHP magazine. It would be interesting to know what kind of payment one should expect for a multiple page article… It still isn’t clear after asking.

I have finally had enough time to work on our Swedish project Mitt City with its fifty city portals and they are now going live. Many features are still missing but we will add them one after another the following months as well as fixing issues we have found. It feels really good to have the project going again. Especially since it is based completely on PHP 5, PDO and MySQL 5.

After working with Mitt City spending months with PHP 5 as well as MySQL I am amazed that so few are leaving PHP 4 way behind. I will not look back.

At work we just had a meeting discussing all the technologies and applications that we are working on at the moment. Currently, my small team of three people including myself, are integrating and developing systems using PHP, javascript, Java, C, C++, C#, ASP, Orbix  (corba), SOAP, MS CMS, MS Commerce Server, BizTalk, Oracle, MS SQL Server. We even support a Powerbuilder application on top of this. All these applications and systems run on linux, Solaris, Tru64 and windows environments. No wonder my head is spinning from time to time.

So it is time to let go and start focus on other things. I have decided to spend the following six months pursuing opportunities in rich web applications using technologies like PHP/C and javascript on *nix. Throw in SOAP and databases, maybe even some XSL, in the mix and I’d be more than interested…

Next week I will have a break from all this. I’ll spend a week in Puerto Banús, Spain, with my family. We will stay in a really nice two story apartment with all the stuff and fluff you really don’t need; outdoor pool, a huge plasma TV screen as well as a broadband connection. Hopefully I won’t use the latter…