Holidays already here, so are you ready to celebrate ? Like every year, google celebrate it with a serie of Doodles, numbered 15 . As usual we will keep this post updated everyday with the new doodle as it will be available.
As a DBA, I have been asked many times to provide an ER diagram for an application schema. There are many tools that can do the job, mostly expensive CASE tools which have reverse engineering capabilities. There are also some rather exotic freeware tools which are largely unsupported and difficult to find. Fortunately, there is a software tool ideal for drawing ER diagrams, called GraphViz
This is a firefox plugin that I was looking for since long time, you will probably say why we need activeX with Firefox ? But some Intranet application require some functionnalities that are already available as ActiveX. I had a ActiveX twain solution that I wanted to run on firefox, so finally I think this could be done using ff-activex-host . The extension is developed by Leeor Aharon, IT Structures Ltd , makes possible to use ActiveX controls in Firefox and provides full access to the hosted control (events, functions, properties) based on the Gecko NPAPI. Concerning security : The plugin has some security related features to limit the risk it might pose to users by making ActiveX controls available in Firefox. First of all, it is using a special MIME Type so that it won’t get triggered by sites that were not specifically designed for it. Additionally, it supports lists of well known CLSIDs and PROGIDs so that it can be limited to use with specific controls and interfaces. Finally, it can be “site locked” to make sure it’s only being used by a predetermined list of domains.
Just in time for the gift-giving season – as mentioned christopher in his blog – annoucing the December edition of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual . We have announced the previous edition 1.4 of the manual back in may 2007. The current edition is written by Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway, it include 290 pages and 16 chapters and is 50% bigger than the previous edition – unfortunately we don’t have the previous edition at this time to compare, but what we can say is that it’s a great eBook that you should get for anyone working with PHP and Oracle. The manual still aims to bridge the gap between the multitude of PHP books and Oracle books on the market. It is still a “braindump” and in no way replaces any of the other PHP-Oracle books in the marketplace. They all cover different aspects of development with PHP and Oracle, and I encourage you to also consider them for your bookshelf. Download Underground PHP and Oracle Manual [PDF]