The days of static Powerpoint Presentations are numbered. By static I mean stale content and primarily sequential presentation.

If you watched CNN’s coverage of the 2008 US Presidential Elections you will have seen their “New Toy”. An interactive touch display that takes presenting data to the next level. It is developed by Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel.

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I have released a new version of FirePHP. You can download it here. It will also be available on the Mozilla Add-ons site in a few days.

The release includes 27 bug fixes and feature enhancements. The scope of this release was primarily focused on improving the current feature set in terms of usability, reliability and support for logging complex objects. You can find the changelog here.

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Eran Galperin has written a great post on profiling MySQL queries with Zend_Db and optimizing them by hand.

He explains how to use Zend_Db_Profiler to analyze all SQL queries on a page and how to improve the performance of the queries by adding indexes.

Here is a quick modification to his example that will send the profiling information to firebug instead of printing it to the page.

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You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

What if you could just think “I wonder what my stats are today?” and your Mac would tap into your mind and give you the answer. It’s probably a good thing it has not advanced that far yet.

But what if you could ask your Mac and it would answer?

Well … It can! The needed speech tools are built right into Mac OS X.

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Just ran across this post where Felix shares some wisdom he gained while re-writing CakePHP’s Set::extract() (code) method to make it faster and add some XPath 2.0 support.

If you need a function to have the highest performance, try to express it non-recursively. It can make a 500% difference.

Now I thought the 500% speed gain (and associated fewer CPU cycles) was a number he grabbed out of the air or it was based on comparisons with the previous Set::extract() method and very specific to that case. It surely would not apply to any algorithm in general as some are much more complex than others.

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I have more domplate goodness for you. First of all keep in mind that domplate only works in Firefox right now. I will be making it cross-browser soon! Also, it requires some plumbing code if used outside of Firebug that I will be removing as well.

This post is about the variable substitution and variable formatter functionality in domplate. I will start by showing you what you can do with the domplate implementation that is shipped with Firebug and then tell you about a little enhancement I made on my own copy.

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I have been working on trying to understand the magic behind domplate, the template system that is shipped with Firebug. Apparently nobody knows much about it and there is no documentation.

As part of my domplate project that is aimed at making the template system available for general use in the browser (and yes there will be documentation) I have begun by adding some debug logging capabilities.

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The long awaited day has arrived. Zend Framework 1.6 just shipped and with it native support for FirePHP!

This means that if you use Zend Framework (ZF) you can now log to your Firebug Console via FirePHP without needing to download any other PHP files such as the FirePHPCore library.

There are two primary components available at this time. One is the Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug and the other the Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug.
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I stumbled across this post during one of my “firephp” google searches.

I find it great for inherited websites where I need to troubleshoot problems on live servers, as I can have all the debug/variable dump/etc crap dump to the FirePHP console so it doesn’t show up on the website while I’m trying to track down a problem and the budget is not there to make a dev copy of the system[they need an in and out fix, 4 hours tops]

It illustrates a great use case. Many times you need to maintain legacy code that you don’t have a development environment for. FirePHP enables you to do ad-hock debugging on a live site without affecting site visitors as long as you are careful not to cause any parser errors. Maybe not a great idea on a high-traffic site, but chances are if the site runs on more than one server or has a lot of traffic the owners will be able to afford a development environment for you.

It may also be a great tool for helping you convert PHP4 applications to PHP5.

Google has banned my google groups account. No notice, no explanation and no way for me to contact them. Looks like I am not the only one, (2). I am getting the same screens as this guy.

I don’t think it is too much to ask to at least send an automated email when you ban an account as to the reason. Should group owners not get a bit more consideration and service? If it is a system glitch then I would expect a notice with a way to have your ban reviewed.

I may have to consider moving my groups elsewhere. Not a fun thing to do. I am sure I will lose a lot of subscribers along the way.

UPDATE - Sep 05, 2008: FirePHP now has a New Community Forum hosted by Nabble2.

UPDATE - Oct 14, 2008: My google groups account is still blocked. The worst part is that I cannot even unsubscribe from groups!