Monthly Archives: January 2009

blogging

2008 on IT Writing: browser and OS stats, plus what you’ve been reading

There were 780,000 unique visitors to this site in 2008, according to my stats, up from 650,000 in 2007.

OS stats

Windows 80.5% (down from 82.1%)

Mac 4.2% (up from 4%)

Linux 4.1% (up from 3.5%)

Browser stats

IE 51.5% (down from 58.8%)

Firefox 25.3% (up from 20.5%)

Opera 4.1% (up from 3.2%)

Safari 2.8% (up from 2.5%)

Chrome 0.6% (new, not available all year)

Most read 2008 posts

Note: some of the most-read posts in 2008 were published in 2007 or earlier, including Outlook is slow, RSS broken (complete with 188 comments), and Annoying Word 2007 problem – can’t select text (248 comments) – both examples of users searching for fixes to problems with Microsoft software.

From 2008, these were the 10 most read:

Fixing wifi on Asus Eee PC 901 with Linux

Vista SP1 vs Server 2008 as a desktop OS: more comparisons

Why I can’t use Microsoft Live search for real work (I now think some of the problems mentioned in this post are to do with inappropriate localization)

More Silverlight, Visual Studio setup hassles

VirtualBox is amazing, 50% faster than Virtual PC on my PC (intriguing as a recent review I saw claimed that Virtual PC is actually faster than VirtualBox).

CNN Daily Top 10 spam shows failure of user education

Changing the motherboard or storage controller underneath Windows XP and Vista

What’s new in Delphi 2009

Counting Primes in Flash and Silverlight (see also tests for Alchemy, JavaFX and Chrome)

Debugging PHP code to fix a WordPress problem

and finally

Thanks for reading in 2008, and Happy New Year. I may do a more general review of 2008 if I can find the time before it is too late!

Uncategorized

PHP Development Tools 2.0 released, joins official Eclipse “Galileo” release

1 Comment

I picked up a couple of PHP and Eclipse news snippets from Zend’s Andi Gutman. He reports on his blog that PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.0 has been released – this is a free, open source PHP IDE for Eclipse. He also notes that PDT is now part of Galileo, a release of Eclipse together with numerous language-specific projects set for June 2009.

These yearly Eclipse releases form the mainstream Eclipse releases – you can think of them as equivalent to new versions of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. The big problem with Eclipse is one of dependencies; projects depend on other projects and maintaining a single Eclipse environment with the latest of everything you are interested it is challenging to say the least. Galileo guarantees compatibility for the projects which it includes. This announcement will bring many more users to PDT.

I’m pleased about this as it seemed at one time that it would not happen, and I was among those asking for it.

So what should you download if you want to use PDT 2.0 now? The decision is complicated by the debugger choices: Zend or XDebug. You can either:

  1. Attempt to integrate PDT 2.0 into your existing Ganymede Eclipse. I did this with earlier builds, but it may not be straightforward. Or
  2. Download the all-in-one for Windows, Linux or Mac. An easy solution, but you still have to get the debugger from elsewhere. Or
  3. Download the all-in-one from Zend, with Zend debugger included.

The third option may be the easiest, presuming you are happy with Zend rather than Xdebug.

I was amused by the language on the Zend "Open Source PHP Development Tools” page:

Looking to experiment with PHP or build simple PHP applications? PHP Development Tools (PDT), as its name suggests, is an open source development tool that provides you with all the basic code editing capabilities you need to get started.

I’d suggest that you can build a lot more than simple PHP applications with PDT alone. Take a look at Zend’s own comparison if you are wondering what the differences are. Still, it is worth supporting Zend by buying the commercial product if you can; after all, Zend is a big contributor to the PDT.

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