With OSInet having a large part of its business with suppliers and customers within the EU at large, I often find myself having to check the validity of the VAT information for third parties, and the EU VIES database comes in handy.

However, although I had been discussing remote access using XML-RPC or SOAP as early at 2004 with the database administrators, the UI had remained web 1.0-only until quite recently (apparently march 2007), when an AXIS SOAP service went online, just as I had suggested three years ago. So I figured I really couldn't let the occasion pass, and did a PHP-GTK client to VIES, which happens to be my first production SOAP application in PHP-GTK, previous ones having always been done in Pascal using Delphi or Kylix.

Let's see how this can be done... (code updated 2010-09-21)

For some reason, I had never bothered to pursue the relationship between string gauge and actual string diameter. However, when I sorted my stash of old strings after putting brand new Elixir medium strings in order to sound best at next week's concert, I found several strings for which I didn't know the gauge, meaning they would be next to useless in case of an emergency (which is typically the only situation under which I'd put on a used string). And I only had a metric vernier caliper available...

See the → driving directions.

As usual, there will be several bands playing. The concert is set up by french charity Portes Ouvertes. This nonprofit exists to help people with social difficulties by providing them with a way to meet others through art events, graphical or musical.

I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.

Since Zend Framework appears to be well on its way to becoming a standard for professional PHP developers, I figured I'd give it a spin :

In just one drawing, Randall Munroe sums up why you want to think twice or more before giving in to the blanket EULAs you have to agree to when choosing DRM-laden HD content. So why haven't you clicked to see that drawing yet ?

"Approved content". Oh my !

Earlier today, I just happened to go check an article on the PHP-GTK community site using MSIE, which is a fairly infrequent occurrence considering how I spend most of the day in Opera, and noticed the PageRank green bar, which had until now remained at zero as the site was still too recent to be ranked, now had an alluring value...

Following JP's suggestion, the whole band went to see Tania Maria in Palaiseau yesterday.

Now, I had heard lots of praise about her in the late 80s, notably from Isabelle, who used to sing and play drums in one of my former bands, but I had not been enthused by what I had heard, so I went to the concert ready to be disappointed : after all, I've never liked latin music *that* much.

The stage layout brought the first surprise : instead of the traditional band we had expected to see, based on her previous work, were just a grand piano and a mammoth percussion set. The concert itself was indeed a revelation, although not really about Tania Maria herself.

A discussion these days on the PHP-GTK general mailing list revolved around the issue of feeding a large amount of rows to the model bound to a GtkTreeView.

Funnily enough, my recent post about wishes for Drupal happened just before discussion started afresh on the recurring "everything-as-a-node" theme, in which I seem to have been played the re-animator part this time.

Thinking deeper upon this issue, I figured it would be interesting to see where Drupal stands currently (in D5) regarding the reularity and orthogonality of the hook system and most visible content-related entities: nodes, comments, terms, vocabularies, and node types.

The resulting table is attached to this post (OpenDocument format), and shows some interesting results: