I was on a plane for most of today so I’ll keep it short…

New and Notable This Week

• Beastie Boys: The Mix-Up
  Instrumental and funky. I think this will be great to listen to while coding.
• Bryan Ferry: Dylanesque
  Bryan Ferry sings Bob Dylan songs. The songs sound more like Brian than Bob.
• Nick Lowe: At My Age
  The album should be titled “Still Under-Appreciated At My Age”.
• Paul Simon: The Essential Paul Simon
  I caught the last half of the PBS special last Wednesday where The Library of Congress awarded Paul Simon the first Gershwin Prize. Listen to this greatest hits to remember why he deserves it.
• Kelly Willis: Translated from Love
  I’m picky about what country music I like. The more it sounds like Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Sr., or George Strait, the more I like it. And I’ve always had a soft spot for Kelly Willis.

Free Downloads (Thanks to Salon’s Audiofile for the links.)

• Spoon: “The Underdog”
  This is a preview track, they have a new album coming out July 10.
• Stars: “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead (Final Fantasy Mix)”
  IMO, not the best introduction to Stars. (This is.)
• Immaculate Machine: “Dear Confessor”
  Note that this is the second free track by these guys.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using Ajax and SQLite. Basically, it allows applications to download data while they have a connection to a remote server, store the data locally in a database, and then retrieve and use the data even when the web application is offline. Imagine searching Google Maps while in your car or reading RSS feeds on a plane. Even better, imagine submitting data to a web application that gets uploaded once you have a connection again—a lot like having emails waiting in your outbox.

Rather than just write “Hey, Google Gears was announced!” like everyone else, I decided to hold off until someone wrote something more in depth. Well, now O’Reilly’s OnLamp has. Jack Herrington has written an article titled The Power of Google Gears (Part 1). It’s not just about Gears, he actually walks you through a sample implementation step-by-step. He uses PHP, PEAR, and Prototype, but he explains it well enough that it should be easy to do in any language or framework.

But, at least for now, you’ll need an internet connection to read the article.

Padraic has written a long how-to article for the Zend Developer Zone about Acceptance Testing (aka Functional Testing). He starts out by explaining what Acceptance Testing is and why its useful. After you are convinced, he goes on to explain how to set up and use PHPUnit and Selenium to start testing your PHP applications. If you’ve been putting off learning how to implement testing in PHP, this article should be a great way to get started.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last six months—the iPhone comes out this Friday and people are already lining up to buy one. Whether you get one or not, as a developer, you are probably wondering how your existing applications will perform and are eager to discover any iPhone details worth remembering during future development.

O’Reilly’s blog has the details on iPhoneDevCamp. Like BarCamp it will be a free, non-commercial event, organized by volunteers. There will be collaborative development projects as well as opportunities to optimize and test existing web applications on the iPhone. You won’t need an iPhone to attend, but if you are already in line, you’ll definitely want to come show off yours.

Edward Z. Yang released HTML Purifier 2.0 last week. HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter written in PHP. It uses whitelists and a comprehensive knowledge of the HTML specification to output stanards compliant code while also filtering out malicious JavaScript and Cross-site Scripting injections (XSS). In fact, instead of just removing malformed input (like missing HTML end tags), it fixes it! It even validates your CSS and converts deprecated tags.

Geez, maybe version 3.0 will do my laundry too…

[Hat tip to Pádraic Brady for the original link.]

Today, June 26, the SaveNetRadio coalition will be holding a National Day of Silence to draw attention to the impending royalty rate increase that could lead to the shutdown of most internet radio sites in the United States. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15, 2007. That’s the bad news and it only gets worse. The rate increase will be retroactive to January 1, 2006!

Most large online radio providers are participating including Yahoo, Pandora, Live365, Rhapsody, Accuradio, MTV, KCRW, and Radio Paradise. A full list is here.

The goal of the National Day of Silence is to raise awareness and to encourage listeners to take action and contact their Congressional representatives.

MySQL.com has put together 12 days of case studies and discussion on database scale-out. “Scale-out” describes the process of increasing web application speed and scale by adding multiple replicated database servers incrementally and only as-needed. As your hot new web app gains users, you scale it out from one database to three, or from four to 23. It’s the opposite of “scaling-up”, which involves upgrading all of your hardware and database licenses to add capacity. Growing companies can keep their existing investment; large companies can save millions.

The case studies have some interesting facts and figures but they don’t go into a lot of depth. But that also makes all 12 days a quick read! If nothing else, it should help anyone who’s trying to convince the higher-ups that MySQL is a viable, scalable choice by allowing them to do a little name dropping. “It will save us money” also tends to resonate with the folks in suits.

12 Scale-Out Case Studies and Discussion

• Day One: Booking.com
• Day Two: GumTree.com
• Day Three: Alcatel-Lucent
• Day Four: Zimbra
• Day Five: Wikipedia
• Day Six: Top Five Scale-Out Pitfalls to Avoid
• Day Seven: The Phone House
• Day Eight: Zappos.com
• Day Nine: RightNow Technologies
• Day Ten: iStockphoto.com
• Day Eleven: Skyblog
• Day Twelve: Zillow.com and mixi

The best album this week is definitely the White Stripes’ Icky Thump. I’m one of those people who thinks everything Jack White does is genius, so I’ve been anxiously awaiting this one. Would it sound like the old White Stripes albums? Or more like The Raconteurs (who I love even more)? The answer is: more of the former and less of the later, but the White Stripes’ sound has evolved. The songs are generally more bluesy and the production values are cleaner, as if they were recorded in a proper production studio instead of a garage. And like their previous album Get Behind Me Satan, there’s a country and folk influence woven in to the punk, rock, blues tapestry. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” sounds like it could have been written for Loretta Lynn. (Jack White produced and arranged her last album.)

• White Stripes: Icky Thump

Other New and Notable This Week

• Maps: We Can Create
  Mellow electro-pop: think Postal Service, Pet Shop Boys, Spiritualized, Sigur Ros, My Bloody Valentine (on Valium), Low, Travis or maybe even a down-tempo Charlatans or Happy Mondays
• The Polyphonic Spree: The Fragile Army
  I grew up in Dallas, so to me they sound like a matured Tripping Daisy plus a symphony. But if you don’t know them from their previous albums, the best comparisons would be Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. Section 22: Running Away is the best track to give you a taste.
• Stateless: Stateless
  Sounds like DJ Shadow, Tricky, Radiohead, or Faithless
• Frank Black: 93-03 (Greatest Hits)
  He’s talented, but nothing he did after The Pixies measured up.

If you use (or want to learn to use) the console while programming Ruby on Rails. Then Railscasts #48 is for you! Ryan Bates demonstrates all sorts of useful techniques for getting the most out of the Rails console. He has also provided a list of resources that are worth the trip if you want to learn even more.

iTWire has a two-part article (part 1, part 2) that profiles the top ten hottest open source projects today, as judged by their level of activity on SourceForge.

The top ten are:

1. Azureus (Java-based BitTorrent client)
2. Openbravo (enterprise resource planning system)
3. Zenoss Core (monitors servers and equipment across a network)
4. Stellarium (renders 3D photo-realistic night skies with OpenGL)
5. ZK (Ajax framework)
6. vMukti (multi-party web conferencing application built on .NET)
7. phpMyAdmin (PHP app for working with MySQL databases)
8. OrangeHRM (web-based PHP/MySQL human resource system)
9. FileZilla (Windows FTP client)
10. FCKeditor (online text editor)

You can read the iTWire article to find out more about these applications and find links to download them from SourceForge.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the link.)