Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

Hi all,

It’s been some time that I haven’t posted anything new on my blog. Today I got a call from a long-time-not-seen friend (he’ll recognize himself!) who found me through my blog (and not FaceBook, ha!), and he also invited me to post some stuff more frequently. Funnily, I just got ZEND’s latest newsletter announcing their new kid on the block, ZEND Studio 8, which integrates with VMWare virtual development servers :

Run your PHP applications on a virtual server while creating and debugging them on your developer workstation! With Zend Studio 8.0 Beta 2, you can deploy applications directly into VMware Workstation virtual machines. Debug applications from inside a VM using Zend Studio and build real virtualization into your development processes.
http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/vmware-workstation-deployment

Well, FINALLY! I was wondering why it took so long for someone, especially Zend, to offer an integrated solution. For our development needs at atHome as well as at VAlain , we’ve been using virtualized development and staging environments for months, and it has made a big difference from the first day, even if there was no direct and seamless integration, but rather a homebrewed solution.

I am very keen on trying this as soon as possible, and I’ll keep you posted with some expert, real-life insight.

… or “Why you should pay attention to your chemistry teacher”.

A couple of days ago, a friend and co-worker of mine had a big problem. She mistook classic dish washing soap (the classically green liquid) to be special soap for the dishwasher, and put a pretty hefty dose of this stuff into her dishwasher, to wash the dishes. Hum.

The result looked somewhat like this, and her kitchen was full with foam because the stuff just kept flowing out of the machine :

H E L P  !!!

Then I remembered something that was buried deeply into a part of my brain that I didn’t use for years. Soap and oil , saponification , hmmm YES that should work! You use soap to get rid of your oil stains, then you can also use oil to get rid of too much soap. Or the foam thereof. Yes!

The magic recipe: put 10 to 20 cl of olive oil into the dishwasher full of foam, and have it run a quick-clean cycle.

The oil and soap will nicely bind together, and there we go – no more foam soap monster ! This should also work with any other oil… please avoid motor oil though

Happy dishwashing.

Check out the following article about the conference we held at the luxembourgish chamber of commerce. Sorry, it’s just available in french.

http://lequotidien.editpress.lu/news/127/ARTICLE/2232/2009-02-05.html

A video report:

http://tele.rtl.lu/waatleeft/videoarchiv/v/20090204/3/1004922/

Check out Simon Baker’s latest post about REA.

Analysis of Recent REA Group Announcements