It's SQLite-Mania Time!

Between the freshly announced Google Gears and the upcoming Firefox 3, I'm really happy to see the SQLite project picking up some massive and forefront industry momentum. And well deserved at that, since I've always thought it was an excellent venture in many respects, though often overlooked by the general development community.

Firefox will use it for their upcoming Places feature, which aims to be the evolution of bookmarks and history.

Google Gears, on the other hand, uses it for offline web app data storage. I have to say I'm getting a geeky kick out of seeing SQL queries passed directly via client-side Javascript (although as an offline app, I guess the client is the server too). And not even as a WTF post: bonus!

Kudos to the SQLite dev team, and good call to the two latest industry icons who chose it.

That install base sure is going to grow fast! Makes me giggle when I remember thinking that every PC would be running at least 6 different embedded copies of the tiny DB within a few years when I first played around with it, all without 99% of the end users even realizing this. I'd say we're right on track. :)

Who's taking bets on Adobe doing the same with Apollo?

McGill Website Wins Silver CASE Award

I guess we must be doing something right:

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded McGill University the silver medal in the Complete Institutional Web Sites category. There were 41 entries in this category, with two silver medals and one bronze medal awarded. CASE is a non-profit association encompassing 3,300 colleges, universities and elementary and secondary schools in 54 countries.

Via McGill Announcements.

I don't actually know any more than this, because the details haven't been published on the CASE web site yet. I really want to know who we tied with, knowing CASE has members such as MIT, CalTech, Harvard, etc.

2007-06-16: The CASE web site has now been updated: Web Sites – 2007 Winners

French Voters Choose Sarkozy for President

I really like Le Monde's map featured above. Gotta love the colour cliché. And how the colour-coded maps are all the rage now, somehow.

It's days like this I really miss living in France. NOT! ;)

Coming Soon: Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition

From the source email (@ubuntu-devel-announce):

We will start more detailed planning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit next
week in Seville and the first release of this edition will be in October
with Ubuntu 7.10. If you are interested in the project, please get involved.
We will be working through our normal development processes on Launchpad,
the developer mailing lists and IRC.

Via Digg.

PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 Released

"PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed. All administrators that run any version of PHP are encouraged to update immediately."

Our sysadmin installed 5.2.2 on our test instances earlier today, and we'll be testing (and closely watching for external reports) over the next few days before rolling it into production.

Via Slashdot.

The Javascript Programming Language

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford provides a comprehensive introduction to the JavaScript Programming Language in this four-part video. This is the first section of the four-part video. See below the embedded video for more links.

Other programming videos by Douglas Crockford on Yahoo! Video:
The JavaScript Programming Language (4 parts).
Theory of the DOM (3 parts).
Advanced JavaScript (3 parts).

Via Digg.