The movie Journey to the Center of the Earth fascinated me, although the cinematography was in that cheesy era of filming making. This one I’d like to see remade instead of War of the Worlds, although I am interested in War of the Worlds, even if I haven’t cared for most of the movies Tom Cruise has starred in to date. Guardian:

Japanese scientists are to explore the centre of the Earth. Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below.

There’s been lots of stories about unlocking the mysteries inside the earth with Scott Sigler’s Earthcore, coming most immediately to mind. Just checked in on Scott’s progress, BTW, and he’s up to chapters 25-26. I’m waiting until he has the whole thing done to burn to CD and then listen on a trip. Wonder if he’ll be done in time for summer vacation?

Also noticed Scott was up to 2,562 subscribers according to the Feedburner Feedcounter. His goal was 5,000, I hope he makes it. You can do it, Scott! In this interview with Todd Storch Scott says he has made it (so Feedcount stats be damned):

I’m hoping that by proving EarthCore can land a big audience a publisher will take a chance on printing the book. The typical first printing for a new novelist is 5,000 copies. I already have more listeners than that.

Found something that made you go hmm? Think it might make others go hmm in one of the 20+ categories? Especially now that this blog has thousands of daily readers (thank you!), and continues to grow, it seems like a logical progression to offer readers an opportunity to submit their own drafts for possible publishing here.

So, if you are interested in doing so, then please go ahead and submit your drafts to us. We’ve opened it up so that anybody can register and submit a draft for possible publication.

Submission elligibility and guidelines
1. Any content/draft submitted may be edited and/or refused for any reason.
2. No third party hotlinking images or other content (including calling offsite scripts) OR any material that violates the TOS of the affiliate programs we are using (basically that means no pron). If you would like to include an image from your own site that you have/own the copyright to then make sure it matches the domain in your profile.
3. No spamming, stealing and/or crossposting (blatant copy/pasting) the same content from another website, blog, etc. Fair use referencing is welcome as well as including a link URL by itself (please use the “linkdump” category for links by themselves). Please realize that the basic idea is to provide your own opinion on why something made you go hmm, not be copying what made somebody else go hmm.

Note: If your draft submission only contains a URL then the assumption will be the site is a web service or software that speaks for itself. Please do not submit any links to software containing spyware, trojans or other nastiness.

How to submit your draft to MakeYouGoHmm
1. Register for this blog (I know, I know, not another registration, argh). Don’t worry, your email will only be used to discuss your submission if we have any questions (which we won’t in 99.9% of the cases). It will not be used to spam you or sell to partners or affiliates or anybody else.
2. Login once you’ve registered and click the “write” tab and then hit the “draft” button to submit for possible publication. Please save a local copy of any draft you submit. We will either delete or publish any draft submitted, we aren’t a draft clearing house repository. If you are looking for that type of service then try Blog Event
3. Wait for a response or write and/or submit another draft. There are currently two of us here that will be reviewing submitted drafts. If we decide to publish your draft, then it will be published and not show up on your menu any longer, if we decide not to use it, then it will be deleted off the server. Please don’t take a delete/denial personally unless you are a spammer, and then please do take it personally.

What’s in it for you?
Besides a link back to the URL in your profile if you provide one: nothing. So please don’t submit a draft if you are expecting more than a byline credit/link.

I contribute to some group blogs out there without being paid except for a byline credit and also I get paid for some other group blogging I do. Some 98% of the existing MakeYouGoHmm blog posts were written by me and (for those curious) I don’t have any plans to cut back my output any time soon. Well, except for our annual summer family vacation, that is, that’s fast approaching.

Now, if this all sounds fair to you, then show us Things That Make You Go Hmm!

Sebastian Bergmann has benchmarked performance for PHP 5.1 against PHP 5.0.4, 4.3.11 using the three execution models (CALL, GOTO and SWITCH) that the new virtual machine PHP offers:

Initial results show that PHP 5.1’s GOTO-based executor gives a 400% better performance than PHP 4 and PHP 5.0.

Meanwhile, as of June 8, it’s been 10 years since PHP was released by Rasmus Lerdorf. Happy Birthday PHP!

The Microsoft Office news hinted at earlier is in and it is definitely pretty important, via Channel 9:

Word, Excel, and Powerpoint will get a new file format all based on XML. The extensions will change from .DOC, .XLS, .PPT to .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX. The new file format is actually enclosed in a ZIP file. Change the extension name to .ZIP and you’ll be able to double-click and get access to all the pieces of the new format (Brian in his demo shows what it looks like).

I left my immediate response and this is without actually looking at the format: Excellent!. Go check out the Channel 9 video and learn more from Brian Jones, program manager on the Word Team who also has a blog and writes:

Open Format: These formats use XML and ZIP, and they will be fully documented. Anyone will be able to get the full specs on the formats and there will be a royalty free license for anyone that wants to work with the files.

Check out the official name: Microsoft Office Open XML Formats. Open file format and … Microsoft? That’s what they are saying!

There are tons of spell checkers out there these days. Yesterday I decided to add the Spelling Checker Plug-in to the comments area here at MakeYouGoHmm. It’s powered by Aspell and based upon this speller pages sourceforge project. If you don’t have Aspell, nor the ability to install Aspell through your hosting provider, then it’s probably not something to mess around with on your own blog, but it’s fairly straightforward to implement if you have Aspell (or the ability to add it to your server).

Right now the “Check Spelling” button is located right next to the “Submit Comment” button, but I might move that because I’m thinking people might confuse the two. Maybe next to the “Subscribe to comments via email” checkbox would be better? Comments / feedback?

I also added a stats page that gives information like total number of posts, comments, most recent posts and comments, most commented posts, commenter stats (number of posts per commenter). Probably most readers don’t care about this stuff, but I have had a couple readers say that they missed the “show most recent comments” that used to be on the home page and was dropped when we switched blog scripts.

For readers and/or other bloggers interested in the MakeYouGoHmm Site Meter traffic stats, just click on the counter in the “This Page Stats” section. That will show the third party traffic stats for MakeYouGoHmm which has been available publically since February 15, 2004 when the counter was added.

Slowest traffic day of the week? Saturday. Guess most readers are taking the day off and unplugging. Mixing in some AFK time is a good thing.

Thank you for reading MakeYouGoHmm

Yahoo is on the lookout for cool uses of their contextual API with a Y!Q $5,000 programming challenge.

Recently I wrote about comment deletion policies and thought I’d share a couple examples of spam that is routinely deleted from this blog. Since all new commenters are moderated on their very first post, readers never see this stuff. But we sure do.

And this one:

Also, we delete all comments that aren’t in English, unless someone we trust translates it for us. I need to add that to the comments terms, I guess. If we don’t know what you are saying, we can’t approve your comment at this time, sorry. If we had translators on staff then we could do that, but without translators we have to have an English-only policy at this time, sorry. And, BTW, no babelfish is not a good alternative.

My article on working with the Yahoo API was just published today by the folks at Informit. There are PHP code examples for many of the different Yahoo! web services. I added this to the Yahoo developer wiki as well.

For those who don’t know, Informit is the publisher behind the Sam’s books, those awesome Peachpit Press Quick Reference Guides, and more. I love the Peachpit Press books! I was so totally stoked when an Informit editor contacted me to have the opportunity to write something for them. I have signed up so I could follow the commentary. I hope developers enjoy and find it to be useful for working with the Yahoo API.

Computer science majors going down? Say it isn’t so. Where are all the computer science majors going? Are they skipping college and going straight to companies? Getting on the job experience and training?

The Herald Sun reports that IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students.

Could it also be the mounting tuition costs? It’s not inexpensive going to college these days, especially without a grant or scholarship of some sort. Some of the ./ commenters are saying that it’s because the wages are not commiserate with the education, so students are being driven to more lucrative professions.

Also, unrelated but I’ve noticed that Slashdot recently moved their Google Adsense code into a more prominent location (we’re they even using Adsense before?) which is just below the story summary and above the comments. Definitely a better location. It doesn’t show these Google ads all the time though, so it must be in a rotator of some sort. Hmm.

The rumours and speculation are flying that Microsoft might be interested in buying Red Hat.

An anonymous reader writes “Various news sources including ZDnet [blog] are today reporting that Microsoft is considering buying out Red Hat, speculating that ‘Microsoft could see Red Hat’s acquisition as a nice way to undermine IBM, but might not consider that a sufficient reason to do it,’

My first, immediate reaction via IRC was: I think microsoft feels in a sort of obligated way about Linux the way it does with Apple; it is willing if they have to support the platform on one level because ultimately it sells software and they should want to be on as many platforms as possible.

The flipside, however, is they also want to control their proprietary OS and if they also own Red Hat which is free online, but can be packaged with goodies and sold like Red Hat does in stores like Best Buy, they would be competing with themselves. But is competing with themselves such a bad thing?

Think about how many people believe Microsoft hates open source and doesn’t want to work with the open source community. It could even drive that crowd even more batty or it could start to change them.

Or could it land them in another anti-trust situation? jvastine thinks that’s a possibility, writing in the Script School IRC chat: “MS buying RedHat would be highly scrutinized as a monopolistic move.”

Forser, a .NET developer and blogger has a slightly more optimistic opinion: “It would rock if they bought Red Hat and kick some dirt in the machinery .. Hail .NET.” Forser originally alerted me to the Slashdot story above, BTW.

Google buying Red Hat seems to make more sense, but I doubt we’ll see that. This could also be a power play to force IBM’s hand. Then again, Steve Balmer announced recently that Virtual Server 2005 would be supporting Linux.

Russell Beattie who works for Yahoo, recently wrote a long, passionate piece about how Yahoo really had no choice but to go with Microsoft and their DRM because it was Microsoft or Apple and at least Microsoft wants to work with people via Janus. Apple is sitting on a Janus alternative but it thinks it can call all the shots.

I’m one of those paranoid guys (if you can’t tell) that thinks the main threat to Yahoo’s business is not Google but the old enemy Microsoft. Y! is making more forays into Hollywood, but we’re basing our services on Microsoft’s techology! That’s insane! I guess, hey, this isn’t really new - I’m sure 90% plus of the people using Yahoo! right now do it on Windows and IE. But this is different - DRM adds a new level of control which will allow Redmond to eventually push competitors out of the market with proprietary extensions and or future licensing changes.

Should Mr. Beattie or anybody else be paranoid? Two separate issues, the Red Hat purchase and the Janus DRM but the funnel leads unserendipitously to the famous Redmond campus.

Scoble will be all over this soon, I imagine. Will be curious to read what he thinks about these Red Hat rumours.