A while back i blogged about a bug with PDO and prepared statements. After digging a little it appears that as of libpq.so.4 (PostgreSQL 8.0 tree) native prepared statement support was added. If PDO detects you have libpq.so.4 at compile time it will use the libpq prepare instead of its own internal prepare. What then happens is random prepared statements fail with heavy use. Again the only way around this right now is to use libpq.so.3 from PostgreSQL 7.4. Now to figure out who to bug about it. I have a feeling the PDO folks will point to libpq and the libpq maintainers will point to PDO.
Zend Studio 6
Posted on April 18, 2008
I'll admit, I was not happy with the jump from Zend Development Environment 5.5 to Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0. I've tried other Eclipse based IDE implementations, most notably, Aptana. I found them to be slow, buggy and not very reliable. Eclipse is complicated and the interface designers clearly shouldn't be designing interfaces. I have to give Eclipse its due though, it is very flexible and robust.
I voiced my concern about Zend Studio 6 to my contacts at Zend, including the product manager for Zend Studio. To me it was too far of a departure from ZDE. From a business perspective I understand why they discontinued ZDE and moved to Zend Studio, money. Why pay programmers to maintain the core development environment when you can pay them to enhance an already popular and extendable Eclipse? That being said, as a developer I feel alienated and left out in the cold.
I decided about two months ago to give Zend Studio a fair shake. Not the load it up, poke around in it, find what I disliked and move on evaluation I initially did. What I found since doing so is I like some things about it, but the negative aspects far outweigh the positive.
Eclipse and Zend Studio on top of it is slow, unstable and prone to lockups. The remote development support, mounting remote filesystems over SSH or SFTP is unreliable and unusable. Remote projects and the various Zend Studio specific add-ons feel more like a kludge after-thought than a core part of the overall experience. The frequent lockups, instability and time it takes to work on remote filesystems, in comparison to ZDE 5.5 has made me switch back. Even the random errors in ZDE due to the Leopard upgrade are far less impacting than the issues with Zend Studio for Eclipse.
I do have to hand it to Zend Studio though, and it's more credit to Eclipse than to Zend; The XML editing in Eclipse is hands down better than ZDE.
Polaroid follow-up
Posted on April 07, 2008
We finally had a Polaroid service tech show up today to repair the TV. Turns out the issue was with the LCD and so they're going to send us a new TV. I do appreciate the replacement (which we should receive in a few weeks), but the lack of follow up was ridiculous and the amount of time it is taking to get this taken care of is just plain unacceptable.
