I'm doing a little database programming with PHP and was intending to us XAMPP for my development. Well yesterday I found out that the PDO drivers for PHP5 are not included in the package.

That is a deal breaker for me. I want to test my code with MySQL and with SQLite. The only driver for SQLite 3 is the PDO driver. Plus, I just want to write the code once, and plug in whatever database I need. Yes, I'm crazy I know. So I guess I'll be running my own MySQL server again. /sigh

Woo hoo My Yahoo

I have a new favorite RSS reader again. Recently I have been using the latest Google Reader, which is still a fine RSS reader with a pretty good interface. But in the last week or so I rediscovered My Yahoo! again.

My Yahoo! has been around a long time. Long before the great RSS and feed stampede of the last couple of years. When My Yahoo first added RSS features, I tried them out but was unimpressed. You could display feed headlines or headlines plus summary paragraphs. One had too little information, the other too much.

Well last week I discovered their feed had a cool Ajaxy feature that displayed the summary information in a popup if you moused over a feed headline. This is great, cause you can browse the headlines, if something catches your attention, mouse over and drill down a little bit. If your interest is peaked, click on the link and jump to the site. Now this feature may have been their from the beginning for all I know, and I"m just noticing it now. But whatever, it's cool. This is exactly how an Ajax interface should work, give you the information you need, when you need it. So My Yahoo is back in the number one postion for reading feeds. Now if they would just add tabs for moving between pages they would really have something.

Boo Yahoo Mail

Well I wish the Yahoo mail team would take a look at the My Yahoo team's work. I tried using the Yahoo Mail Beta again last week, and had to bail out again back to the old RocketMail interface. They have fixed the speed issues quite a bit. The interface is much snappier. However, the main UI is still hosed. The interface still has the navigation bar on the left side. However, they still insist on putting an ad on the right side of the message pane. Thus, the message window is scrunched down in the middle of the page and uses a tiny font to display the message. Yuck. I want to read my mail using a normal sized font on a a normal sized page. If Yahoo does not get the UI right, I won't upgrade my mail account, I will just stop using it. Yahoo, you need to get the UI right, or risk losing a bunch of customers to Google Mail.

Rececently I have been reading a lot of books on AJAX and Web 2.0. Many of the books and articles compare the JSON data format quite favorably to XML. "JSON can do anything XML can do. Its more efficient. It's cleaner. It's faster. blah blah blah."

So if you haven't seen JSON, let me show you two simple examples.

Date in XML

<date>
   <month>06</month>
   <monthDay>08</monthDay>
   <year>2007</year>
</date>
	

Date in JSON

{"date":{
    "month":"06",
    "monthDay":"08",
    "year":"2007"
	}
}

	

Granted I'm a little biased towards XML, but I just don't see buy the JSON hype. A couple of points I would like to make.

• Sure, JSON reduces the tag overhead of XML. But, when would you ever send enough data for tag overhead to matter? If your application sends enough data for tag overhead to impact performance, I'm guessing your application is sending too much data at one time.
• JSON should be good at handling data that fits nicely into grids, like a relational database or spreadsheet. Once you have narrative data like a blog or a word processing document, methinks JSON isn't going to work so great.
• If you ever need to edit data by hand, JSON looks like a nightmare to me. Imagine trying to keep the commas, colons, and brackets straight in a 1k or 2k file. No fun.

Being able to turn the data instantly into an object is cool. So JSON is definitely worth checking out. But it certainly is no "all powerful" solution to data exchange problems.

Last week Google released Google Gears a JavaScript API for building Web application that will work offline. An excellent idea that looks very interesting. Haven't tried it out yet, but I plan to.

I have just been noticing this week how out of control advertising is getting in some media. For example, television is fast becoming unwatchable. You used to be able to flip between two channels if you were bored with the ads. But now, all the other channels are doing nothing be running ads too. So unless you have Tivo'ed the show, forget it, it's not worth it. Basically, the only reason I still have cable TV is English Soccer, the NBA, and MLS. If I could watch those sports over the Internet, bye bye cable.

One other case worth mentioning. I have been using Yahoo news for years as one of my primary sources for news. This week they have been running this really gross ad for some sort of skin cream. I tried to find a place where I could give them feedback or a heads up. Nothing, nada, zip. There is no way that I could find, to give them feedback. So I guess no Yahoo News until that ad goes away. One must also assume that Yahoo is not interested in my opinion.

I don't understand why these companies can't learn from Google. Highly targeted unobtrusive ads work. Overwhelming a page, or a medium or whatever with ads doesn't. It merely drives customers away.